Neha Pathak, MD, FACP, DipABLM: Welcome to the WebMD Health Discovered podcast. I'm Dr Neha Pathak, WebMD's chief physician editor for health and lifestyle medicine. Whether you've been fired abruptly, terminated after being on a performance improvement plan, or were part of a mass layoff, losing a job can feel like the floor just dropped beneath your feet.

One moment, you're completing projects, working with colleagues, and basing life decisions on a regular paycheck and health insurance. The next moment, your income, self-worth, community, routine, and your imagined future are drastically changed.

It can be an emotional experience that we may not allow ourselves time to have. It can bring anger, fear, shame, and grief to the surface. There also might even be a bit of confusing relief woven in there. You may suddenly be left asking yourself, "Who am I without this title, this income, this future? And where do I go from here?" In today's episode, we'll discuss how to care for your mental health in the days and weeks after job loss, why you don't need to rush into your next role, and how to make space for difficult emotions, as well as the practical first steps that can help you regain a sense of control and direction.

First, let me introduce my guest, Dr Monica Johnson. Dr Johnson is a licensed psychologist and the owner of the group practice Kind Mind Psychology. Her focus is on reducing healthcare disparities and reducing barriers to quality care.

She's also host of the "ADHD &" podcast through the nonprofit organization understood.org. Welcome to the WebMD Health Discovered podcast, Dr Johnson.

Monica Johnson, PsyD: Thank you for having me.

Pathak: Well, I think that we are gonna be talking about a very important topic these days. But before we jump into it, I'd love to ask about your own personal health discovery or your aha moment that brought you to the work that you're doing today.

Johnson: Oh, that's actually a strange story because I decided to be a psychologist when I was 12 years old. I've always been kind of a very empathetic person. I also grew up in an impoverished background, so I witnessed people going through a lot of hardship. And so, at 12 years old, I wrote in my journal that I was gonna be a psychologist because I felt that I was a strong person, and I wanted to impart that strength to others, I think is essentially what I wrote in my journal at 12.

Pathak: Wow, what a beautiful story and manifestation that you're currently living of your 12-year-old dream. So thank you for sharing that story. So let's then talk through a potentially difficult circumstance that a lot of folks are facing today, which is a fear of or actually having been laid off.

Can you help us understand some of the first emotions that someone is likely to experience?

Johnson: Yeah, I think grief is a big one. Not to say that there's not stress, but people have a lot of shock, anger, sadness. I even see relief sometimes, and that often is the most confusing for people. Job loss is extremely stressful. If you look at research, it sits near the top, right up there with things like divorce.

So truly, whatever emotions you're having, you're not overreacting. When you lose a job, you're losing a lot of your identity, stability, and a lot of other factors.

Pathak: That's really great. And I want to pull on what you just said, that this is all completely part of what you would expect someone to experience. So it's not something that you should then be upset at yourself for feeling some of these emotions. So how do you remind people that all of these emotions, these fears are all within what one might feel very commonly?

Johnson: For me, it's a very easy thing to validate when you think about the role that work takes in your life, especially if you're in America. Like, work and being productive is a large part of our identity. It's the whole kind of American dream, pull yourself up by your bootstraps moment.

And so, it's completely normal to then, when you lose a job, go, "Oh my God, it feels like I've lost everything." Because so many people have spent so much of their lives towards whatever role it is that they're taking. I mean, listen to me. I'm saying that I decided what I wanna do with the rest of my life when I was 12.

If I all of a sudden woke up and couldn't do that, that would be a big hit to who I am as a person and what I've spent a lot of time pouring into.

Pathak: How do you help people understand and validate their emotions, particularly in those situations where it's sort of like a company decision that has nothing to do with their individual work?

Johnson: With my patients, particularly because I have a background in DBT, mindfulness, those sorts of things, we talk a lot about radical acceptance, which is about kind of the reality of these circumstances, which is companies, especially large companies, they're not necessarily seeing you as you, like, an individual human person with a name and feelings and family and responsibilities and all of these things.

Oftentimes, there's a line item on a spreadsheet that's leading to a lot of these decisions, right? And that's a really harsh reality. So there's a dialectic to hold in the situation where, like, this is significant and it's about you, and then on some other more profound level, it's not about you.

