Losing your job: the first thirty days and what helps

On Tuesday at ten they call you into the meeting room. There is a glass of water on the table that nobody drinks and a folder that has clearly been ready for a few days. The conversation lasts twelve minutes. Then you go back to your desk, because your jacket is there, and a colleague who already knows avoids your eyes. On the way home you catch yourself driving the same route as every day, at the same time — except that the time is wrong.

At home a question is waiting that you can’t skip: what now? Not in a year’s time, but tomorrow morning, when you don’t have to be anywhere.

This post is about losing your job and the first month after it. Not about how to write a CV — there is plenty of advice on that elsewhere — but about what happens to you, to your day and to the people around you during this time. And about what genuinely helps in these weeks.

Your job gave you more than a salary

In the 1930s, as a young researcher, the social psychologist Marie Jahoda and her colleagues studied Marienthal, an Austrian village where almost the entire community was left without work after the factory closed. They described something nobody had expected: people did not rebel, nor did they make use of their free time. Their days spread out and lost their shape. The men walked through the village more slowly and stopped more often, as if nobody were waiting for them anywhere.

Decades later Jahoda drew from this an idea that researchers still use today. Employment has an obvious function — income — and a range of latent ones that we only notice once they are gone: a structure to time, contact with people outside the family, a sense of contributing to something shared, social status and identity, and regular activity. When you lose your job, you don’t lose one thing. You lose six at once.

This is not just theory. In 2009 the psychologists Karsten Paul and Klaus Moser combined several hundred studies in a large meta-analysis. Among unemployed people, an average of 34 per cent had psychological problems, compared with 16 per cent among the employed. What matters is what else they found: the difference is not only because people with more difficulties are more likely to lose their jobs. Losing work in itself shakes mental health. And when people find work again, their wellbeing generally improves.

I mention this because many people say in the first weeks after a redundancy: “I don’t know why I’m so low, the severance pay will cover things for a while.” The answer lies in those five things that aren’t on the payslip.

The workplace was a system — and you had a role in it

As a family therapist in training, I look at people through the relationships they live in. Seen this way, a workplace is surprisingly like a family. It has its own rules that are written down nowhere. It has roles: the one who calms a meeting down, the one who says what others don’t dare to, the one who knows where everything is kept. It has alliances and triangles — the manager who talks about one colleague with a third instead of with them. If you are interested in how patterns from childhood repeat themselves in these relationships, I wrote about it in Attachment at work.

When someone drops out of a system, the system rearranges itself. Colleagues share out your tasks, someone takes over your role. Often they start avoiding you — not because they don’t care, but because they don’t know what to say, and because your fate reminds them that they could be next. That avoidance hurts more than you would expect. Losing a job is also losing a group that confirmed every day that you exist.

And here is the other side of the systemic view, which matters in the first days: a redundancy is almost always a decision of the system — a reorganisation, cost-cutting, a change of strategy, sometimes poor management. Even when your own mistake or a difficult relationship with your manager played a part, in the end it was decided by a web of circumstances that no single person controls. That doesn’t mean you had nothing to do with it. It does mean that the sentence “because I’m useless” is almost never the whole story.

Why thirty days

Thirty days is not a magic boundary, and nothing happens on day thirty-one. But the first month has its own shape. Shock, paperwork, conversations with the people closest to you and the first attempts to give your days an edge again all follow one another. What gets established in these weeks often sticks: the habits you build, or a day that falls apart and is then hard to pull together again.

So I have divided this month into four parts. You don’t have to follow them exactly. Treat them as a map, not a timetable.

Days one to three: land

In the first days the body is in a state very similar to the one after any shock. Sleep is worse, appetite odd, thoughts go round in circles: what I should have said, what I missed, what they will think. Some people feel anger, others numbness, others a strange relief that is then replaced by fear. All of this is a normal response to loss and says nothing about how you will cope in the coming months. You’ll find a short explanation of what happens in the body under strain in the knowledge base under stress.

