{"id":152062,"date":"2024-02-03T15:28:37","date_gmt":"2024-02-03T15:28:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/effectsofanxiety.net\/archives\/152062"},"modified":"2024-02-04T20:10:20","modified_gmt":"2024-02-05T01:10:20","slug":"the-one-factor-causing-depression-and-anxiety-in-the-workplace-johann-hari-big-think","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/effectsofanxiety.net\/archives\/152062","title":{"rendered":"The one factor causing depression and anxiety in the workplace | Johann Hari  | Big Think"},"content":{"rendered":"<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/G0tgMubFqd8?si=NUxpRSxlK6139Blu\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe>\r\n\r\nI learned about nine causes of depression\r\nand anxiety, for which there\u2019s scientific evidence with different sets of solutions. But I\u2019ll just give you a very quick example\r\nof one. I noticed that lots of people I know who were\r\ndepressed and anxious. Their depression and anxiety focus on\r\ntheir work. So I started looking at, well, how do people\r\nfeel about their work? What\u2019s going on here? Gallup did the most detailed study that\u2019s\r\never been done on this. They found that 13 percent of us like our\r\nwork most of the time. Sixty-three percent of us are what they call\r\n\u201csleepwalking\u201d throughout work. We don\u2019t like it. We don\u2019t hate it. We tolerate it. Twenty-four percent of us hate our jobs. If you think about that 87 percent of people\r\nin our culture don\u2019t like the thing they\u2019re doing most of the time. They did send their first work email at 7:48\r\na.m. and clock off at 7:15 p.m. on average. Most of us don\u2019t want to be doing it. Could this have a relationship with our mental\r\nhealth? I started looking for the best evidence, and\r\nI discovered an amazing Australian social scientist called Michael Marmot who I got\r\nto know, the story of how he discovered it is amazing, but I\u2019ll give\r\nyou the headline.\r\n\r\nHe discovered the key factor that makes us\r\ndepressed and anxious at work: If you go to work and you feel controlled,\r\nyou feel you have few or limited choices you are significantly more likely to become depressed\r\nor even more likely to have a stress-related heart attack. And this is because of one of the things that\r\nconnects so many of the causes of depression and anxiety I learned about. Everyone watching this knows that you have\r\nnatural physical needs, right? You need food. You need water. You need shelter. You need clean air. If I took them away from you, you would be\r\nin trouble real fast, right?\r\n\r\nThere\u2019s equally strong evidence that we\r\nhave natural psychological needs. You\u2019ve got to feel you belong; You\u2019ve\r\ngot to feel your life has meaning and purpose; You\u2019ve got to feel that people see you and\r\nvalue you; You\u2019ve got to feel you\u2019ve got a future that makes sense. And if human beings are deprived of those\r\npsychological needs they will experience extreme forms of distress. Our culture is good at lots of things.\r\n\r\nWe\u2019re getting less and less good at meeting\r\npeople\u2019s deep underlying psychological needs. And this is one of the key factors why depression\r\nis rising. And that opens, just to finish the point about\r\nwhat that opens up, a very different way of thinking about how we solve these problems,\r\nright? So if control at work is one of the drivers\r\nof this depression and anxiety epidemic I think well what would be an antidepressant\r\nfor that, right? What would solve that? In Baltimore, I met a woman called Meredith\r\nKeogh as part of an amazing transformation. Meredith used to go to bed every Sunday night\r\njust sick with anxiety. She had an office job. It wasn\u2019t the worst office job in the world,\r\nshe wasn\u2019t being bullied, but she couldn\u2019t bear the thought that this monotony was going\r\nto be the next 40 years of her life, most of her life.\r\n\r\nAnd one day Meredith experimented with\r\nher husband Josh. Josh had worked in bike stores since he was\r\na teenager. Again, it\u2019s insecure, controlled work, as\r\nyou can imagine. And one day Josh and his friends in the bike\r\nstore just asked themselves: what does our boss do? They liked that boss. He wasn\u2019t a bad guy, but they\r\nthought, \u201cWell, we fix all the bikes.\u201d They didn\u2019t like this feeling of having\r\na boss.\r\n\r\nThey decided to do something different. So Meredith quit her job. Josh and his friends quit their jobs. They set up a bike store that works on a different,\r\nolder principle. It\u2019s a democratic cooperative, not a corporation. So the way it works is there is no boss. They make the decisions together democratically\r\nby voting. They share the good tasks and the bad\r\ntasks. They share the profits. One of the things that was so interesting\r\nto me going there which is completely in line with Professor Marmot\u2019s findings is how\r\nmany of them talked about how depressed and anxious they\u2019d been when they worked in\r\na controlled environment and they weren\u2019t depressed and anxious now. Now it\u2019s important to say: it\u2019s not like\r\nthey quit their jobs fixing bikes and went to become like Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s backup singers,\r\nright? They fixed bikes before, they fixed bikes\r\nnow. But they dealt with the factor that causes\r\ndepression and anxiety. As Josh put it to me, there\u2019s no reason\r\nwhy any business should be run in this top-down, depressogenic, humiliating way, right? The modern corporation is a very recent invention.