20 signs you hate your job (red flags)

All of us have days where nothing seems to work and we are frustrated with our jobs. But what if you feel like this all the time? There is a difference between hitting a rough patch and truly hating the work you do. Luckily, there are some early warning signs that your job is negatively impacting your life.

Here are 20 signs you hate your job.

1) Your sleep gets worse

How is your sleep these days? Do you wake up feeling rested and energized, often without an alarm? These are the signs of restorative sleep. Or do you wake up during the night, or maybe 2 hours earlier than you used to? Do you have trouble falling asleep? Sleep problems often point to emotional stress or anxiety. An intricate hormonal dance is executed by your body for you to fall asleep. Lots of moving parts have to come together at the right time in the right way. This makes sleep incredibly fragile¹. It is also the reason why sleep is often the first red flag when your mental health starts declining. Take this warning sign seriously.

2) You experience anxiety

You have become more anxious. You constantly worry about things. Your thoughts seem less under your control, always jumping forward to something you have to do or something that could go wrong. Psychology has a fancy name for this: intrusive thoughts². Intrusive thoughts can feel like being stuck in a loop, like your brain is unable to move on. If this anxiety grows it takes over more of your life and you will find that periods of rest become rare. In other words, your body's physiology is constantly on high alert, primed for something dangerous. Which, unfortunately, negatively impacts your sleep pattern.

3) You are constantly tired

You are tired. All the time. No matter what you try you are chronically exhausted. You don't have enough energy. You can't quite remember when you became so tired all the time, it slowly snuck up on you. Whatever the reason you clearly seem to be running an energy deficit. A weekend is nowhere near enough for you to feel rested and recovered. You can feel yourself getting distracted more easily. It has become more difficult to concentrate at work. Things that used to be fun now just seem exhausting.

4) Small tasks seem insurmountable

When small tasks, that used to be easy, become this huge insurmountable mental obstacle, I know something is wrong. When writing that one email, or talking to that one person becomes this huge challenge, chances are you've overextended yourself mentally. Your energy reserves are starting to deplete and you're in dire need of deep rest. If sleep is one canary in the coal mine, this is another. We don't know exactly what happens in the brain and why this shift occurs, but some new research points to a buildup of neurotransmitters that slow us down³.

5) You have no motivation to do anything

You don't have any motivation at work anymore. You can't bring yourself to do even the smallest things. You can't find any energy to get things done. It's as if work has lost all importance and meaning. Things that would have excited you in the past now seem boring and unimportant. This lack of motivation can be on top of feeling exhausted or it can be because you feel no meaningful connection to your job.

6) You are bored

You are regularly bored out of your mind. You're not necessarily exhausted or stressed out. You are just bored. The job seems unnecessary, unimportant, or meaningless. You go to work, do your thing, and go home. People who are chronically exhausted from work often think a boring job would be heaven. Trust me it is not. A meaningless job that sucks the joy of life out of you can be equally damaging. Things lose their meaning and your motivation drops like a sack of flour. If you're stuck in such a job for long enough it might creep into the rest of your life too, infecting everything with this sense of meaninglessness.

7) Your job performance suffers

With a drop in motivation or with exhaustion comes a performance hit. You might not notice this yourself in the beginning, but your supervisors might. Perhaps you don't care enough, or maybe you feel so exhausted and tired that you can't keep up. There can be many reasons for job performance to suffer. Perhaps you had to move to remote work during the pandemic and find it much more difficult to concentrate at home. Don't get me started on the dread of demotivating zoom calls.

8) You are angry & irritated

Have you noticed your emotional reactions lately? For some people, the lack of energy and exhaustion leads to anger and irritability. Watch yourself next time you get frustrated or annoyed. We often get so swept up in these emotions that we don't even notice where they come from. Just like small tasks become these huge obstacles that seem impossible to get done, small disturbances will leave us more irritated. Both of these can be a sign of early burnout and a lack of recovery. Sleep not only restores your mental energy but also processes emotions, making them less salient⁴.

9) Increasing health issues

You have noticed more health issues lately. Chronic stress can have a negative impact on the immune system. This probably is because stress hormones are inhibiting the proper functioning of the immune system⁵. That's unfortunate news for us. On top of everything else, the lack of rest and recovery can lead to health issues over time. To be clear: Health issues are often not the first signs, they might take a while before showing. Health issues come quite late in the game and only after a longer period of stress or anxiety. Take this sign seriously and seek support from a professional.

10) You develop bad food habits

When it rains it pours. This is unfortunately true when it comes to our mental and physical health. A job you hate - that sucks all your energy from you - can have a myriad of negative effects on your life. Bad sleep is one, bad eating habits are another. Your rare Ben&Jerry cookie dough splurge has become a regular thing. The science is still out on why this happens. It's not simply because it makes us feel better. Maybe it's because we don't have the mental energy anymore to inhibit the craving for unhealthy food that has always been there.

11) You have a low libido

This is another classic sign. Not necessarily of hating your job but of being in a job that is impacting your life in a negative way, usually because of chronic stress or anxiety. Both of these can negatively impact your sex drive. This is not true for everyone but keep this in mind when looking for signs. Stress and bad sleep have so many downstream effects it's good to know a few of those and see how many red flags are already visible in your own life.

3 steps to a new career

There are only three steps to take charge of your career path.