You didn't necessarily lose this job because you weren't productive enough, you weren't a good enough worker. It's a circumstance that, unfortunately, tens of thousands of people every single month in the US right now are, are coping with. And it does lead to a lot of complex emotions related to anger, anxiety, stress because as you get into some of that reality of, when we're going through hard economic times, I may also be a casualty of those hard economic times.

It truly does make you worry about, like, your long-term stability and viability. And again, that's a valid emotion, and I've had a lot of patients go through that in, in this economic downturn in, previous work I've done I used to lead a homeless clinic, so I was helping people cope with this literally on a daily basis.

Pathak: And you mentioned DBT, so tell us a little bit about what that is and what that entails.

Johnson: Yeah. So DBT stands for dialectical behavior therapy. It was originally developed by Marsha Linehan for borderline personality disorders and people who engage in higher-risk behaviors like self-harm or are a higher risk for suicide. But over the decades, we've learned that it's profoundly impactive—impactful for a lot of different things.

Even in my specialty of ADHD, it's extremely helpful for helping with things like emotion regulation. Throughout my career, I've helped people in all sorts of situations, as I mentioned, being homeless all the way up to people who have lived more, I guess, fortunate lives. And in all of these different settings, DBT has been profoundly helpful in giving people tools to live, because the skills that we learn in DBT are not skills that are for people who are necessarily sick.

These are skills for anyone. So some parts of that are skills that help you cope with life on life's terms, and I think one example of that, that is what we're talking about today, which is layoffs, which are things that are often outside of our control. I mean, the definition of a layoff is usually like you didn't do anything wrong, but, like, the company is letting you go.

Pathak: So kind of using that as a frame and thinking about that as one way you help people understand and process their emotions, what should somebody be thinking about in that early stage? So they've just found out that they've been laid off. How do you think about triaging emotions in that very short term, near term?

Johnson: First thing is don't do anything. Please just chill. Feel your feelings. That is very important. Don't make any major decisions in the first few days. Those are more likely to be emotion-minded decisions that are kind of based on kind of like your stress and panic in the moment, versus in DBT we talk about wise mind, which is like a combination of your emotions, but then also kind of using your logic and an understanding of your value system to figure out what for you is the true or right answer.

So, typically speaking, in these first few days or maybe even a week, just allow yourself to process what's going on. In combination with that, at DBT we have a skill called the PLEASE skill, which is about the basic foundational things that we all need to live and cope, so you really wanna protect those basics.

So you wanna make sure you get sleep, that you're eating regular meals, that you engage in movement, however you define that. It doesn't have to be a hard, like, HIIT class. It can be walking, it can be yoga, but just move your body because that is good for your mental health and physical health during these periods of time.

Some people may have the urge to use substances, but I truly encourage no substances or going very easy on those because they can exhaust your body during a time when you're already exhausted with emotions. From a financial perspective, I usually encourage people to file for unemployment during this period of time.

If you're getting any sort of severance package, please make sure you read the paperwork beforehand and really understand what you're signing. I have in some situations had people be able to negotiate their, their severance and, and get something different or, or better for themselves. I would avoid doing, like, kind of doom scrolling.

That's not a healthy habit. You don't wanna be on, like, LinkedIn or Indeed at 3:00 in the morning. That's the exact opposite of what you wanna be doing. I would hope that you would be sleeping during that time, or if you're struggling with sleeping, doing something that's actually going to be relaxing or calming for your system.

Pathak: That's really, really helpful. And so much of what you mentioned, I think, is the reality, and what you mentioned earlier about DBT is that you have to understand your reality but create these healthful behaviors and sort of respond to it in healthful ways. Because we're not just thinking about the financial stress.

As you mentioned, layoffs can lead to a lot of other changes, so concerns around losing health insurance, being able to afford your medication, being able to access healthcare. So how do you help people manage all of those stressors without feeling overwhelmed?

Johnson: Absolutely. A big thing that I do with my patients, just generally speaking, not just in moments like this, is, the way that I talk about it is I tell my patients, you wanna understand the game you're playing." Meaning that you want to understand the systems that you have to, like, interact with.

So in terms of insurance and layoffs and the healthcare that we have in the US, typically speaking, people are usually eligible for COBRA benefits. So if people don't know about those, it's important to inform yourself about COBRA. Also, in many cases, a layoff would be kind of like a life-changing kind of event that then allows for, like, special enrollment with insurance in many cases.

