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Anxiety at the start of annual leave

Mr Alligator

Mr Alligator

Well-Known Member
V.I.P Member
It sucks.

Break up from work for two weeks.

Already anxious about all the work I’ll come back to (Helpdesk tickets assigned to me whilst on leave, various emails from various people, tasks that are outstanding on my projects, etc).

Urgh.

Considered cancelling some of the leave, but I really feel like I need a break.
 
I know what you mean. I was “in charge” of a lot of things before. Nobody else would do the work when I was on vacation because they knew I would do it when I returned (lazy asses). I would be really stressing on the Friday before a vacation, and everyone would give me advice like “Dude, you gotta learn to leave your work at work! When I leave here, I don’t even think about work.”

I would always wish I could do it but it was impossible. Those people didn’t care about the work getting done right, or on time, or even at all. That’s why they could forget about work when they went home. I cared too much and they knew it, so everything slowly became my responsibility until I was doing everything.

Eventually I had to completely change jobs (same company, different department). It was the only way I could establish new boundaries. And I battle every day to maintain those boundaries. When the boss sees that you’re excelling at something, he wants to add ‘just a little more’ until you’re doing it all and thinking about it at home. And believe it or not, I force myself to purposely make mistakes on anything outside of my normal job functions because that’s the only effective way to keep those walls in place.

Today, I barely think about work when I’m not there. Because I have kept those boundaries in place, nobody expects me to do additional things (like taking over scheduling when the scheduler is on disability, in addition to my normal load). It took me years, but it worked.
 
Mr Alligator said:
It sucks.

Break up from work for two weeks.

Already anxious about all the work I’ll come back to (Helpdesk tickets assigned to me whilst on leave, various emails from various people, tasks that are outstanding on my projects, etc).

Urgh.

Considered cancelling some of the leave, but I really feel like I need a break.
Click to expand...
Maybe you need to distract yourself. Going on leave and worrying about work is counterproductive.

Your manager should be distributing your time-sensitive workload to other employees. A properly run workplace understands that people need time off and organizes accordingly. Everybody gets to take leave (presumably not al at once) and the business carries on regardless. How do other people handle it when they take leave?
 
Most employers will have a strategy to push more and more onto an employee until they sense "resistance" from said employee. "How much work can I get out of this person?" It is frustrating at times, especially in positions where "If I don't do it, it doesn't get done." Most employers do not have a good sense for how difficult and demanding some of these positions are,...and it isn't until said employee leaves on a holiday/vacation that the employer has any sense of it. It's one thing if you have a partner that can cover you, but that's not always the case. If you have a sense of responsibility and duty,...admirable, honorable,...but some employers sort of count on you feeling guilty for leaving the job for any sort of personal time off,...and will take advantage of that. My wife and I are both in jobs like this. Some of my co-workers struggle to have any time banked up in their Paid Time Off account,...where as my wife and I struggle to take any time off and have several hundred hours banked up because we rarely take a break for ourselves. Sometimes we are forced to turn in our vacation hours for a check at the end of the year because we've banked up too many hours.

Having said that, I NEVER check work e-mails at home, and I refuse to answer work texts or phone calls while I am at home or on vacation. I tell people I will be "out of the system", so don't bother trying. All emergency concerns go to my up-line. I am off-the-grid,...sometimes literally.

For your sanity, separate your work life from your personal life.
 
Neonatal RRT said:
Having said that, I NEVER check work e-mails at home, and I refuse to answer work texts or phone calls while I am at home or on vacation. I tell people I will be "out of the system", so don't bother trying. All emergency concerns go to my up-line. I am off-the-grid,...sometimes literally.
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That’s the absolute best advice you can give in this situation.

Now…. having said that…. When I was in that situation, I tried doing that. But I would still think about work when I was home. I never had access to my email, and I didn’t answer my phone. I think that, for me, the ONLY solution was to start over somewhere new.

