Laid off and lost

Where are people immediately after being laid off? In session, it usually shows up a couple of ways: one person cannot get off the couch and the other won't stop moving. One is paralyzed by the betrayal of being plucked from the herd and the other is in full hunting mode. Scanning for new jobs at 2am, obsessing over their resume and getting applications in "as soon as possible." From the outside, these manifestations look like opposites. Internally, the nervous system states are nearly identical.

Behavioral economists Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir explain the mechanism at play: when a critical resource becomes scarce, whether it be money, time, or, in this case, structure and income, the mind narrows to managing that "deficit." In more quantifiable terms, a 2013 study in Science found that financial worry reduced cognitive performance by an amount comparable to losing a full night of sleep. That study examined money scarcity rather than job loss, and a published reanalysis disputed parts of its findings, so read it as an illustration of the mechanism, not a measurement of what happens to you. And I think you know what that feels like if you've ever done an all-nighter, on purpose or against your will.

This is also why the bigger questions around what this change means for your identity and your future is not something you can really think about in week one. Because all your mental capacity is being used up, fixated on the loss itself. Unfortunately, some of what needs to be handled in that time window is critical. Health coverage, unemployment filing, anything with a deadline attached: these are time-sensitive because once the window closes, there's no recourse. So addressing those administrative tasks immediately is the correct use of the bandwidth available right then, but it probably feels like the most unnatural.

Once the logistics are moving, a second piece of your inner psychology takes over: interpretation. Not the dancing, not the translating. Psychologists Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman showed that the same event produces different stress responses in different people, depending on how each one assesses it against their ability to cope. Meaning, 'how does the difficulty of the situation stack up against my capacity to handle it?' Later research on stress arousal, including work by psychologist Jeremy Jamieson, found that the body's physical response, elevated heart rate, cortisol, adrenaline, looks nearly identical whether someone interprets the situation as a threat to who they are or as a difficult, but survivable event. Whether someone experiences a threat or a challenge depends entirely on the meaning they assign to the event. That interpretation, then, dictates if the coming weeks deplete them or keep them moving.

So the story you tell yourself about what happened is really important here as is your ability to use your emotional vocabulary to label the experience. Research found that putting a felt experience into words measurably lowers activity in the brain's threat response. This means that being able to talk about what has happened and making sense of it has an immediate impact even when the problem itself hasn't been solved.

What story are you telling yourself about what just happened, and is it a story about your worth, or a story about a decision a company made?