So when that happens, you may be able to go to the marketplace and find a plan that is affordable for you and kinda get those things restarted.

Pathak: And I really wanna honor what you said around this is a balance of activity, and so you don't necessarily want to go all in and do everything, but there are certain important pieces that you wanna figure out—the pieces of the puzzle that you need to act on. So how do you help people think through what is something I have to do today? What is something that I can do later on? I don't need to try to do all of this at once because I'm also thinking about my own self-care as a piece of what I need to do during this time.

Johnson: A lot of times I have people do kind of like brain dumps, like just sit down and everything that's kind of floating, write it all down. I think one of the things we sometimes do is we hold things in our mind, and it's very hard—listen, it's easy to do arithmetic in your head, it's hard to do calculus.

That's kind of what I say to people. So you wanna kind of write it down and show your work, and a lot of times when you do a brain dump and you kind of list everything out, you can then go and assign a value to different things. Like, this is something that's, like, urgent and important that I need to get done today or this week.

This is something that, like, is emotionally annoying to me, but, like, it's not urgent. It can sit for a few days, and really assign a value to that. So when I say assign a value, it's looking at: is there, like, a time pressure involved with, like, one of these elements, and then also looking at, like, the emotional impact that it has on you.

Like, even what I just said about, like, something being emotionally annoying, it's like, okay, it's emotionally annoying, but it's not urgent, which means I can deprioritize it and focus on something that's more practically a problem. But there's also things that, like, weigh on us so much emotionally that you also wanna factor that in, and that can go in either direction.

It could be that this is, like, worrying me so much that I need to do something about it right now to just kind of ease my brain a little bit. And there's other things where our emotion makes us want to avoid. So we want to pay attention to that because if our emotion is telling us to avoid, but when we look at it we go, "This is actually something that I should, like, move up on the priority list," right?

Then it's about what kind of self-care can I do for myself around this issue so I can approach it in a timely manner? So it's never about ignoring your emotions. It's about having compassion for yourself and then choosing a value-based action that is in alignment with what your needs are.

Pathak: How do you help people feel comfortable reaching out when one's natural tendency might be to just avoid and hide?

Johnson: Oftentimes this comes from a place of shame. Shame has an action urge that tells you to hide. But you actually wanna do the opposite to that because what shrinks shame is kind of bringing things to light, and connection is a part of that. The moment you go to a trusted friend and you say, "Hey, I have a problem," and they sit there and they listen to you, or if you're looking for problem-solving, they try to help you, it is such a healing moment and a healing experience.

And I'm oftentimes telling my patients, "Give the people around you the opportunity to show that they love you." That's part of the reason for why they're there, and when you're hiding these things, you're removing that opportunity from them and also from yourself to feel that love and connection. And we know from research that isolation is the exact opposite thing you wanna do in these situations.

Now, you may not have a lot to, like, give socially, but that's why you tell people, like, what your needs are. Sometimes it's just, "Can you come and sit beside me on the couch and stare at the ceiling?"

It's just nice to know that, like, someone is willing to be close to me when I'm going through such a raw moment in my life.

And that can be a very vulnerable thing to do. Sometimes we can question if we are deserving of those things, but it's not about deserving. If it was ever about deserving, we wouldn't be in a layoff position to begin with, like, those people are there for you, let them be there for you.

Pathak: I love that. That is such a beautiful way of putting it, letting the people show you how much they care about you. I love that. I'd like to then kind of shift us over to—you mentioned that work can really become someone's identity, but work can also become someone's community. A lot of your social relationships, people that you see every day, may be connected to your workplace.

So how do you help people feel connected when they're losing not only their identity in terms of their job, but also potentially their community?

Johnson: Oh, for sure. I think that's why I started with this idea of grief, because when you lose the job, you're not just losing your income, you're losing people that you interacted with, like, on a daily basis. You're losing kind of the overall rhythm of your life. So it does end up being, like, quite complex.

So part of this is kind of figuring out how do I replicate some form of this, like, while I'm unemployed? The worst thing that you can do is just kind of have a completely open and unstructured, like, whatever. You do want—I call it roaming time—of just like, here's a block of time where it's just like whatever I'm feeling in my system, I can just go with that.

But outside of that, you wanna bring back some of that structure for yourself. If there are people at work that you were like, "Okay, these were work friends, but, like, one or two of these people could be more than work friends," try to get their information. Try to figure out a way to connect.

