How to feel better at work

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0:30Kimberley Wilson:And Spice Up Fall at Whole Foods Market. What's it like to see an El Nino on the horizon? I'm Tristan Redmond, one of the hosts of the Global Story podcast from the BBC. And on today's show, we speak to a climate scientist who's worked for the U.S. government predicting extreme weather events like this year's El Nino. Of course I'm worried because I know these extremes impact people and you can't not be worried about that. What does he see coming? Search for The Global Story on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:04Kimberley Wilson:Hello and welcome. I'm Kimberly Wilson. I'm a counselling psychologist and this is Complex. The psychology podcast that helps you make sense of the messy stuff going on in your mind. Today's episode is all about why work can feel so emotionally exhausting. And you know what I mean. You finish the day feeling completely drained, but you haven't done anything physically demanding. The UK government estimates that nearly 2 million people suffered from workplace stress last year, And that's almost 25 % up from the previous year.

1:52Kimberley Wilson:So today we're exploring emotions and work, and specifically something called emotional labour in the workplace. That's the invisible psychological work that many of us do every day just to get through our jobs. So alongside a brilliant expert guest, we're going to be digging into this topic and looking at how to improve your wellbeing in the workplace. So let me be your guide from the overflowing inbox of misinformation to the completed to-do list of understanding.

2:31Kimberley Wilson:And I am delighted to welcome back Chartered Psychologist, Dr Ellie Buckley. Thank you for having me. We had a fantastic conversation about overstimulation the last time you were here, which listeners can find in the Complex Feed on BBC Sounds. But Ellie, could you remind us about your work? Yes. So I have a predominantly academic background. I have a PhD in psychology that looked at autistic people's experience of working in the arts. And now I work in consulting, where I specialise in organisational psychology, user research with a particular focus on accessibility and inclusion. And before we get into it, do you find that work gets to you?

3:14Yeah, absolutely. Work can get to me. I'm doing a lot of different tasks. I'm working with a lot of different people. And all of those people come with their own expectations and feelings. And I have to remain professional and focus on getting the work done. And sometimes that means managing my own emotions so that I can focus on work.

3:35Kimberley Wilson:Thank you. I think there's going to be a lot in this episode that listeners will be able to relate to.

3:45Kimberley Wilson:So today we're talking about our emotional lives at work. And so we should start really by acknowledging that work comes in many, many different shapes and sizes. So there are freelancers, carers, stay-at-home parents, bus drivers, software engineers, academics, service workers and so we all have different experiences of work and the workplace. So with that in mind let's start with a definition because often when we're thinking about difficulties at work we're thinking about stress, maybe workload but today we're focusing on emotional labour. So what does that term actually mean? So emotional labour is essentially the regulation of both our feelings and our expression to meet organisational goals.

4:35So you might be expected to be neutral or happy, but workplaces are less tolerant of you being really frustrated or angry, for instance. So there is an expectation of the type of emotions that would be acceptable to display at work. And so your emotional labour is you perhaps regulating your feelings and the expression of those feelings to fit in with what would be expected of you in that workplace.

4:59Kimberley Wilson:So I'm actually feeling this, but I know that that's not acceptable. So I have to suppress that and or show a different feeling. Exactly. And the term was actually coined back in 1983 by sociologist Ali Hochschild in her book, the managed heart. And she argued that many jobs require us, as you say, to manage or even perform emotions as part of our role. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, all workplaces have expectations around behavior. The thing is, some of them are explicit and rich and some of them are implicit. And that can be really challenging. Yeah. So sometimes you have to kind of intuit or perhaps even through trial and error work out which emotions or which ways of being are acceptable.

5:48Kimberley Wilson:So what are the different types of emotional labour? So we can think of emotional labour in three categories essentially. We've got genuine and spontaneous emotional labour. So say you're at work, you've got loads to do but you've got a new colleague and they're asking for some help. If you are having a genuine and spontaneous reaction to them you might be happy to help because you love mentoring people, you're not too worried about the task you have to complete we then have deep acting so deep acting is where you are working to change how you feel in order that your feelings and expression of those feelings match what's expected of you at work so if we bring it back to your new colleague they've asked you for help you're thinking oh no I don't have time for you I need to focus on my own tasks you're feeling a bit frustrated but then you stop and you try and empathize with how they must be feeling.

6:39They're panicked, they're worried, they need some help. And then you shift how you feel about the whole situation. So you go, actually, I am happy to help you. I'd have liked that for myself. So you've changed how you're feeling. And then we have surface acting. And surface acting is where essentially you're feeling one way inside, but you're expressing something dissonant to that. Kind of, can we say faking it? Yeah, faking it. You're faking it. And so yeah, if we bring it back to that new colleague. They're asking you for help. You're feeling frustrated. You don't want the added burden. You're smiling, but inside you're still really irritated.

