Work-related stress

It usually starts with Sunday evening. People describe a heaviness that arrives around six o'clock the night before the week starts, long before anything has actually gone wrong.

Then the week itself. A phone that does not stop — the office group at eleven at night, a message on Friday that will not wait until Sunday. A drive down Shahrah-e-Faisal in the morning spent rehearsing a conversation. Month-end, closing, targets, a manager who is fine one day and impossible the next.

What people notice first is often physical rather than emotional: shoulders that will not come down, a jaw held tight, a stomach that turns over before a meeting, headaches that arrive at four every afternoon.

Then the part that worries people most. They describe becoming worse at the thing they used to be good at. Reading an email four times. Missing something obvious. Snapping at a colleague, or at home, where it lands on people who had nothing to do with it. A weekend spent recovering rather than living, and by Sunday evening it is time to start again.

Many describe guilt on top of all of it: other people manage, the job is a good one, plenty would want it — so what is wrong with me?

Recognising yourself in a paragraph on a website is not the same as knowing what is going on. This page describes; it does not assess you, and there is nothing here for you to score yourself against.

A hard quarter is a hard quarter. Pressure that ends when the deadline ends is not what brings people to a clinic.

What a clinician pays attention to is duration and spread. Stress running for months rather than weeks, and stress that no longer stays at work — sleep going, appetite changing, patience with family gone, weekends that no longer reset anything. Absence that is creeping up, or the opposite: being there every day and getting less done than you used to.

It is also worth speaking to someone when the ways of coping have started to cost something of their own — drinking, smoking more, spending, or an evening that only works with something in it.

Only a qualified clinician can tell you what is going on — a website cannot. What a page like this can tell you is that this is an ordinary thing to bring, and that you do not have to be at breaking point to bring it.

PHC is an assessment-first practice. Work stress and low mood look very similar from outside and are not the same thing, so nothing is concluded from one conversation.

1. An initial sessionWe ask what has been going on, for how long, and what it is costing you — at work and outside it. Nothing is administered before this conversation.
2. Emotional assessment and symptom screeningA structured screening of emotional functioning and what you are presenting with, using internationally validated instruments. Its purpose is to decide which further tests, if any, are clinically warranted — you will not be given tests you do not need — and to separate stress from what can sit underneath it.
3. A psychologist matched to what the assessment foundPsychologists at PHC are not assigned on availability. Assignment is based on speciality, your presenting needs and clinical fit.
4. Therapy, reviewed as it goesPHC runs a structured stress and anger management service for individuals and for employees, and CBT is the modality most often indicated alongside it. Some people also use the Hypno-yoga at PHC DHA, in a group, four days a week. Sessions are 50 minutes, in clinic at our DHA clinic or in PECHS, or online.

Confidentiality, session length, fees and choosing your psychologist are answered in full in questions people ask before booking.

• Anxiety
• Sleep disturbance
• Anger difficulties
• Emotional assessment
• Stress and anger management