#64😢 Coping with Loss at Work: Navigating Grief with ADHD for Improved Mental Health and Job Performance
Showing up with your whole self at work, even your grief, is critical to your wellness and best job performance
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Part 7 of the Performance and Productivity series.
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🦋The Takeaways
The Belief: Acknowledging grief will make me a worse employee.
The Reality: Coping with loss is critical to wellness and productivity.
The Action: Process losses and accommodate needs at work sustainably.
⭐️Introducing Professor Megan Shen
Today my guest writer is Dr. Megan Shen. She’s a professor who studies grief and dying at Fred Hutch Cancer Center in Seattle. She writes her own Substack at Light in the Wound and is a freelance writer for publications such as Entrepreneur and USA Today.
I asked her to write an article for this series because I wanted to discuss how not coping with loss at work can affect productivity. This could be due to the loss of a loved one or things like layoffs.
With layoffs, you are often asked to carry on as if nothing has happened even though trusted colleagues and friends are suddenly gone. Ignoring loss can have a significant cost for most of us, including employers who may not be aware of it or choose to ignore it.
Those of us with ADHD often pay an amplified cost due to our emotional dysregulation.
Today, Dr. Megan discusses the cost of grief we all have to pay and how to reduce it in the workplace or at home.
⭐️Introduction - Workplace loss and grief
Most of us can at least acknowledge grief when someone we love dies. However, we experience multiple types of grief in our lives that extend beyond the death of a loved one.
One of the most common forms of grief is what I like to call “workplace loss.”
Workplace loss refers to losses occurring within our work lives such as the loss of a job, team member, or way of working.
We often experience multiple workplace losses throughout our careers.
Take, for example, changes in workplace rhythms that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. The majority of us experienced massive, wide-scale workplace loss.
Nearly overnight, all of us completely shifted work paradigms from being fully in-person to fully remote. This was a jolting experience regardless if your work life improved or declined.
Another common form of workplace loss -which we are witnessing in alarming numbers right now – is wide-scale layoffs.
Compounding losses occur when we not only lose team members we connect with but also get shifted to new managers and teams.
We lose coworkers, teams, and the safety of our jobs.
Research summarized in Harvard Business Review demonstrates that layoffs have very negative effects on both individual employees’ performance and overall performance at the corporate level.
What is less often talked about, however, is how the grief we experience from these losses.
Prior research indicates that after a layoff:
74% of remaining employees report a decline in their productivity.
69% report the quality of their company’s product or service declines.
87% report being less likely to recommend their organization as being a good organization to work for.
77% report making more errors and mistakes.
The data are clear – layoffs create widescale decreases in work performance.
Yet, most of us either ignore how layoffs are affecting our well-being or believe that we should ignore those feelings and just keep our heads down.
In most cases, we asked to perform at an even higher level due to the losses.
😵💫The Belief – I should ignore how workplace loss or grief is affecting me.
The belief that we should ignore how workplace loss is affecting us is common. Often, grief feels like it’s reserved for losing someone you love – like a spouse/partner, close friend, or family member.
However, most of us are suffering from grief in the workplace. This is especially true in the tech industry. The layoffs have been so widespread and continuous, that the New York Times published an article this month (February 2024) titled, Why is Big Tech Still Cutting Jobs?
The short answer to this question in the article is that the tech industry is up against two giants – a frenetic workforce expansion during the pandemic and building out A.I.
Regardless of why the tech industry is laying off so many people, the consequences remain the same. Tech is dealing with a grieving workforce but failing to help it cope.
This is why we must show up for ourselves and begin to recognize, acknowledge, and cope with workplace grief.
If you’re a leader, you are exhausted by how many people have quit your teams or been laid off.
If you are a team member, you are exhausted and nervous about how many people have quit or been laid off within your team.
Each of these scenarios causes multiple losses to be incurred – loss of people, events, workplace rhythms – which all add up to experiencing grief.
So why do we avoid talking about and dealing with grief?
It’s because the human body is designed to resist loss.
When we experience any type of threat, our bodies instinctually decide to fight back against it and resist it (fight), to run away from or avoid it (flight), or just collapse (freeze). This fight, flight, or freeze response – which is fairly automatic – is helpful if a tiger is chasing you. It is much less helpful when facing loss or grief.
The natural tendency to avoid loss or grief is even more pronounced among those with ADHD. Because ADHD can make it more challenging to regulate emotions, something like grief or loss can trigger and exacerbate ADHD symptoms like denial, anger, or despair.
This means that you are more likely not only to experience greater ADHD symptoms but, also to fail to recognize that it’s workplace loss that is affecting you in this way.