7:14Kimberley Wilson:And I wonder if for the listener, what might that look like on a day-to-day basis? If we want to think of the types of emotional labour metaphorically, we could think of it like singing. Sometimes you're just singing a song because you're feeling the vibe. That's your spontaneous, genuine emotional labour. Sometimes you're singing a song to try and get yourself in the mood that you want to be in. That's your deep acting. You're trying to shift how you feel. And then sometimes you're just lip syncing and you don't want to be there. And that's surface acting. It's not moving you at all. As a frustrated theatre kid, I really love that analogy.

7:49Kimberley Wilson:And that feels like the perfect moment for us to get into the complexity.

7:58Kimberley Wilson:so ellie are some jobs more emotionally demanding than others well yes i mean a lot of the research started looking at the service industry people who are customer facing or people facing there's a huge amount of emotional labor involved in those jobs so hospitality healthcare workers educators teachers but you know even if you've got an office job and you're not facing the general public you will still be performing emotional labor with your colleagues with your manager with your boss so yeah everyone's doing it to a certain extent but also then different work environments have different cultural expectations about emotions like I worked in a corporate legal environment for a while and it was clear that there were a lot of people in a lot of distress emotionally your colleagues colleagues yeah but none of those emotions were really welcome at all and it was actually seen as a sign of being less professional and less capable and I think it really was to the particular detriment of women in those environments but there might be other environments that are more accepting or amenable of a more honest expression of emotion yeah absolutely there are definitely certain industries where you might be expected to show a more limited range of emotions like those corporate settings but at the same time It's quite organisationally dependent.

9:42Like you could have two different estate agents and in one people are allowed to openly express their frustration inside the office and in the other you're expected to suppress yourself and act like everything's fine. So it's very dependent on the organisation you're part of. And what creates that culture though? What's the difference? Well, psychological safety plays a big part of it. Essentially, how safe do employees feel to express their genuine feelings? and you know leadership how leadership is modeling what they want from their employees what they're encouraging them to do you know are they doing it themselves are they sharing say their frustration and not just positive emotions or neutral ones is it part of the culture

10:26Kimberley Wilson:and those different levels of emotional labor the spontaneous emotion the deep acting the surface acting. Are there any pros and cons of each one of those strategies? Yeah, absolutely. In the context of emotional labour, genuine spontaneous emotion is fine in terms of your well-being, and so is deep acting. So that's when we're able to empathise with the other person and able to shift how we're feeling. In fact, we see some positive associations with feelings of authenticity in terms of job performance and accomplishment and satisfaction. Surface acting is the one that is tricky. That's when we are feeling one way internally, but we're expressing different emotions to conform with expectations.

11:13And that tends to have some negative impacts on people, especially if they're having to do it for extended periods. So you might feel more dissatisfied with work. It might have knock-on impacts, like you might start to withdraw from work, be absent insomnia it can be associated with you know those kind of like wider impacts and then ultimately surface acting is also associated with burnout you know if it's kind of extended and extensive and so when I talk about burnout I'm talking about things like a reduced sense of accomplishment emotional exhaustion that's kind of cynicism and withdrawal yes because as you were

11:49Kimberley Wilson:saying that I was thinking it sounds exhausting actually to have an authentic set of feelings that I'm suppressing all the time or a lot of the time. And then another set of feelings that I'm faking and putting on. Yes, absolutely. We call it emotional dissonance. You're feeling one thing, but having to display another. And are there individual differences in the ways that people manage or cope with the burden of emotional labour? Yeah, absolutely. So we know that Your ability to emotionally regulate and your emotional intelligence can have a real effect on how able you are to deep act rather than surface act.

12:33And if anyone's thinking, oh my goodness, you know, what do I do if I'm surface acting all the time? Don't worry, you can boost your emotional intelligence. You can absolutely work on it with loads of strategies. It's a skill. And then also there are demographic factors that affect how much emotional labor you might be expected to perform. if you're a woman you're more likely to be expected to engage in emotional labour than a man and do it more and that intersects with race as well and then also culture do you mean individual culture or the culture of the organization i mean the culture in terms of the worldwide culture like individualist cultures and collectivist cultures countries like the uk and the us are thought of as individualist and then you have collectivist cultures so we can think of countries like japan and South Korea, say.

13:21And collectivist cultures prioritise group harmony and loyalty. And in a collectivist culture, there is a higher expectation for you to engage in surface acting to maintain group harmony than in an individualist culture where personal autonomy is more prioritised. But very interestingly, surface acting, which can have negative impact on people, it has less negative impact on people from collectivist cultures than from individualist cultures, maybe because there's less dissonance and there's more practice. It's more of a norm.