1. Take the personality career test
2. Unlock your career matches
3. Find a meaningful career

12) You daydream about the weekend

In an unfulfilling job, we tend to get distracted and start daydreaming. You might start thinking about your lunch break or the weekend. Anything that lets you escape the current reality you're stuck in. This is not always a negative sign. We all daydream, that's perfectly normal. Some people find it more difficult to focus and daydream quite a bit⁶. But if you notice yourself constantly escaping the current moment in your mind definitely pay some more attention to it. Is it boredom, is it stress?

13) You haven't gotten a promotion in ages

This is not technically a warning sign. Not getting a promotion doesn't necessarily mean you hate your job. Not all jobs have a ladder to climb. We usually define those as careers more than jobs⁷. But if you are in a career that was always meant to be a stepping stone to a more fulfilling or better-paying occupation then this could be important. Seeing yourself not be where you wanted to be in your career can be frustrating and demotivated.

14) You don't feel comfortable at work anymore

Do you look forward to going to work in the morning? Chances are you don't. How is your relationship with your boss and coworkers? Our social connections at work are a big part of how we feel about our job. Good friendships and good communication can make even the most difficult job somewhat manageable. But what if you don't have such good connections? What if you don't even feel comfortable at work? In that case, it would be only natural to feel hesitant and not motivated at work.

15) Your email inbox gives you anxiety

Maybe this one is just me, but I hate email. Remember when I mentioned tiny to-dos becoming insurmountable monsters to slay? Well, email is one of those monsters in my experience. The more I fall into an energy deficit, the more I start to get stressed when I see all my unanswered emails. I guess they represent all the work I still have to get done piling up in my inbox. Like an unending stream of locusts, slowly overwhelming you. The inbox becomes an unwelcome reminder that you are not keeping up anymore. That you don't even have the energy to reply to a simple email (see #4)

16) Your work-life balance is out of whack

Most of us spend somewhere between 30 and 50 hours a week at our jobs. It's no surprise that being unhappy at work negatively impacts the rest of our lives. The modern term "work-life-balance" has its issues but it will be helpful here. If we become chronically overworked and stressed the best defense is to get deep rest outside of work. This can include doing workouts or decompressing with your family and friends. Unfortunately, we often see the opposite. Because we are running on fumes, we don't have the energy to commit to these healthy behaviors anymore. We don't go to the gym anymore and we don't see our friends as much because we just want to sit at home watching Netflix and eat ice cream.

17) Your friendships suffer

This brings us to a broader issue. You notice your friendships suffer. Your lack of energy can be cushioned by a strong social network. But we often let these friendships slip because we don't have the willpower to go out and see people after another exhausting week. This leads to a negative downward spiral. The exact things that would make us more resilient and recover are some of the first things that we lose. So pay close attention to your friendships and if you feel like things are going in the wrong direction, ask yourself if it has to do with your job.

18) Your family suffers

Next to your friends, you might have a family. Maybe a partner, or parents, or children. How is your relationship with them recently? We talked about feeling angry and irritated at work, how about at home? Are you your best self when you come home from work? Or are you mentally and emotionally exhausted? One clear sign of things going wrong in your job is when it keeps negatively affecting your life outside of work. If you feel this could already be happening, it might be a good time for an honest and open conversation with your family members. Those conversations are never easy, but they will only get harder over time.

19) You become resentful

Spend enough time in a job that negatively impacts your well-being and you might grow resentful. This won't apply to everyone because people deal with stress and anxiety differently. As we discussed above, some people become angry and irritated - scientifically this is referred to as externalizing behavior - while others might show more internalizing behaviors. Growing resentful could be a form of internalizing. Do you feel like you're the victim of your circumstances? Do you feel like you deserve better? The truth is, you might be right. I have no way of knowing your unique situation. All I can tell you is to watch your emotions and see if you can figure out where they are coming from.

20) You dread going to work every night

This is the classic sign you read about everywhere. You start dreading the thought of going back to work, aka Sunday blues. If things take a turn for the worse this feeling might become a regular guest every night. Pay attention to your mood and emotional state every evening, especially on Sunday nights. How are you feeling in those moments? How do you feel when you think of going to work tomorrow? This introspection is essential and can help you recognize how bad things have already become.

That was a long list of signs showing you might hate your job. Or more precisely, that your job is negatively impacting your life. Don't expect all of these to apply to you even if you are in such a situation. People react differently to triggers and stressors⁸. But some of these are generally common and do represent early red flags. The question now becomes: what to do when you're in such a situation?

What are your options?

Those are the options as far as I see them.

Option 1 is to tough it out. This might be the right move if you're just going through a rough patch. Maybe you like your job but the last month was too much. Those dips are normal and things can get better again. But maybe you never liked your job or your boss, and you simply hate it. Then option 1 is a risky one. Because it can lead to burnout. So to tough it out is not a long-term solution and probably won't work for an extended period of time.

Option 2 is to find a way to get the rest and recovery you need. Maybe you can take time off or talk to a company physician who can recommend you take a few weeks for yourself. Depending on your relationship with your supervisors it might be a good idea to talk to them about your situation. Maybe there are other opportunities within the company that would be a better fit for you.

Option 3 is always the last option. Quit your job and find something better. This depends on your family responsibilities and how much money you have saved. In other words how big of a risk this would be. It might be a good idea to start saving money now so this option becomes available.