\r\n\r\nThink about how many people you know who feel\r\nterrible today if they were going to work tomorrow at a workplace that they controlled\r\nwith their colleagues. If there had to be a boss, they elected the\r\nboss and the boss was accountable to them. Where they chose the priorities for their\r\nworkplace. A lot of people would feel very differently. Now that is an antidepressant, right?\r\n\r\nChemical antidepressants should\r\nremain on the menu. They give some relief to some people. That\u2019s valuable. But we need to look for antidepressants that\r\ndeal with the reasons why we\u2019re depressed. So I was able to identify nine causes of depression\r\nand anxiety and seven antidepressants like this which are actually about dealing with\r\nthe reasons why we feel this way and not just blunting the symptoms.\r\n\r\n<center><a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/b?_encoding=UTF8&amp;tag=3sss3-20&amp;linkCode=ur2&amp;linkId=e9b113b7be64ea1832997bb5c717e582&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;node=283155\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">100 Hot Books<\/a><\/center><center><a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/b?_encoding=UTF8&amp;tag=3sss3-20&amp;linkCode=ur2&amp;linkId=5f7f04b68b05d11ccfcb2df607b0af04&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;node=565108\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Computers Laptops<\/a><\/center><center><\/center><center><a href=\"https:\/\/jvz4.com\/c\/335985\/319641\">Explaindio Agency Edition<\/a> FREE Training How to Create Explainer Videos &amp; SELL or RENT them! 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Their depression and anxiety focus on their work. So I started looking &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/effectsofanxiety.net\/archives\/152062\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The one factor causing depression and anxiety in the workplace | Johann Hari  | Big Think<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1013,"featured_media":152068,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1,7],"tags":[2038,40508,696,61208,61209,61210,61213,518,5162,61221,61222,61218,34201,61215,61219,953,61211,56573,6714,34239,61214,38412,2971,61220,2560,61217,61212,43734,36111,34214,5176,957,519,39587,5700,702,61224,34004,965,61223],"class_list":["post-152062","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anxiety","category-getting-help","tag-work","tag-antidepressant","tag-anxiety","tag-big-think","tag-bigthink","tag-bigthink-com","tag-boss","tag-brain","tag-career","tag-co-op","tag-colleague","tag-cooperative","tag-corporation","tag-coworker","tag-democrative-cooperative","tag-depression","tag-edu","tag-education","tag-educational","tag-emotion","tag-employee","tag-equality","tag-happiness","tag-hierarchy","tag-job","tag-job-security","tag-johann-hari","tag-labor","tag-lifelong-learning","tag-medication","tag-medicine","tag-mental-health","tag-mind","tag-psychiatrist","tag-psychiatry","tag-psychology","tag-robert-sapolsky","tag-society","tag-therapy","tag-work-culture"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/effectsofanxiety.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/152062_maxresdefault.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/effectsofanxiety.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152062","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/effectsofanxiety.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/effectsofanxiety.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/effectsofanxiety.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1013"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/effectsofanxiety.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152062"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/effectsofanxiety.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152062\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":152102,"href":"https:\/\/effectsofanxiety.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152062\/revisions\/152102"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/effectsofanxiety.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/152068"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/effectsofanxiety.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/effectsofanxiety.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/effectsofanxiety.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}