13:53Kimberley Wilson:It does feel less dissonant for me to be doing a thing that I know everybody else is doing. Exactly. And actually I'm fitting into the norms of a wider cultural identity, even if on an individual level, it's tricky. Yes. So we see surface acting more associated with burnout in individualist cultures. I wonder whether there are personality or even neurodivergence differences in the capacity to surface act or the impact of surface acting. Yeah, it absolutely can be. There are neurotypical norms around how you might behave at work and the emotions you might display and that can absolutely add pressure.

14:34Kimberley Wilson:So you seem to be saying that it's really an interaction between the demands of the environment, which might be explicit or implicit, but also the individual, their coping skills, their ability to regulate, you know, how they understand or interpret what's being asked or expected of them. Yeah, very much so. And I think it's easy to believe or imagine that if someone is getting paid a lot of money for the work that they're doing, that that reduces or mitigates the emotional burden. Is that the case? Can we kind of pay our way out of this difficulty? No, we can all be affected. And I think we see those stories of people in high-flying careers who find that they just ultimately burn out from pushing themselves so far.

15:24I mean, obviously, money can help with your rest and recovery. You know, you might be able to go on that fancy holiday and pay for your therapy and everything else.

15:33Kimberley Wilson:Pay for a massage, pay for someone to do the cooking or something. Yeah, exactly. So it can obviously have an impact on how well you're able to recover from work, but it's not getting you out of it.

15:46Kimberley Wilson:Now, Ellie, I quite like to put things on a scale. So how can somebody listening tell the difference between I'm having a rough month, maybe rough couple of weeks but it's probably okay and actually this is a really toxic environment situation manager and this is actually harming me and I should probably think about finding a way out where or what is the tipping point so I tell you to think through some key things first do you feel like yourself if you don't recognize yourself if you're starting to behave out of normal for you and that could be your routines your sleep your concentration but also your moods are you feeling really frustrated irritable withdrawn consistently and is that constant for you now I think also you can think about how you're feeling at work if you're constantly tense that might be a sign that there's a problem are the rules changing at work do you know what's needed of you because if things are constantly shifting that can be very hard and cognitively straining.

16:58Do you have any time for rest and recovery? If you don't, that's a warning sign. And I'm thinking both in your work day, do you have breaks from what you might find more stressful? But then also, you know, when you're getting off work in the evening or at the weekend, do you have good boundaries around work and you're not having to work past your working hours, but also are you able to then truly relax, do the things you enjoy doing? Or are you just trying to decompress from work just to get yourself ready for Monday morning again. And if that's going on and on and on, week after week, month after month, I'd really have a think about whether that workplace is right for you.

17:32Thank you. That's really helpful.

17:39Kimberley Wilson:So Ellie, for everyone listening and thinking, oh my God, that's me. What can they do? you? So first I would have a think about your emotion regulation skills, your emotional intelligence. You know, it's a skill we can train. So don't worry if you feel like you're doing a lot of surface acting and you don't know how to move to deep acting. You're like, how on earth do I feel empathy for people I'm finding really frustrating, for example. But yeah, we can do self-reflection that can help boost our emotional awareness and that in turn can help us regulate we can engage in cognitive reappraisal so that's thinking through a situation and trying to reframe it in a more positive way mindfulness as well can help us regulate when we're getting kind of stressed and you can do that by yourself you can do that with the support of like a friend a loved one a therapist you know there are lots of ways we can try and boost our emotional intelligence and emotional regulation ultimately with the idea that we might move from surface acting to deep acting more regularly because deep acting doesn't have those negative effects so properly empathizing instead of faking it but then also you can think through are there ways you can bring more autonomy into your work day that's really important it's one of our core psychological needs to have some control over our environment and what we do and so if you find yourself surface acting a lot can you take more breaks from the kind of people that you're having to surface act with can you think about how you're surface acting maybe you're forcing a really big smile on your face when you're feeling really frustrated and there's a lot of dissonance there is it okay to just be neutral in those situations can you kind of reduce what you're trying to do there you can also build in more rest and recovery generally you know make sure your time away from work you're really focusing on how you rest and recover and with that your social connections social support is a huge buffer for for workplace stress and so it's really important to think where can I express myself authentically that might be with a manager if you have that relationship it might be with a colleague it might be with friends outside of work it might even just be in your diary but try and find a place where you can authentically express yourself so we've got the strategies they're evidence-based they work for lots and lots of people if you can implement them but at what point if they're not working for you do you have to make the decision that the best thing for me the safest thing for my well-being is that I just have to leave it's such an individual decision and I think you really have to look at the impact that work is having on you and it's thinking about is this short-term impact or is it a long-term impact can you even remember the last time you didn't feel this way is it weeks is it months is it years again I would probably be thinking about those signs of burnout you know you care less about work you're not as engaged you feel withdrawn you feel cynical maybe it's affecting other parts of your life it's affecting your relationships with your family and your friends you know is it affecting your ability to sleep what are your weekends and your rest time looking like and if you are just surviving that can be a moment to just try and reflect and think is this what I want but you know maybe you have to I'm not saying it's an easy decision but you just have to look at the impact it's having across all areas of your life is it just a tough work day or is it now a tough life I just have this kind of real concern for the people for whom they know they have to and they want to but they can't leave for financial reasons and what support or interventions might be available for them so i think if someone came to me and said that i'd go if we can't change anything about what's happening inside of work let's just think about what you're doing outside of work that's probably where I'd encourage them to put their energy and to see if they can kind of boost their recovery time.

