To be baffled by how everyone on MN claims to have a really stressful job

[T1nah]

Or their DH does. Or they both do.
What exactly is so stressful about your jobs? Does everyone work in Intensive Care or are you being a bit dramatic about the pressures of your job?

I would be stressed out if I had a crap job paying crap money AND I had one or more kids depending on me. I watch Can't Pay We'll Take it Away a lot. Those people, the ones with kids, are stressed out about money.

I guess some people are stressed b/c they have amazing house with huge mortgage, so have to hold onto stressful job. I've been too debt adverse to get in that situation.

My job isn't stressful. I'm a self employed mosaic artist and tutor and was stressed out because my income was unpredictable, so have recently started a small cleaning job to provide a baseline income every month and now have no stress. I'm happy with both jobs.

I’m a solicitor lots of deadlines - often you’re the last to know they exist and corporate clients who work long hours and so need me to be available too.

I'm a nurse, and my decisions or can cause people to live or die.

Yes, I would say that is stressful.

That should say...my decisions or actions can cause people to live or die.

I'm a university academic. It can be all consuming and occasionally quite stressful......but the flexibility and autonomy do make up for that stress.

I'm a teacher and I find it stressful.

NoIDontWatchLoveIsland Then I'm not talking about you so have your back.

I find having to bring work home every evening on top of my day job stressful just to meet deadlines. Then I find my bosses adding large scale tasks, out of my professional experience that are time sensitive and can't be done in that evening time - that was promised to be a team effort but ended up being just me makes me more stressed. Oh and then simultaneously being in a redundancy consultation period because your job doesn't exist in a few weeks can kind of make me a bit dramatic. I don't apologise for that.

Job stress is all relative. Clearly if you're a nurse, for example, you need balls of steel but we only have our own experience as a reference.

@Prequelle haha, more like won't! And the amount of times we have had staff from the quieter wards been sent down to us in the middle of the night because the department is heaving, and they do not have a clue what to do!

@NorthEndGal

I was a naval officer for 11 years. Really not stressful at all. I am extremely busy in my current role but not stressed.

Different people get stressed by different things. I hated being on maternity leave, I found the lack of adult conversation and the repetitive boredom 'stressful'. Conversely today I was in work from 5am to 5.30pm, there was lots going on, my phone was buzzing the whole time and I had multiple people needing me. My work isn't usually this extreme, but reduce the hours but retain the 'being pulled in 101 directions' and you're there. But I don't find it stressful, I have a secure, interesting job with lots of challenges, I get paid a good salary and I have a lot of autonomy. I have great workmates and a motivated team. I know others have tried the job and have left and I think it does need a certain personality to cope with the responsibility but in comparison to most jobs with less money and more insecurity it's a walk in the park.

Part of the problem is the lack of resources and unreasonable expectations by management. Routinely your patients are trying to kill themselves, other patients or you. Or seriously self harm: swallowing batteries, stockpiling medication, ligaturing etc. Plus false reports of illness, court cases in another part of the country and staff being moved to other wards. Lack of medication -pharmacy are meant to order it but claim they are too busy 🙄. I thought that was their primary function but what do l know. 13.5-14 hours with no break isn’t that unusual. Then you often have to come back the next day and do it all over again. It might not be your turn and your day off / annual leave day but they still might ring you to plead you come in / guilt trip you. I have had a pay rise and then in quick succession a pay cut while results in lower new pay. That’s why my job and my partners jobs are deemed to be stressful by me!

I was a SENCO - that was very stressful. Competing expectations, lack of time and funding, terrible issues that were caught up in a bureaucratic nightmare, line managing a lot of staff, teaching lessons... but I left and now my job is not stressful at all.

I am finding not being stressed an adjustment. I am happy about it but its interesting to note that I am so hyper aware that I don't feel stressed.

Most people who get paid a decent amount will have a certain amount of stress in their job, otherwise why are they getting paid?