Maybe they were laid off as well, and so now we are layoff buddies, and we can support each other in, like, navigating this period of time. But I would really work to bring back in some more of that structure, that routine, finding ways to connect. Connection is one of those things of, like, you don't always have to have direct face-to-face contact with a close friend for it to count as connection.

We often minimize the kind of small contacts that we have. So sometimes just if I go and get a coffee from a place every day, like having that little interaction of, "Hello, how was your day?" Like, "Thank you." That's a connection. I recently started doing a martial art, and so, like, now I'm going and I'm connecting with people over this new sport that I'm engaging in.

You can go to the park and people watch. Anything that allows you to feel like I am connected to things that are greater than just myself is what you're looking for in many of these moments.

Pathak: So help us again balance. We have this culture of, "Okay, something happened. Let's bounce back. Let's be resilient. Let's prove that we're super strong." So help us navigate between rebuilding but not having this pressure to bounce right back.

Johnson: Yeah, I think of bouncing back as, like, a marketing slogan. I often think about The Princess Bride with that quote where he goes, "Life is pain. Anyone who says differently is selling something." Resilience was never about speed and, like, rushing through something. We're all going to have painful things happen to us in life.

Some of us will get more painful things than others. Unfortunately, that's how it shakes out. And resilience is about how we move through our day-to-day living, knowing that things are gonna happen, some things within our control and some things outside of it. When we look at bereavement research, what it actually shows is that healthy coping really, like, oscillates.

Like, you're gonna have some days where you're facing the loss head-on, and there's gonna be other days where you need a break from it and you need to do restorative things, and both of those count as progress. I talk about grief so often in these ways because oftentimes people only think of grief in terms of, like, losing a family member or a pet or something like that, and it comes up in so many other aspects of living.

So it's important to understand that these things happen, you can grieve them, and you can move through them and still build a wonderful life that is worth living.

Pathak: I also wanna bring up the idea of trust and security, because I think when you do go through life and you have had very different difficult circumstances, something like a layoff that can just feel like it came out of nowhere, and like you said, you're just one line item potentially on a spreadsheet when you've poured in so much of who you are into your, your role. How do you counsel people to remain open, trusting, allowing themselves to feel a sense of security when they've experienced something like this?

Johnson: Absolutely. I think what's really important is to never have your whole life be built around one pillar. Like, a word that you just used that's very important is, is role. A lot of times we look at our job as like our identity, and we know from research that people do best when they recognize and engage with the multitude of identities that they hold.

So, like, I am not just a psychologist, I'm a lot of different things. Like, I'm an auntie. I am a white belt in BJJ right now, I'm a wife. I'm a gardener. I'm a gamer. Like, there's a lot of things that kind of inform who I am. Even if I take the role that I play as a psychologist and break that down, that's even more of who I am.

I started this off by saying, like, "I'm an empathetic person who's strong and altruistic. I enjoy helping people."

So part of it is really, really, really reflecting on who am I? Because it was never one thing. And a quote that I love is, "A whole is not a sum of its parts." And I think if we really remember that, that everything that makes you who you are, while so many of those elements can be shared with other people, it only came together in a very particular way to make you.

There's no other you. And I really try to get people to hold on to that and recognize that, yes, you've lost a role, but there are ways that you can go and reclaim that back. One of my best friends lost her job. She was laid off, and she immediately started volunteering at the Red Cross because that's the kind of person she is; she needed to find a way to give back.

And before she was giving back in the role of being a professor, and then she found another way to give back as a volunteer for the Red Cross while she was figuring out her next steps in her career. And that fundamentally helped her, like, with her mental health, and also allowed her to help other people.

So you can even go through your own painful time and still be useful and helpful to others if you're open-minded about, "Okay, I'm a multifaceted person. How can I engage with the world in a way that's still feeding my cup while I'm going through a rough time?"

Pathak: So these are all really, I think, healthful ways of coping. When do you see that there are signs that someone is really not handling the situation well? They may need more help, not just from themselves, maybe their community, but from a mental health professional.

Johnson: Sure. So you really wanna look at the duration of things. So, like, sadness, anger, rough nights, things like that are expected. But if you're weeks in and your sleep and your appetite is still wrecked, like, you are struggling to get out of bed most days, you, you're withdrawn from everyone, you do see yourself using substances a lot and it's creeping up, you're feeling a lot of, like, kind of hopelessness or helplessness, and definitely if you're having thoughts about, like, not being here, those are all signs that it's probably time to speak to a professional.

