Unemployment anxiety – The game that saved my sanity

So you or your partner lost your job. Now what? I thought anxiety would crush me. Every day a new low blow: first my brother, then my partner and then my brother again. I mean, my brother wasn’t a surprise, so you might say I was well-equipped to deal with the news, but brotha’, it stung like a motherf***er when my partner called and let me know they gave him no notice and no explanation whatsoever for the decision. So I noticed that I started spiralling and researched to see if unemployment anxiety is a thing and what you can do about it. Bad luck, resources were, as expected, not very helpful.

So what did Kat do instead of wallowing and creating fatalistic scenarios?

She beat anxiety at its own game by challenging the unreasonable fear it brings.

Fear is just an emotion as any other. Use it to your advantage!

1. Afraid of not having enough money? She did the actual math and found out how screwed we actually were. Turns out, it wasn’t that bad.
2. Having fun while being broke? Sure can do! She came up with a fun game to try while trying to cut the overall living expenses. What can you buy with 1 RON at the supermarket? For those of you who wonder, that’s currently around $0.22 or €0.20. Sounds weird, but it was actually entertaining, and we got out of the supermarket with a cart full of goodies. And the anxiety just went away on its own, cause who wants to hang around two bozos that fool around the isles, racing to see who wins the game?
3. She took all the fear and channelled it towards something productive, like writing this post instead.
4. Too much time to think about the worst that can happen? She focused on what she could control instead of spiralling out of control. Went for a walk, tried creating a logo from scratch, turned to Spotify for soothing or uplifting playlists, tried playing pool after many years of letting social anxiety pin her down on the sofa until her limbs went numb.
5. Why worry about tomorrow when you can do something for yourself TODAY? She went on a self discovery adventure and, it turns out, there was a LOT yet to be discovered. Don’t know where to start? Just head to Google or TikTok and start typing. Be it something you’ve been doing lately or something that you’ve been curious about. There is a lot to learn, and there are better ways to use your time than spend it repeating the same toxic patterns. It’s hard, but not impossible. After all, our neural pathways are meant to be rewritten!
6. So many things to be afraid of, so little time to let it go to waste! She died her hair purple. What does this got to do with unemployment anxiety, you ask? It has everything to do with it. Being unemployed brings around a ton of uncertainty, and what’s Kat’s best, tried and true, strategy to fight anxiety during hard times? Breaking the anxious cycle by taking old patterns and tearing them down. Afraid to try something new and bold? Well, we’re already f***ed, so why not take those lemons that life gave you and learn to juggle? Or maybe turn them into whatever you’ve got on that secret “I’ve been too scared to try this all my life” list. I know you have one. We all do.

Ok, so this list could go on, but I’m afraid longer posts don’t actually make it in times when ChatGPT blows your socks off with AI generated content. Or maybe they do? It’s up to you to let me know if I should actually keep this up. Wait, what did I just write? Did I just let self-doubt creep in? I guess I did, and it’s ok. I’m still here, ain’t I? And THAT is what counts. Doing the work, showing up, allowing yourself to explore and rediscover new ways to welcome anxiety into your life, with all of its relatives: panic, self-doubt, heavy sweating, trembling, hyperventilation, trouble concentrating, all covered with sprinkles of impending doom.

I digress, as I frequently do when I let my mind just be as it is, without judgement or fear. And this is what I recommend, above all. Just allow yourself to be, to breathe, to live in the moment. Embrace everything you are feeling and then decide to pick one step from the list and give it a go.

Concentrating on literally anything else than what was bothering me at the time saved me a lot of time and energy, because I used to spiral and spiral until I had no sane cells in my brain. You might say that it’s avoidance at it’s finest, but if you look closer, you’ll see that the first thing I did was put my mind at ease and assess the situation. Is it as bad as I think when anxiety kicks in? Most often than not, it isn’t as bad as I thought. So why dwell on misfortune when I can use the time to actually improve my mood and in the meantime boost the morale of a loved one, who is obviously probably equally affected by the situation, if not more so.

Also, if you’ve been following us for a while, you know we also struggle with sleep anxiety. Well, guess what, I got great news! The above advice not only saved my sanity while my partner and I were experiencing unemployment anxiety, it helped me sleep a lot better! Because I started breaking old patterns that were keeping me awake at night. Who would have thought!

And this story has multiple happy endings, as the new job showed up on our doorstep exactly two weeks after we decided we were not going to sit around and stress over something neither of us could actually control.