In these days you have just three tasks. First: look after the basics — eat, go outside into daylight, try to sleep at your usual time. Second: tell one person you trust. Not everyone, one. Third: don’t make big decisions. Don’t sell the car, don’t sign the first offer that comes along, don’t write a long email to your former manager at two in the morning. A brain under stress sees more narrowly and more quickly than is good for decisions you will carry for longer than a week.

The first week: sort out what has deadlines, and tell people

The first week is for the practical part. I won’t give legal advice here, because as a therapist I’m neither allowed nor qualified to. I’ll only say this in general terms: in Slovenia, check with the Employment Service of Slovenia (Zavod RS za zaposlovanje) what rights you have and what is expected of you — some things are tied to deadlines, so don’t put them off. If you believe the dismissal was unlawful, or that something wasn’t paid to you, get advice from your trade union if you are a member, or from a lawyer; deadlines apply here too. The Labour Inspectorate is the place to go if you suspect an employer is breaking the rules.

Then comes what is often harder than the paperwork: telling people. Your partner, your parents, your children, your friends. This is where shame speaks up — the emotion that doesn’t say “something happened to me” but “there is something wrong with me”. Shame pushes us to hide. People leave the house every morning for weeks as if going to work, or avoid family lunches so that nobody asks. I wrote about how shame differs from guilt, and why the difference matters, in Guilt and shame are not the same.

Hiding costs you more than it saves. Every day you carry the story alone, the shame deepens, because nobody can soften it. When you do tell, something unexpected usually happens: people don’t pull away, they tell you their own story. It turns out that plenty of people you know have been made redundant too.

A conversation with a partner might go like this (composite, not a real person):

“They let me go today. I don’t know yet what will happen, but I know I don’t want to hide anything from you.”
“What? Why didn’t you call me straight away?”
“Because I was ashamed. I still am. I don’t need you to tell me right now what to do. I need you to be here tonight.”
“All right. I’m here. We’ll talk about money tomorrow, together.”

There are three things in this short exchange that help: the fact without sugar-coating, a name for the feeling, and a clear request for what the person needs right now. The partner’s first reaction — “why didn’t you call me” — isn’t an attack but their own fear. I write about how job loss is experienced by the person beside you in When your partner loses their job: how the balance in a relationship shifts.

The second week: build a day with an edge

Once the first shock has passed, a more dangerous period begins than it seems. The days become long and shapeless. You get up later, breakfast stretches into lunch, you open the laptop to look at job ads and two hours later find yourself reading the news. In the evening you feel you’ve done nothing, so you sleep badly, so the next day you get up even later. This is Marienthal in miniature — the loss of time structure that Jahoda described.

The answer isn’t to load yourself with a full timetable. The answer is to give the day a few fixed points. The same time to get up every weekday. One fixed errand in the morning — a walk, the shopping, a visit to the library. One planned contact with another person. Job searching within a set time, say two or three hours, after which you close the laptop. You’ll find a short explanation of why recurring points in the day calm the nervous system under routine in the knowledge base.

Why a time limit on searching? Because searching without end quickly becomes another face of anxiety. People refresh job sites the way they once refreshed their work email — not because they expect something new, but because a pause makes them feel guilty. Research on unemployment shows that looking for work is psychologically demanding in itself: every rejection or unanswered application is a small blow. So it needs a limit, just as the job had one.

Weeks three and four: look ahead, not just around you

In the second half of the month there is usually room for a question that couldn’t be asked in the first days: what am I actually looking for? Not just where there’s a vacancy, but what I need from work. Some people realise that for years before the redundancy they had felt trapped, and that this break, painful as it is, is also an opportunity. Others know they want to go back to the same profession, and that is just as legitimate.

These weeks are also a time for people who can connect you. Not because you’re asking them for a favour, but because a lot of work is found through people who know us — often through more distant acquaintances rather than our closest friends. Former colleagues, people in your field, classmates from university. A message saying “I’m looking for new work in such-and-such an area, if you hear of anything please let me know” isn’t asking for charity. It’s information that others are often glad to pass on.

