Dr. Jason Wang Transcript: May 22, 2025

Anne Godlasky/NPF (00:00:00):

Okay, good morning. Welcome to day two of Covering Workplace Mental Health. We are very excited. We have a super packed day and I’m excited to kick it off with Dr. Jason Wang. Dr. Wang is a trained vocational psychologist, meaning that he specializes in addressing career related issues in therapy. So he does this clinically, but he’s also read about, studied, written a lot about these issues including coping with unemployment, wellbeing in the workplace. And today he’s going to talk to us about job uncertainty, which I know is of interest to a number of you as you cover not only changes in federal employment, but also vulnerable populations in the communities that you serve. So please join me in welcoming Dr. Jason Wang.

Dr. Jason Wang/Inflection Points Therapy (00:00:57):

Thank you, Mike. Looking okay. We good to go? Yeah. Okay, great. Alright everyone, good morning. It’s really nice to be here with you all and in particular to talk about a topic that is both, I think really, really important and salient right now. Job uncertainty and mental health, and that I’m just particularly very passionate about. So excited to do that. I’m excited that I’m your first speaker of the day because you all hopefully have some caffeine early morning energy on this rainy day outside. I’m not going to read from my slides, but I think they’ll have access to these later. Yeah, great. So there’s a lot of facts and figures and citations on here for research for you all to dig through if there’s certain topics that are interesting to you.

(00:01:47):

But really quickly, my clinical practice, my therapy practice is inflection points therapy here in dc. I’m just in DuPont a couple blocks away. So I’m in private practice as a solo psychotherapist and one of my focuses, there’s no real technical term, but I call it career focused therapy, meaning it’s therapy first and foremost. It’s not career counseling, it’s not career coaching. It has to do with thoughts, feelings, emotions, inner conflicts around work related topics. So that’s something that I particularly enjoy working with and coping with. Job stress, which DC most of you probably know is a town that a lot of people have put a lot of effort and importance on work. So it’s a good place to have this particular focus. Vocational psychology, as Anne mentioned, is my research home. So vocational psychology is a sub branch of psychology research. I distinguish it from IO psychology because you all know about IO psychology.

(00:02:52):

Is this a familiar term? No. Okay. Alright. So I’ll explain real quick. IO psychology is from the point of view of the organization, it’s industrial organizational psychology. So these psychologists will say, how do we make an organization work better? How do we improve employees motivation or performance so that they perform better in the workplace? That’s IO psych. I’m interested in something slightly different, which is work-related psychology from the perspective of the individual worker. So what that means is I’m interested in how do people make their career choices? How do they develop their careers across different organizations, different industries. You can see how it’s a little bit different. I’m not from the point of view of a specific organization or a specific workplace. I’m interested in the career lifespan of workers and what’s particularly important there is unemployment. Unemployment does not fall under IO psychology because once someone’s not associated with an organization or a company, I mean this is harsh, but they don’t really care anymore.

(00:04:01):

So unemployment falls under vocational psychology, and as unemployment becomes more and more a norm as related to job uncertainty, which we’ll talk about today, I think it’s particularly important that I advocate for more research and more media coverage of the idea of coping with unemployment because it’s just not as big a part of the psychology research literature as some of the other things are, right? So IO psychology, there’s also organizational behavior at schools of management. So you all have probably heard of the giant Google study on psychological safety. Those are not typically done by vocational psychologists. They’re done by either IO psychologists or organizational behavior folks in schools of management. So just a little technical placing me in the psychology world.

(00:04:57):

All right, so today we’re here to talk about job uncertainty. I want to start briefly with just what is uncertainty period. So uncertainty has a number of different definitions. Again, not going to read from this, but uncertainty is related to ambiguity, it’s related to complexity, unpredictability, when you don’t have all the information, when you’re feeling insecure about what? When there’s a lack of control and you can’t figure out what the future will bring. So those are all kind of the characteristics of uncertainty. That’s pretty intuitive, right? There’s nothing there that surprises anyone there. I just want to make sure we’re kind of all on the same page. When it comes to the general idea of uncertainty, I’m not going to go through the general uncertainty in mental health. I’m going to skip directly to job uncertainty in mental health. But suffice to say, there is a literature that looks more broadly at the concept of uncertainty in mental health. And as you might expect, facing uncertainty generally or in different areas of your life is typically associated with worse mental health. We as human beings don’t deal super well with uncertainty. Anyone care to hazard or guess just generally why we don’t deal well with uncertainty. Any thoughts on why that might be? It might be an obvious question, but curious what folks are thinking

Julia Carpenter | Independent (00:06:25):

Perhaps because it so often uncertainty in different areas of our life affects our core needs, so in certain career will affect you. Repeat your answer. Yes, absolutely. Hi, I’m Julia. I’m a freelance journalist. My guess is that uncertainty in different areas of our life affects our material needs. So uncertainty in career can affect my housing, or uncertainty in my relationships can affect my sense of who I am or uncertainty in some other fields can affect where I’ll eat tonight. And that’s very scary.