Pathak: And I think I also wanna kind of circle back to something you said earlier, which is that we have to think about our day-to-day routines as how they are filling us up, and that our role is not all of us. And given the world that we live in where layoffs are very common, this may be something that may happen to you in the future.

What are some of the things that you want folks to be thinking about in their day-to-day lives, even if they have not been laid off?

Johnson: Yeah, I think it's important to prepare in whatever ways are feasible for you to do so. The financial hit is often the things that people are most concerned about, and as you should, that's a major thing. So if you have the capacity to save any money, try to save that, like, six months, like, emergency fund.

That is something that can be very helpful and give you breathing room if a layoff were to happen. If you can look at your budget, if there are any ways to cut certain things, that also helps financially. Sometimes I help patients go through and say, like, "Oh, how many subscriptions do you have?"

And people often have more subscriptions than they think that they have, and they're like, "Oh my God, I was paying for this music subscription. I don't need that anymore. Like, let me save the $15 a month and, like, move that someplace else." So if there's certain things that you can do to provide a, a bit of a financial cushion for yourself, like, do those things.

That will make a big difference in terms of your anxiety and stress. The things that I said about connection and community, if you find that you're not as connected as you would want to be, start doing those things now. Don't wait until you're at a bad time to start connecting. Connect now, and you may find that you get more resources because you are connecting with people.

I know a lot of people that have gone ahead and they've kind of prepped their resume and done certain little things, so if it happens, they kinda have things sitting there in a semi-done state for them to pick it up.

Pathak: I wanna thank you so much for really practical advice and really honoring, validating people's feelings before, if they're in the midst of, and what they may be feeling after.

So if you could speak to our audience directly, and if someone's listening who maybe has just heard the news that they've been laid off or are sort of preparing for it, what is your message about protecting their emotional health, their overall wellbeing, and what would you like them to remember?

Johnson: That they lost a job. You didn't lose your worth, your skills, your relationships, or your story. That's not something that a company can take from you. And when you're approaching this, approach it like you would if your best friend or someone who you love a lot was going through this loss, because we're always kinder to people that we care about than we are to ourselves.

Our kind of secret thoughts will be very critical and harsh for ourselves, but they won't be that way for someone else. And another thing that I say, 'cause I'm a Southerner, is what's good for the goose is good for the gander, right? If it's not your friend's fault, it's not your fault either.

So, like, tell yourself all of those same things. And you can cope with this even if it's difficult. One of the things that I've learned through all of my work as a psychologist, part of that was just learning history, because all of us come from people who have gone through hard things. And so you can kind of tap into the energy of your ancestors and go, "Hey, they did this hard thing back when they had to do it, and I'm gonna do this hard thing now."

And so find that connection wherever you can, whether it be with people who you can tangibly talk to now or people who are part of your ancestry, people who you've been inspired from from the past. Call all of that forward and use that to help you propel yourself forward.

Pathak: Really, really fantastic conversation. I want to thank you so much for your time.

Johnson: Yes. Thank you so much.

Pathak: I'd like to share my three key takeaways from today's episode. First, losing a job can bring up feelings of shock, anger, anxiety, and even a little bit of relief. All of these feelings are valid. While a layoff might be a strategic business decision for a company, for a person, it can be life-changing.

It makes sense that it feels personal because it is personal to you. This decision impacts your identity, routine, financial stability, and healthcare.

Second, the first days after a layoff are a time to process and focus on the basics before making any major decisions.

It's a time to focus on your new routine and making sure that you're eating, sleeping, moving your body, and not doomscrolling.

Finally, most importantly, remember this: losing a job does not mean you've lost your value, your skills, your relationships, or the full story of who you are. Reach out to trusted people, let them support you, and create small daily routines that help you feel connected and grounded.

If sadness, isolation, sleep problems, substance use, or hopelessness persist or worsen, reaching out to a mental health professional is a very important next step. To find out more information about Dr Johnson, make sure to check out our show notes. Thank you so much for listening. Please take a moment to follow, rate, and review this podcast on your favorite listening platform.

If you'd like to send me an email about topics you're interested in or questions for future guests, please send me a note at [email protected]. This is Dr Neha Pathak for the WebMD Health Discovered Podcast.