And here the question of identity returns. If for years you were “the one from accounts” or “the project manager”, without that title you can feel as if you’ve disappeared. I wrote about how tightly self-image becomes bound up with what we do in Worth only as much as you get done. One of the tasks of these weeks is to find a sentence that says who you are without having to say where you work.

Partner, children and money

Losing a job never stays with one person. In the 1990s Amiram Vinokur, Richard Price and Robert Caplan followed unemployed people and their partners. They showed the route by which distress spreads: financial strain increases low mood in both partners, and low mood makes it more likely that the partners start to criticise each other and withdraw support. It isn’t the job loss itself but the fear about money that eats into the relationship most.

So it helps to talk about money early, calmly and with a sheet of paper on the table. How much you have, how much you need each month, what can wait. Fear you write down in numbers is almost always smaller than fear you carry around in your head. If the two of you deal with uncertainty differently — one wants a plan straight away, the other needs a few days of quiet — say so out loud before it turns into a row.

Children pick up on tension even if you tell them nothing. It is better for them to get a simple truth suited to their age — “Mum is looking for a new job at the moment, so she’ll be at home more for a while; we’re taken care of” — than to work out for themselves why their parents have gone quiet. What matters is that they don’t become your confidants for money worries. That is a burden a child can’t carry.

An exercise: five things my job gave me

You can do this exercise today; you need a sheet of paper and fifteen minutes.

1. Write five lines. Time structure, contact with people, shared purpose, identity, regular activity. Under each one, write how your job gave you this — quite concretely (“coffee at nine with Mojca”, “the feeling that the project couldn’t move without me”).
2. Rate what you miss most. For each line, mark from 0 to 10 how much you miss it now. There’s no right or wrong; people miss very different things.
3. Choose the two highest. For each, write down one small, temporary stand-in you can make happen this week. Not a permanent solution — just something that gives this need some room.
4. Put it in your calendar. With a day and a time. A stand-in without a slot stays a good intention.
5. Check in a week later. What happened to how you felt that day? What would you change? Then choose the next line.

The exercise doesn’t replace a job and doesn’t take away the worry. But it helps prevent what happens most often: that alongside the loss of income, five other things quietly slip away that could have been kept.

Where this map isn’t enough

I want to be honest here, because any advice about “the first thirty days” can sound as if it were a matter of good organisation. It isn’t always.

When the money crisis is acute, there is no room for exercises about identity. If you don’t know how you’ll pay the rent this month, the first task is getting by, and rightly so. Help then comes from the Employment Service, the social work centre or people who can help you bridge the gap — not from self-help.

When losing the job is a relief, this post may not speak to you. If you’ve left an environment that wore you down for years, you may need rest first, not structure. But relief often has a shadow too: sadness for the people you no longer see, or for the version of yourself you left there. I wrote about losses that the people around us don’t acknowledge in The grief nobody acknowledges.

When structure doesn’t help. If after a few weeks you can’t get out of bed, if you no longer feel anything, or if thoughts appear that it would be better if you weren’t here, this is no longer just a response to loss. Then go to your GP, who can refer you further. If thoughts of death are strong, in Slovenia call the crisis line Klic v duševni stiski on 01 520 99 00 (every day from 7 pm to 7 am) or the Samaritans helpline in Slovenia on 116 123 (24 hours a day), and in an emergency 112.

A 2004 study by Richard Lucas and colleagues, which followed German households over many years, showed something else I don’t want to leave out: for many people, life satisfaction after losing a job did not fully return to its previous level even after they found work again. That doesn’t mean it will be so for you. It does mean that losing a job isn’t something you should “just get through” and forget. It is an experience worth working through — on your own, with the people close to you, or in therapy.

What to remember

• Besides a salary, your job gave you time structure, contact, shared purpose, identity and regular activity — which is why the loss hurts even while there is still money.
• In the first days, look after the basics, tell one person and don’t make big decisions.
• Shame pushes you to hide, and hiding deepens shame. Tell people — those closest to you first.
• Your day needs a few fixed points, and job searching needs a time limit, just as the job had one.
• If after a few weeks nothing keeps you upright any more, that isn’t a failure of will. Get help from a doctor.