Because they have desirable and relatively unusual skills that allow them to both command good wages and control their working environment so they don't get too stressed. Doesn't mean they aren't busy.

I guess it's more of the being away most of the year, while stuff is going on here , that is stressful.
I'm glad it wasn't stressful for you.

Also it might be different for different countries

Hmm. My current role isn't stressful or life/ death. It is woefully underpaid & basically junior so akin to my first job out of uni 20 years ago. After 14 months of interviews/searching and previously self employed for 15 years I was forced to take it to feed my family. It's for these reasons my confidence is zero and life is no blast.

I'm a teacher, which comes with its own set of stresses, but I think the main issue in general is that nobody leaves work at work anymore. It's the same for my (non-teacher) DH and all my friends- there is always email to check or a report to write or hours to log etc. The 24 hour nature of our world means that work is never finished and that definitely causes me anxiety. I don't know what it was like before, it may have been that way before technology too!

My job could be easy. It started off in admin *with a fussbudget boss that would follow me to toilet in case I took too long when we wanted something, then I was made to hold the fort through various incompetent and frankly unreliable staff and their angry incompetencies/absences. Then it changed to a highly specialised Technical post, supervision, controlling students, intervening in indicents. With a new micromanager not told about how thing were. And a senior leader who, without doubt, shit. This has left the place chronically underfunded, undersubscribed and I'm now in the position to having to take a part time, vastly underskilled position (or lose my redundancy pay) and hope that they will be able to wangle the high paying specialist work to fill up the gaps.

At the same time, I'm dealing with children. Deprived children, poor attainment, poor backgrounds, a lack of parental support and boundaries. It gets stressful when you're talking a distraught child down so that somebody can get the fuck off big weapon they're waving around.

It's stressful when I don't know if I'm going to be able to provide the results they need from the equipment they have, as it's historically been neglected. Am I going to be able to magically fix the equipment when I've been away and something has gone wrong? Usually. But one day I won't, Do I actually know enough to be able to fix this new problem/change to requirements at the last minute? Possibly. Can I solve a, b c, and cover d, e, f, g, h and x27? I'll try.

They seem to want to try and keep me. I'm going for it because I'll get less grief of Universal Credit for having a part time job that if I were to deliberately choose redundancy. Some of the new duties might help make me more employable somewhere else.

It's stress in the environment, the other people, the requirement, the lack of funding and it's stressful that if you can't pull another rabbit out of the hat at the last moment, you're potentially affecting the chances of kids who already have a shit start by being unable to get a place at a fancy new school or one with an extremely wealthy parent contingent.

I've been fantasising about a nice, plain office job where I go there at 9.30 and trot off after a full hour's break with my mind completely clear for some time. And the feeling of dread and, at times, outright panic at the thought of going in there is too much.

But it's only education. Apparently, I get tons of weeks in holiday (I get a 20% reduction in salary, actually) and make a ton. (I really don't). And it apparently finishes at 3.30pm. Well, my part time job will finish at 4.30pm, which makes a nice change, but I imagine I'll still be asked to give up holidays and also do my old job for longer durations and holidays, too.

No, it's definitely stressful. I don't switch off. There's too much to do to switch off.

I had time off with stress earlier this year. I’ve worked for 30 years and never even come close to it before. I was shocked to find that purely as a result of being under resourced for the workload, and being shouted at relentlessly by the public, I got so stressed that I was having palpitations, insomnia, non stop crying etc. I have never been like that before, ever. It’s very easy to think it will never happen to you.

Most people if they care about their jobs, will have an element of stress attached.

Has the op mysteriously vanished back to their stress free life?

My job isn't stressful. When I find myself thinking about it after work it's due to a problem I need to solve.

DH's job is stressful. He does contract roles. The client often asks him to do work beyond his original remit with little input from them.

Mine is a bit of both. Can be great, can be stressful giving bad news, getting called up to the hospital in the middle of the night etc.