I used to work with this person. We’ll call them, for the sake of it, Jamie.
Jamie was a nice enough guy, all things considered, but he had one flaw – Jamie loved to boast about how busy he was. He had to be the busiest, most-put-upon person in the office where we worked. He complained from morning to night (and Jamie worked late, so he said) about how much stress and strain he was under. And you couldn’t stop him talking. You couldn’t avoid him. If you went for a cigarette Jamie would appear, complaining as he ran to lunch (al-desko, obviously) about how he never had time for smoke breaks. If you were making a cuppa Jamie would be there, sighing heavily about how parched he was without the time to boil the kettle. As far as I was aware, Jamie and I had the same job. And I could never understand why he was so pressed for time. I was so bored with this office job that I fell into a compulsive crossword habit and deliberately chose the seat in the corner of the room so I could spend hours on Web WhatsApp until it was time to go home.
But Jamie’s boasting got under my skin. Soon I started to feel stressed out about my demonstrably un-stressful job too. I started to feel like I should be panicky and over-worked. If I wasn’t, did that mean I was doing a bad job? And if our boss looked at the pair of us and had to sack one, surely he’d pick me to boot out the door over Jamie, who cared so much about doing his apparent mountains of work. I still kept up my crossword and WhatsApping habits, but I did them now under a sheen of constant anxiety. There was one silver lining, at least. I just found out I wasn’t alone in my predicament, and neither (sadly) was Jamie.
A new study, recently published in the journal Personnel Psychology, delved deep into the practice of so-called “stress bragging” and discovered the extent of its negative workplace consequences, both for the recipients of the bragging, and for the stress braggarts themselves. The study asked 360 participants to rate an imaginary co-worker who indulged in stress bragging. They found that stress braggers should do well to be wary; engaging in the practice will cause colleagues to see you as not, in fact, booked and busy, but actually much less likable and less competent. They’re also less likely to help you out in times of need. Unsurprisingly, colleagues of stress braggers will end up reporting higher levels of workplace stress themselves. Thanks Jamie.
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Stress bragging can be seen to be the unfortunate evil twin of actually unionising. And few of us are unionising any more
“It’s not the being stressed part that’s a problem,” the study’s lead author, Jessica Rodell, told the Guardian. “We found that if I perceive you as stressed, I actually see you as more competent. If you genuinely feel stressed, it’s okay to find the right confidant to share with and talk about it. But be mindful that it is not a badge of honour to be bragged about.” Otherwise, she warns, “they wind up feeling more stressed, which leads to higher burnout or withdrawal from their work. Think of it as this spiralling contagious effect from one person to the next.”
But if stress bragging is so detrimental, then why do we feel drawn to it in the first place? Is it an impulse, a negative tic, like picking a scab? When I put the question to the seat of my workplace boredom (the groupchat), friends of mine got surprisingly introspective over their own professional behaviour.
“I don’t even realise I’m doing it, I suppose,” said one, who works long hours in fintech. “But I’m definitely guilty. I think it just feels like venting. If I say out loud how busy I am it feels like I’m a little step further to managing everything, even if I’ve done nothing.” Nothing? I prod. “Well, nothing except complain to other people, I suppose,” my friend adds. Others pointed out that although there are negatives to workplace stress bragging – both to the bragger and braggee – there may be some hidden positives too.
“It’s kind of like an expression of solidarity in a way,” suggested a pal who works in video production. “It’s like, we’re all overworked, we’re all underpaid, here’s a way for us to complain together, around the water-cooler or whatever and share the burden.”
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TV psychologist Honey Langcaster-James echoes this sentiment. “Generally speaking, when someone engages in stress bragging, it can be motivated by feeling stressed themselves and trying to employ this as a personal coping strategy, by offloading and talking about their feelings of stress,” she says. “They may, in a not very adept way, be trying to seek social support from colleagues.”
Taken from this angle, stress bragging could be seen to be the unfortunate evil twin of actually unionising. And few of us are unionising any more.
Statistics show union membership has plummeted from a high of more than 60 per cent in the early 1980s to about 25 per cent in Ireland today. In Britain, union membership density fell from 12.7 per cent in 2021 to 12.0 per cent in 2022 among private sector employees, and from 50 per cent to 48.6 per cent among public sector employees.
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As cost-of-living crises spiral around us and wages stagnate, we’re becoming more and more individualistic in the workplace. Last year, research from Oxfam illustrated that workers in Ireland effectively took an almost 4 per cent pay cut in 2022 with wage growth lagging behind inflation. Is it any wonder we’re so stressed out? Is it any wonder we’re turning on each other?
“Focusing on the negatives of your job can undermine your coping abilities and affect your behaviour,” says Langcaster-James. “It can cement the perception that you are in a stressful set of circumstances.”
My video-producer friend may have felt like complaining was an act of collective solidarity but, as Jessica Rodell and her researchers found, it’s actually driving us further and further apart. When I think back, through gritted teeth, to my time working with chronically overworked boaster Jamie, I never felt sorry for him, I never wanted to help him out. Admittedly my automatic response was to think of myself and what his behaviour meant for my performance, my job. At times I brooded over how bad he must have been at his own – if I could handle it with time left over, why not him too?
Bragging as a way for someone to “convey that they are indispensable to the organisation” can actually backfire, Langcaster-James says. “It may be reflective of a lack of security. They may feel that they need to highlight and amplify their work so they can further solidify their position. But it’s been suggested by some studies that stress bragging causes a kind of ripple effect – that when people brag about stress it actually just transfers it to their colleagues and over time your presence can just become unwelcome. It’s a maladaptive and unhelpful strategy in that way.”
So, is this the situation we’re stuck with forever? I don’t like to think so. But I have hope, too. Jamie and I – and the rest of my group chat – are all millennials. We love to complain about being busy. We’re the generation who work long hours and panic about our non-existent prospects of progression. We’re the generation who were taught to believe if we just worked hard, and more importantly, showed the world we were working hard, that we could get whatever we wanted.
Gen Z, the generation behind us, have come of age in a world which has already demonstrated to them that working hard for little to no progression is a sunk-cost fallacy and a trap. And so, rather than bragging about their stress or complaining about their prospects, they adapt. They don’t work in the same way – with better work-life balances, Gen Z, we’re learning, have a better attitude to the cult of busy-ness. They know that busy-ness doesn’t equal productivity. They care about unions, and they leave the office on time, every single day. They prioritise autonomy over suffering for profit (someone else’s profits, of course).
“Of course we know that many people can suffer from stress in the workplace and if that is the case people should talk about it, but the appropriate way to do that is to talk to your manager about your workload and your autonomy,” says Langcaster-James. “Studies have long shown that as humans we can tolerate and even thrive in stressful situations, so long as we have autonomy to work in a way that suits us and is flexible around our personal lives.”
In other words, maybe we could learn a thing or two from the Zoomers.