
Next, focus on fostering more trusting relationships at work. Thinking about how you'd counsel a friend could help you to stop ruminating and instead see your situation in a new light. The goal of this exercise is to gain perspective and some psychological distance from the problem without trying to force yourself to ignore it or let it go.
#WORK MAKING PARANOID HOW TO#
How to cope with feelings of paranoia? For starters, get out of your own head.Įthan Kross, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, has a nifty technique that might help: Imagine a friend came to you with a similar problem. How to cope? For starters, get out of your own head.

But problems occur when the paranoia becomes pathological - when you start reading into things that aren't there. It's a kind of attentiveness to others people's underlying motivations, and it serves as a form of emotional intelligence and information gathering.īeing "prudently paranoid" might give you an advantage in grasping social dynamics and predicting future outcomes. Stanford's Roderick Kramer has shown a level of "prudent paranoia" can be a reasonable and appropriate response to a threat. Paranoia at work isn't necessarily a bad thing. Who among us hasn't wondered whether our colleagues and bosses are all talking about us on some other Slack thread? But knowing that others feel as you do is cold comfort. Research suggests that your experience is not uncommon. Working remotely day in, day out is lonely and can often lead to feelings of vulnerability and paranoia. I recognize that these feelings are unhealthy, and I'm worried they're starting to affect my job performance. Does this mean I am not on the critical path of anything?" I sometimes spiral into unproductive cycles of "Is this new meeting between Jim and Sally because of that thing I said in our team Slack yesterday?" or "No one has emailed me and it's already 2 p.m. I play out conspiracy theories in my mind when I sense even a slight shift in how my boss, colleagues, or leadership perceives me. Lately, working from home is making me bonkers. Return-to-office plans have been continually postponed. Since March 2020, we've been fully remote. I had decent relationships with my coworkers, and my boss respected my work. I've been at my company for four years, and right up until the pandemic hit, I would have described myself as a satisfied in-office employee. But when you start reading into things that aren't there, it is a problem.Being "prudently paranoid" might give you an advantage in grasping certain social dynamics.Feeling paranoid at work is common - and it's not necessarily a bad thing either.

This can be very uncomfortable at first but the therapist should offer you a lot of support and take things at a pace that you can manage.Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. Talking therapies can help you test your thoughts and practise dealing with scary situations and people. But this means you don't have a chance to try different ways of coping with scary situations or to test your beliefs and see if they are justified or not. You might think that you are safe because you do those things and then do them even more. Safety behaviours can sometimes start to act as evidence for your paranoid thoughts. This can make you feel as if your beliefs were justified in the first place. It might become harder to make or keep friends.

You might push them away or decide that you are better off without them.īut this means that people might start to treat you differently. If you think someone is threatening you or wants to harm you in some way, you may behave suspiciously or aggressively towards them.
