EMDR Therapy: Your Lifeline for Workplace Stress
Many people find purpose, passion, and financial security in their work. However, almost any profession can be stressful. Even if you love your job, it might affect your emotions, productivity, health, and relationships. From working in a highly demanding or competitive environment to long working hours, night shifts, and stressful work conditions, work-related stress can take its toll on every other aspect of your life and well-being.
If you seek to reduce stress and respond to it more effectively, EMDR therapy could be a solution.
EMDR therapy for first responders
Are you feeling down, lacking the energy and motivation to go to work and get things done? Do you think your job performance, productivity, and satisfaction are all declining? Do you struggle to focus on work tasks, relax when you get home, or feel guilty for not spending enough time with your family?
If you work as a firefighter, police officer, rescuer, or paramedic, no one knows better than you how stressful or traumatic your work can be. While your friends spend a typical day at the office, your shift is often a matter of life and death. You rush to the scene of emergencies and experience a constant adrenaline rush.
Our bodies cannot recuperate when stress hormone levels are constantly high. So, excessive tension and images of harrowing accident scenes may cause emotional turmoil days, weeks, or months later. You may bury your feelings to focus on assisting others. Still, they will come back as edginess, anger, or grief, causing you to snap at others, use alcohol or drugs to forget, disregard your basic needs, or even think of suicide. Alternatively, you may struggle with muscular tension, exhaustion, aches, or high blood pressure.
Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy can help you process traumatic events, allowing your brain to resume processing the information in its natural way so you no longer relive disturbing memories when they reappear in your mind.
EMDR therapy for frontline professions
Do you feel constantly exhausted to the point where no amount of sleep or rest helps? Do you always feel worried, easily overwhelmed, or angry for no apparent reason? Has your capacity for empathy and compassion been reduced?
In addition to routinely working night shifts and long hours, doctors and nurses often have to deal with traumatic situations and make life-saving decisions for their patients. The emotional toll of demanding work conditions and the pressure to save lives can be tremendous. Over time, this pressure can build up and cause anxiety, depression, disordered eating, or substance abuse.
Furthermore, chronic workplace stress can result in burnout, draining your energy and causing you to feel exhausted, empty, and numb. You may feel helpless, lonely, and isolated as if no one understands or appreciates you. You may struggle to concentrate, make mistakes, or feel uncaring about your patients. Witnessing others' suffering might stress you out. Pressures beyond your ability to manage might increase mental and emotional burdens, reducing empathy.
EMDR therapy can equip you with coping skills to reduce anxiety and better handle challenging situations, allowing you to provide emotional support to your patients and protect your mental health.
EMDR therapy for entrepreneurs, farmers, lawyers, and high-achieving professionals
The more ambitious and passionate you are about your work, the more likely you will experience stress and burnout. You may struggle to separate yourself from your business or interpret professional losses as personal failures, feeling anxious, hopeless, and fatigued.
You may struggle to find meaning in your profession or life, lose touch with coworkers and friends, neglect self-care, miss deadlines and meetings, and lose interest in dealing with clients. Or, you may feel like an impostor, fearing that everyone will see your incompetence and feel inadequate and worthless. You may be haunted by intrusive thoughts, replaying your most recent professional setback in your mind and berating yourself with self-criticism.
After completing your EMDR sessions, you can break free from negative thoughts, learn how to relax outside work hours, and build resilience to better cope with the everyday demands of work and life.
What Can I Expect from EMDR Therapy?
Upon completing your EMDR treatment, you will:
feel more empowered to recover after challenges at work quickly
be able to recall traumatic scenes from work without feeling emotionally triggered by your memories
have a better control of your anxiety
break free from intrusive thoughts
sleep better
experience less or less severe mood swings
take better care of your needs
establish healthier boundaries
Stress will likely always be a part of your job; that will not change. But you will. So, stress will no longer have the same emotional impact on you.
How Williamson & Associates Counselling in Alberta and Trauma Therapy in Alberta Can Improve Your Life!
EMDR Therapy in Olds, Alberta can help you get to a place in your life where you feel peace, ease, freedom and lighter again.
Our therapists are trained in several evidence-based therapy practices such as EMDR, DBT, and more! Reach out today to get relief, and begin your journey with therapy.
See other posts about EMDR:
What Is Trauma? Trauma Therapy