Maybe some of us on the spectrum are just wired to have an unhealthy sense of duty and responsibility, to the point that we neglect our families and our own health without being able to control it. I would drink myself into a coma every night just to turn that off. Ironically… it often made me unable to my job the next day.
 
Neonatal RRT said:
Most employers will have a strategy to push more and more onto an employee until they sense "resistance" from said employee. "How much work can I get out of this person?" It is frustrating at times, especially in positions where "If I don't do it, it doesn't get done." Most employers do not have a good sense for how difficult and demanding some of these positions are,...and it isn't until said employee leaves on a holiday/vacation that the employer has any sense of it. It's one thing if you have a partner that can cover you, but that's not always the case. If you have a sense of responsibility and duty,...admirable, honorable,...but some employers sort of count on you feeling guilty for leaving the job for any sort of personal time off,...and will take advantage of that. My wife and I are both in jobs like this. Some of my co-workers struggle to have any time banked up in their Paid Time Off account,...where as my wife and I struggle to take any time off and have several hundred hours banked up because we rarely take a break for ourselves. Sometimes we are forced to turn in our vacation hours for a check at the end of the year because we've banked up too many hours.

Having said that, I NEVER check work e-mails at home, and I refuse to answer work texts or phone calls while I am at home or on vacation. I tell people I will be "out of the system", so don't bother trying. All emergency concerns go to my up-line. I am off-the-grid,...sometimes literally.

For your sanity, separate your work life from your personal life.
Click to expand...
Yep, pretty much everything you’ve said there resonates.

Plus @Au Naturel - yeah definitely not a properly run workplace!

It’s hard to move on, there’s anxiety about starting somewhere new too.

I’m certainly going to try to disconnect and stay that way. Fingers crossed!
 
AspieChris said:
Now…. having said that…. When I was in that situation, I tried doing that. But I would still think about work when I was home. I never had access to my email, and I didn’t answer my phone. I think that, for me, the ONLY solution was to start over somewhere new.
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Only way I tune it out is playing video games or writing.
 
@Mr Alligator

Work gets assigned by lazy people to hard-working people until there's pushback.

The process of resisting this is close to how to deal with any other kind of narcissist (selfish, uncaring, exploitative, ....).
If you want to discuss possible techniques, ask.
 
I don't think you have this time off thing down yet. This is where you walk away and let it all be someone else's problem for a while. And if you come back to a mess, you already have an pre-paid excuse card... 'I was on vacation. If you needed it immediately, don't assign it to someone on vacation!'

;)
 
I think what Mr Alligator is describing might be a sort of OCD or a phobia. Like a fear of spiders, it might be a fear of the work not being completed correctly or on time. If I’m correct, then the best advice might be therapy.

I got all of this advice when it was happening to me. I tried absolutely everything to shut it off, but the only thing I was able to do was learn how to put some safeguards in place to reduce the volume of unfinished work and pretend the rest wasn’t bothering me. But it still took over my thoughts whenever I should have been relaxing at home. And the more I disliked my job, the worse it affected me.

It helped me to be very organized at work. I stopped allowing unfinished work to be commingled with the finished work. Even when there were spreadsheets, I also wrote everything on paper. One pile of jobs that were completed and another pile of stuff that was not completed. Everything had a page of notes. Things like “waiting on materials”, or “appointment with HR on Friday”. When the materials were delivered, I would cross that out. When everything was crossed out, it meant that it was finished and it got moved to the other pile.

It really helped me because I remember things as photographs. I had a mental picture of the work. Each task was unique and I saw that paper with notes in my head and it was easy to recall what still needed to be done, so I spent less energy thinking about the work. I couldn’t turn it off but it was an effective way of turning down the volume.

I also started a paper at the beginning of each work day and wrote each thing I needed to do on that day, no matter how small. It meant I didn’t need to remember to complete anything because it was on paper at my desk. When it was completed, I crossed it off. New tasks get written down as the day goes on and crossed off when completed. When tomorrow comes, I transferred anything from yesterday that didn’t get done. It helped when I was off work because I knew that everything was on paper and I wasn’t worrying I might forget anything, so that fear couldn’t ruin my time off.
 
