After Losing My Job, I Struggled to Be Productive. Now, I’m Learning to Feel Less Guilty About It

After I was let go from my job a little over a month ago, I noticed I started to immediately feel guilty about things I could not control.

Minutes after I learned that I wasn’t the only one losing my job, a wave of guilt hit me. I was an editor and in a management position, how did I not see this coming? Why couldn’t I have warned some of the people on my staff sooner?

Hours after I was laid off, I started to feel guilty about not being able to provide any help for my little family. We just adopted a dog and I was now wondering how was I going to financially care for her and pay my bills now that I no longer had a job?

I also started to think about all the free time I now had on my hands, thanks to the pandemic. Working at a small start-up with a small staff took up a lot of time, so how the heck am I going to fill up my time now?

I promised myself I would give myself a week to sulk about the layoff before I started on the job hunt. I was able to briefly shake off the guilt and practice some self-care that first week, but when the second week rolled along, I just couldn’t bring myself to be as productive when it came to applying to jobs as I would have liked.

And then the wave of guilt returned.

I tried to focus on other, smaller projects in my apartment with a little “spring cleaning.” I told myself the closet in my bedroom would look flawless before February rolled around if I donated or threw out at least half of the clothes just sitting there. But it’s a month later, and the closet looks exactly the same (or, if I’m being super honest with myself, maybe worse).

I allowed myself to become so consumed with guilt that I started to have panic attacks about not being productive enough. After I calmed myself down after the second panic attack I had this month, I decided to do a little research to figure out why I was feeling this way and if this was normal. And, maybe to no one’s surprise but my own, it is normal.

Lynn Bufka, senior director at the American Psychological Association and clinical psychologist, told CNBC Make It that during the pandemic, people will cope in different ways. Some people may be more productive and others may not be as motivated to be productive, but both feelings are normal.

“Some individuals are going to feel very overwhelmed by all of it, very anxious about what the future holds. Other people may compartmentalize it completely and turn it off and focus on tasks in front of them,” Bufka said. “But it will take each person time to figure out what works best for them and how they’re going to do that.”

It also helps to know that my former colleagues and I were not the only group of people to lose their jobs. The National Women’s Law Center reported that 5.4 million women have lost their jobs since the pandemic began. The rate of unemployment for Latinas and Black women is much higher than prior to the pandemic. In February 2020, the report found that 2.8 percent of white women were unemployed, compared to 5 percent of Black women and Latinas. 

There are still people, like me, who are feeling guilty because they aren’t working right now and don’t have much to do. Dr. Amelia Aldao, a therapist in New York City, told NPR that the feeling of guilt can stem from our family upbringing or internalized voices, but there is a way to work past it.

“So the way to work around guilt has to do with changing the way that you frame your environment, the way that you reset your expectations, the way that you restructure your life — so that the guilt is less likely to show up in the first place. Once it shows up, it's really hard to work with it because it's a very, very powerful emotion,” she told NPR. “So a lot of the work needs to be done up front. So that when we begin to feel that creep up, we can actually be like, no, you know — I'm not going to go that route.”

Reading and researching all of this has made me realize that I still need to give myself a break. I’m still taking baby steps, like finally getting back into a routine and focusing on smaller projects that don’t make me feel super overwhelmed or burned out. 

I hope this article can help ease the mind of someone who is going through the same thing I’m going through. I also hope that this will serve as a reminder to myself that with a little patience and maybe some therapy, I can start to feel less guilty about my productivity and finally focus on the things I need to make myself feel better. 

And hopefully, by the first week of March, I’ll have that closet all cleaned out.