Workplace Depression? A Blast From The Past.

    It is after 10 p.m. on Sunday night. The child is in bed, the husband is nodding off to sleep, the TV is blaring the latest batch of bad news bytes (by the time I am done writing this I'll be watching TMZ) and an all too familiar feeling of dread has washed over me.

This feeling of dread has nothing to do with the news and everything to do with the fact that in a few hours I will have to wake up and get ready for another day at work. It has been a long time since I have been struck with the Oh-God-I-Don’t-Want-To-Go-To-Work syndrome. In fact, it has been about six years since I felt like this.

Back then, I took a job that was split between two departments. I was totally jazzed about half of the job, and thought the other half of the job would be boring and uninteresting. I figured that I had to take the bad to get my foot in the door and eventually do the “good” part of the job full time. Long story short, when the opportunity came to choose one department over the other, I picked the job that I thought, at first, was boring.

That was the best decision I ever made. That job was challenging and I felt important. I worked with a great boss (as opposed to the mentally unstable alternative I would have had to have worked under in the other position) and wonderful co-workers. Now I have traded that in for a job that has left me feeling like I have fallen off the ladder of success and landed in the gutter of monotony.

It is difficult for me to admit this, but for the second time in my life, I am suffering from situational depression. I realize that many people are dependent on anti-depressants because they have a chemical imbalance in their body that reduces the amount of serotonin in their brain. That is not what is happening to me. This is not a negative commentary on that medical condition, but an insistence that this heavy feeling in my chest is much different than a chemical imbalance.

That is why it is all that more important for me to remember that I have felt this workplace oppression and uncertainty before because it gives me hope that I won’t feel like this forever. This too shall pass.

I tried to do a little research on workplace depression. Unfortunately, most of the data I found had nothing to do with people being depressed about their jobs. Most of it talked about what to do when someone you work with is depressed about an external situation such as a divorce or financial problems. However, I did find an interesting article on ABC News about the stress relieving effects of coffee! (Which is so totally perfect for this Website!) I'll have to blog more about that next time. In the meantime, you can check out the article yourself!