Mr Alligator said:
It sucks.

Break up from work for two weeks.

Already anxious about all the work I’ll come back to (Helpdesk tickets assigned to me whilst on leave, various emails from various people, tasks that are outstanding on my projects, etc).

Urgh.

Considered cancelling some of the leave, but I really feel like I need a break.
Click to expand...
Oh my. I can't tell you how bitterly I can relate to that.

Holding a job for nearly twenty years where absolutely no one would do any of the work on my desk or any others no matter what the reason for my absence. The worst being when the corporation sent me to underwriting school in Philadelphia for two weeks every other year at one point of my insurance career. And of course if you didn't pass the exams, don't come back to the office expecting you still had a job. A little pressure, eh? You make it home knowing you passed but then face an avalanche of files in your cubicle, making you want to quit in disgust.

And then there's sick time and last but not least, the dreaded thing called "vacation". Where no matter how you try to break it up into little manageable pieces, someone in HR would always prod me, reminding that I have to take so many successive days and that I should. Yeah....right. So the files on my desk could stack three and four feet high.

As an adult, I've never truly experienced what one might call a "vacation".
 
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Judge said:
Oh my. I can't tell you how bitterly I can relate to that.

Holding a job for nearly twenty years where absolutely no one would do any of the work on my desk or any others no matter what the reason for my absence. The worst being when the corporation sent me to underwriting school in Philadelphia for two weeks every other year at one point of my insurance career. And of course if you didn't pass the exams, don't come back to the office expecting you still had a job. A little pressure, eh? You make it home knowing you passed but then face an avalanche of files in your cubicle, making you want to quit in disgust.

And then there's sick time and last but not least, the dreaded thing called "vacation". Where no matter how you try to break it up into little manageable pieces, someone in HR would always prod me, reminding that I have to take so many successive days and that I should. Yeah....right. So the files on my desk could stack three and four feet high.

As an adult, I've never truly experienced what one might call a "vacation".
Click to expand...
I always took my vacation days one at a time. And I was never on ‘vacation’
 
AspieChris said:
I always took my vacation days one at a time. And I was never on ‘vacation’
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I tried...but at some point the HR manager would always remind me something to the contrary.

Ironically though for the vacation I never took I didn't loose those days. Ultimately they created a windfall for me the day I finally left the company, and got compensated for all those days.

Whew, that was one sick carousel I really needed to get off.
 
Judge said:
I tried...but at some point the HR manager would always remind me something to the contrary.

Ironically though for the vacation I never took I didn't loose those days. Ultimately they created a windfall for me the day I finally left the company, and got compensated for all those days.

Whew, that was one sick carousel I really needed to get off.
Click to expand...
I’ve been on that carousel for 32 years. And I’ve been needing to get off for about 31.
 
Judge said:
OMG. It's a tragic thing, I know. I look back at it as if I was the last guy to jump off the Titanic.
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Ha! All my friends at work have been watching the company go downhill for years. We all joke that we come to work just to “rearrange deck chairs on the Titanic”
 
AspieChris said:
Ha! All my friends at work have been watching the company go downhill for years. We all joke that we come to work just to “rearrange deck chairs on the Titanic”
Click to expand...
I got out just before the corporation merged with a competitor. Luckily someone in the Home Office (Phila.) tipped me off and I got out of dodge. Turned out a few years later the merger got bought out by an even bigger fish who sold off all the west coast assets.
 
Judge said:
I got out just before the corporation merged with a competitor. Luckily someone in the Home Office (Phila.) tipped me off and I got out of dodge. Turned out a few years later the merger got bought out by an even bigger fish who sold off all the west coast assets.
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Yeah, mergers have destroyed my job too. 25 years ago I would recommend to anyone that it was a great job and they should do ANYTHING to get hired. Today I tell them to do everything to get a job ANYWHERE ELSE. If I wasn’t looking at a pension, I’d leave yesterday.
 
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