21:48Maybe you need to take your annual leave, maybe you need to talk to your GP or a healthcare professional about how you're feeling. If it's really getting you down and it's overwhelming, do seek support and get some external perspectives on what's going on for you. So if we're focusing on rest and recovery, what does that look like for people who can't afford

22:07Kimberley Wilson:massages and cooks and drivers. Yeah, absolutely. So this is about how we spend our evenings and our weekends if we're working that regular working week. I'll just give an example from my own life. I was trying to absolutely cram my weekends full of activities to make sure I made the most out of my free time. But then I'd rock up to work on a Monday morning, not feeling replenished, but quite tired. And that ultimately was having an impact. And so I've shifted to making my Sunday all about rest. I do an exercise class and I cook something simple and I don't go anywhere and I don't see anyone and that's really important.

22:45And so I think, do you examine how you're spending your free time? Are you building in restorative activities? And yes, restoration can be socializing and seeing your friends and family, but sometimes it's also about having more quiet time, gentle exercise, things like that. Have you got a balance?

23:06Kimberley Wilson:Ellie, thank you. That is so, so helpful. And what I really love about a conversation like this is that actually we spend so much of our time at work. It has such an impact on how we see ourselves, how we relate to others, our energy, our identity, our mental well-being. And it's not enough of a conversation or part of the conversation about mental health. at the same time I know a lot of people feel very trapped in the work that they do and in the options that they have and I suppose what I want this episode to be able to do is to kind of acknowledge that reality for a lot of people and to offer them some solutions some some hopes, some insight and some tools that they can use to help themselves a little bit.

24:05Kimberley Wilson:And I hope we've done that. Me too.

24:11Kimberley Wilson:We are coming to the end of the episode. Thank you very much, Ellie, for joining us and sharing your expertise. Thank you for having me. And thank you to everyone listening. And if you want details or further support with some of the issues raised in the podcast. You can find them at bbc.co.uk forward slash action line, and the link is also in the show notes on BBC Sounds. And that's it. Thank you very much to the lovely production team at Loftus Media, and thank you to my guest, chartered psychologist, Dr Ellie Buckley, who's going to be reading our credits. Producer Kirsten Lass, assistant producers Samara Linton and Katie Chandler-Clark, researcher Grace Revel, technical producer Reuben Huxtable, studio engineer Matt Heuer, sound engineer Ruth Rainey, and at BBC Sounds, Assistant Commissioner Izzy Lee Poulton and Commissioning Editor Rhian Roberts.

25:11Kimberley Wilson:Hi everyone. Well, that is it for this season of Complex. As our regular listeners will know, I was pregnant during the recording of the season and I'm delighted to share that I've had my baby and we are doing very well. Thank you so much for being part of the Complex community. I've absolutely loved receiving your emails and your contributions. We hope to be back soon and I will keep you posted. Until then, take care and go gently.

25:44Kimberley Wilson:The murder of Tupac Shakur has generated nearly 30 years of rumours, conspiracy theories and unanswered questions. Now the mythology is about to meet the courtroom as the trial gets underway and Nevada prosecutors try and solve the mystery of who killed Tupac. I'm Manushka Matanda-Dawati and for the BBC's Fame Under Fire podcast I'll be inside the courtroom every day and I'm bringing you with me. What really happened on the Las Vegas Strip that night in 1996? It's time to separate fact from fiction. Join me for Fame Under Fire, the Tupac murder trial, the testimony, the arguments, the moments that matter and all the legal analysis.

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26:29What's it like to see an El Nino on the horizon? I'm Tristan Redmond, one of the hosts of the Global Story podcast from the BBC. And on today's show, we speak to a climate scientist who's worked for the US government predicting extreme weather events like this year's El Nino. Of course I'm worried because I know these extremes impact people and you can't not be worried about that. What does he see coming? Search for The Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.