Job Insecurity: How to Handle the Stress of Not Knowing

Job insecurity or uncertainty about job stability is something that can create stress but there are ways you can use your time and focus to really make the best of your time and keep yourself in a positive state of mind.

Often when we find ourselves stressed, all it takes is a shift in perspective to help lift our mood. Instead of defining yourself by your job title, let’s look at defining ourselves as a soul bringing positive energy to the world. When we start relating to ourselves as a soul, we start to see the bigger picture, and the changes we go through become opportunities to learn and grow in positive ways.

Dealing with Job Insecurity

Here are 10 tips on how to overcome job insecurity or uncertainty so that you can kick the lack of job security stress to the curb and be able to look back on this time as a period of true growth and empowerment! Whether you’ve lost your job or you’re not sure if you will, this can help you build positive momentum to overcome negative feelings and create some positive growth in your life personally and professionally.

1. Find Positive Ways to Manage Your Stress

Managing stress is about reducing the time you spend worrying so it’s important to keep the mind focused on something even if it’s as simple as sweeping the floor which can help cultivate a state of zen. You can also use this time to train yourself to think positively by reading inspiration books or listening to inspirational podcasts. You can do guided meditations and play calming music to keep your nerves in a more calm state. Using positive affirmations are also a great way to shift your mood. A simple affirmation such as, “I feel positive and my life is blessed,” can help relieve stress.

Curate Your Happy Place

When we are relaxed, we are more creative and it will help us find solutions much easier. Go ahead and give yourself permission to make your space super zen. That could mean bringing in flowers, plants, incense, and soothing sounds. You could even enjoy a daily hot relaxing bath to let those creative energies flow.

Skip The Alcohol

When you’re stressed, drinking alcohol heavily or frequently doesn’t help. While the movies often portray people turning to a glass of wine when they are stressed, it’s important to know that alcohol is a depressant and will often leave you with more worry the next day. Make an effort to moderate your drinking and you’ll find yourself feeling more confident about future prospects.

Meditate and Balance

Balance productive activities with time for relaxation. Manage your stress by carving out time each day to relax and shut your mind off. Doing things that relax you and stimulate your imagination will allow you to tap into your own intuition on how to best move forward.

Read this next: Gut Instincts: How To Find Your Intuition & Trust Your Gut

2. Seek Creative Outlets to Relax

Creative outlets are great stress relievers as they focus our mental energy on positive and productive things that do not have a stressful deadline. When we find these things, they are a great escape from the mental worry that comes with job insecurity.

Manifest Through Art and Vision Boarding

Create a vision board to map out goals and capture your inner creative insights. Check out our article on how to create a vision board for a step-by-step guide that will help you harness your creative energy and manifest using the law of attraction. This will give you something to focus your energy on and get excited about instead of worrying.

Exercise

Workout to keep your mind and body feeling positive. It will make a huge difference in your ability to think clearly and feel positive if you get a daily release of endorphins. Make it a point to incorporate movement into your day even if it’s a power walk.

Find a Hobby

Learn new recipes while you have some time on your hands or look for ways you can learn new skills. It doesn’t matter what you try, but be mindful in doing so. Choose something that you enjoy doing without the need for financial gain, like gardening or rollerblading.

3. Find Stability: Reign In Spending & Create a Budget

If you can, look for ways to reduce spending. Easing financial pressure will help lower the stress of feeling insecure in your current job. Look at where you spend money unnecessarily such as eating out, buying coffee by the cup, having extra channels on your cable plan, or extra data on your cell phone bill, etc.

Plan to eat at home instead of eating out and maybe get a roommate or move into a cheaper place if possible. Get creative with lowering your overhead to lower stress.

Check out our article How to Become Financially Literate in The Digital Age to find new ways to manage your money.

4. Use Your Free Time to Build Up Your Skills

Improving your skillset is good in any situation, but if this can make you feel more empowered in your career or future job prospects, this is a great way to mediate job insecurity stress.

Seek Out Online Courses

There is so much free and accessible learning out there to uplevel our skills.

Try learning new skills can be found on Skillshare, or level up your professional portfolio through Hubspot Academy or Digital Marketer.

You could even commit to learning a new language with a free language learning app like Duolingo or begin learning a coding language.

If You’re Wanting to Change Jobs…

Make a list of your top exciting career paths and look at what skills they require. If you hope to eventually move on to a management position, consider, do you have the training? Where can you go to get these skills?

To get clear with where to direct your energy, you can make a list of things that you enjoy doing as well as your personal skills.

Focus on something that will feel meaningful and why it is so important for the world to help find a deeper sense of motivation. Fine-tune your resume. Look at resume examples for your field and update your resume so it is current and really shows all your skills and experience.

Closing

Ultimately, we empower ourselves during stressful periods by how we choose to respond. Instead of focusing our thoughts on what we don’t like about any situation, it’s more helpful to widen our horizons and manage our stress in the meantime.

Trust in your own abilities and expand yourself creatively, you could very well turn this time into your own transformational period of spiritual awakening.

Related Article: Is Your Career Hurting Your Mental Health? Here’s What To Do Next