Unemployment
How can job loss affect you?
Call it what you want - being made redundant, getting dismissed or fired. Losing your job hurts. Losing your job can cause as much stress as serious illness, divorce or moving house. It is one of the most stressful life events.
Many of us closely identify ourselves by what we do for a living. When the job is taken away, we can lose track of who we are.
Losing your job can have a big impact on you. It can affect your emotional and physical health. Not having money often causes anxiety and depression. Many people feel worthless and hopeless about the future when they lose their job.
Coping with losing your job
There are a number of issues which must be thought about when you lose your job.
- You need to work out how long the money you have will last.
- You need to decide if you should change career.
- Then you need to think about how to get back into work.
Social Class
We need to take into account social class here. Middle class people who lose their job may have some money to help them get by for a while. So themes such as these affect their stress levels:
- loss of self-esteem
- loss of purpose
- distress due to a lack of day to day challenges
- not feeling fulfilled
Stress in working class people is more often caused by money problems that are there straight away. So these affect their daily life as soon as they lose their job.
This means that if a working class person gets a new job, the money problems can clear up and so the stress can go quickly. A middle class person getting a new job may take longer to get over the stress as their stress is kept going by more than money pressures.