This can cause you to double down on shaming yourself for suffering from your ADHD symptoms when really, you need to allow yourself to experience grief.
🤝The Reality – Failing to process your losses decreases your productivity
Failure and avoidance seem like beneficial strategies for managing a loss. Especially if you worry that coping with and managing a loss will trigger your ADHD symptoms and make you perform worse at your job.
This can be an especially concerning worry when you are existing in a job market that has a high threat of job layoffs.
But what is commonly misunderstood is how failing to process grief is affecting your job performance. The bottom line is that it’s making you much worse at your job.
An overlooked fact is that symptoms of grief tend to overlap with ADHD symptoms. For instance, common symptoms of grief include:
Trouble focusing
A constant need to move your body
Poor work performance
Difficulty processing or learning new information
Acting impulsively
Trouble eating or sleeping
When you look at this list, you’ll realize that what could be grief is very easily mistaken as “it’s just my ADHD.”
But like Batman and Robin, the two are just working together as a dynamic duo to make your ADHD symptoms worse, and thus, your job performance suffers.
When you fail to acknowledge and process your grief you harm yourself entirely. Your body, your mind, your sense of self as someone who is neurodivergent, and your work performance.
🛠️The Action – Label your grief and strategize one thing you can do to help cope with it.
As anyone who has experienced grief will tell you, the only way out is through.
What’s often missed in this important advice is that acknowledging you are grieving a loss is a powerful and important step to getting better.
So often, we push our losses down and ignore them, forcing ourselves to function in a way that is not practical given the losses.
We do this with the loss of loved ones. I have seen people return to work time and time again within a couple of days of losing someone close like a parent, partner, or spouse. This is being unbelievably harsh to ourselves.
We are even worse when it comes to coping with workplace loss. We are especially likely to ignore and push down our feelings of loss when they relate to something other than the death of a loved one.
But these other losses affect us in similar ways, even if less pronounced, and must be processed and coped with to thrive again.
🛠️An exercise to process your losses at work
Make a list of the losses you’ve experienced in the past 1 to 3 years in the workplace.
Examples:
A shift to remote work (loss of daily physical encounters with others)
Management changes (count each manager),
Changes in teams, loss of co-workers (count each person),
Job layoffs, and change in company ownership (through merger or job transitions).
Once you have that full list, go through each loss to sketch out how it’s affecting you (see #3 and #4 below).
Write at least one sentence (or more if you want) saying how each loss makes you feel.
This is where you will learn which ones were inconsequential and which ones have noticeably affected you.
Write down one emotion you associate with your loss.
Is it anger? Perhaps the person who hired you quickly quit and moved on to a new role. Maybe someone you connected with was fired.
Is it fear? Witnessing those around you lose their jobs – whether in your team, company, or industry – can be scary for the security of your job.
Is it sadness? Maybe losing consistent contact with people has affected you socially and personally.
Write down one thing you can do this week to begin to create space for that loss.
Maybe it’s taking 5 minutes a day to acknowledge how it’s making you feel.
Maybe it’s thinking of one way to repair that loss, such as setting up a happy hour with new coworkers to get a rhythm of hanging out back on the calendar.
If you find the losses are more severe or affecting you in a bigger way, consider having a conversation with your supervisor to discuss ways of how to manage this within your workflow.
For instance, do you need more flexible hours, a temporary scale back in hours, etc.?
Asking for accommodations isn’t showing weakness. It’s showing what you need to be strong again.
Conclusion
We need to be able to bring our whole selves to work without fear.
So often, we fear acknowledging or processing the losses in our lives will make us weaker, worse employees, or unable to manage our emotions. But the truth is that ignoring these losses is what’s making us all of these things.
It’s only by accepting and embracing our whole selves - losses, grief, and all - that we can be the best and most resilient versions of ourselves.
Much like ignoring your ADHD only makes it harder for you to work well, ignoring your grief does the same thing. And right now, especially those in tech, we are experiencing a multitude of waves of loss.
It’s time we started putting words to that loss and bravely bringing our whole selves to work.
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Megan J. Shen, PhD, is a social psychologist and expert on death, dying, and grief. She is an Associate Professor at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, WA, where her research focuses on how to support terminally ill patients and their families cope with these challenging diagnoses and losses. Her writing on the broad topic of finding good in the hard places of life can be found in her Substack Light in the Wound as well as her columns at Entrepreneur and Psychology Today.
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⏭️Next Week
Successfully Navigating a Performance Plan with ADHD: Tips for Beating the Plan
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