Jannese Torres

She's a clinical psychologist and anxiety specialist from Boston University.

She says layoff anxiety seeps into how you feel, how you act, even how you treat the people around you.

It used to be that layoff anxiety referred to disproportionate worry about job loss.

Like, you know, an irrational fear that's disconnected from the reality of what's actually going on.

Those are the kind of clients Ellen would usually work with, helping them see that their anxiety is unfounded and coming up with new coping mechanisms.

Talk about that anxiety in this specific moment that we're in.

You've written before about some common scenarios that are usually behind layoff anxiety and how we should handle them.

I'd love just to talk through some of them.

Maybe we can even role play.

Sure.

So one of the scenarios is when we catastrophize consequences.

So maybe if I'm your client and I come to you and I'm like, if I lose my job, I am going to lose everything.

I'm going to lose my house.

My partner is probably going to leave me.

My life will be a disaster.

So then how do we counter those catastrophizing thoughts?

I've never considered doing something like that.

All right.

So say I come to you and I say, I'm a big people pleaser.

And I'm like, okay, I'm really nervous about losing my job.