Dr. Jason Wang/Inflection Points Therapy (00:07:04):

That’s very scary. Yeah, that’s an interesting answer. I like it. I’m going to add a little something to it unless anyone else wants to give a thought on why uncertainty is so hard for us as human beings. So again, going to go, it’s on the slides. I’m not going to go through this. Know what’s going to happen next. And if we don’t, I mean, look at our federal government right now. Uncertainty is like middle name, so I’m going to break that down a little bit when we don’t know what happens. Oftentimes we focus on the potential negative outcomes. Uncertainty can lead to positive things as well, right? Think about this. You buy a lottery ticket, chances are you’re not going to win. It’s almost certain you’re not going to win. But there’s a little bit of uncertainty there, and that little bit of uncertainty is what drives the pleasure of getting a lottery ticket and fantasizing about what could possibly happen because there’s that little bit of uncertainty there.

(00:08:04):

Does that make sense? Right. I’ll use another, probably a little closer to real life example here. A lot of the literature and psychology focuses on illness uncertainty, which I won’t focus on today, but illness uncertainty. For example, and this is an exaggerated example. Say you get a diagnosis from the doctor that is pretty serious and there’s maybe an 80% chance that your lifespan is going to be cut short to maybe just the next year or so, but there’s a 20% chance 20% of the people who have this diagnosis live out full long lives. That uncertainty of chances are it’s not good, but there’s a chance, there’s a decent 20% chance that you will live out a full life can actually give you hope, which actually improves mental health. So the literature primarily says that uncertainty leads to negative mental health, but there are examples where uncertainty can lead to positive mental health.

(00:09:03):

So that’s kind of theoretically, I’m getting you all to think like a psychologist in the literature here. Now, as you might expect, job uncertainty typically does not lead to positive things. So let’s go there. All right, so I’m going to move forward. Okay, that weird. It’s working a little weirdly. Okay. Okay, so moving on specifically to job uncertainty. Okay, I titled this talk job uncertainty and mental health. The research literature calls it job insecurity. Okay, I’ll use those terms interchangeably. I don’t like that term. The reason is, if you try to break it down, if you are uncertain about your job, you’re uncertain if you’re going to have a job that follows logically. To me, if you’re insecure about your job, that could mean you’re not sure if you’re going to continue to have a job or you’re insecure that you’re doing a good job that doesn’t quite colloquially and kind of in everyday usage, I don’t like it as much. But that said, if you’re going to do a Google Literature search, job insecurities, what you want to search for, but I’m going to refer to it as job uncertainty. Okay? So job uncertainty, again, it’s exactly what you think it is. You’re concerned about the future permanence of your job. You are basically there’s a potential threat. You’re perceiving a potential threat to your ability to stay in your current job. Very easy. Job uncertainty, job insecurity, no questions about that. Okay.

(00:10:38):

This does get a little bit conceptually difficult, so I want to kind of walk us through the different ways people can have job insecurity and how it differs from other terms. So first of all, job insecurity is not the same as job loss. Okay? Job loss, there’s no uncertainty. Your job is gone. Okay? So no uncertainty there. And what’s interesting is the research literature basically says that anticipation of something happening, which contains the uncertainty, represents an equally important or perhaps even greater source of anxiety than the actual event. Depends on the situation, but you all have probably been in situations where the runup to you doing something makes you more nervous than actually doing the thing, and that’s psychologically a reason why job insecurity for a lot of folks is worse honestly than just being laid off today and knowing that you’ll be laid off.

(00:11:41):

And the other point being is when you’ve lost your job, you can deploy specific coping strategies, whereas you’re left in this limbo when you’re unsure of what you should be doing. Should you be working harder at your current job? Should you be looking for another job? It’s just harder to know what to do, and so it’s harder to cope. Okay? So it’s also a subjective perception, and I mentioned that because if you have two employees at the same organization who performance reviews come back the same, they’re equally liked by their colleagues and bosses and their chances of being laid off are objectively the exact same. They can perceive different levels of job insecurity, a feeling, right? The literature sometimes distinguishes between the idea of objective versus subjective, but really we’re focused in psychology on the subjective, like the feeling of job insecurity. So two people in the same situation can feel very differently about how insecure their jobs are.

(00:12:48):

That should sense. I mean, that should make sense generally speaking intuitively, and it’s of course involuntary job loss if you’re thinking about leaving your job, that’s not job insecurity voluntarily, and it’s also not something that’s really big right now in DC is there’s been a major return to office mandate for federal workers. That’s also not job uncertainty. I mean, it’s uncertainty in a sense because a lot of folks are like, oh, there’s this mandate. How many days do I actually have to come in the office? There’s not enough seats in the office. What am I actually supposed to be doing? There’s a lot of uncertainty there, but that’s not this concept. That’s something else.

(00:13:28):

Okay? The other thing that’s important to kind of distinguish is oftentimes when we think of job uncertainty, we’re talking about a job that felt secure and all of a sudden there’s a threat to it. And so now we feel insecure, but there are jobs that are insecure from the very beginning, and a lot of that falls under the category of precarious work. Precarious work is work that is inherently unstable and insecure, and where workers don’t have a lot of power. So gig jobs, jobs where there’s no guarantee, and you’re told from the very beginning that you may not have employment after a period of time. I think about seasonal work can oftentimes fall under some of that category. I think another interesting one is that where there’s inherent job insecurity from the very beginning goes to the complete opposite end, which is really selective organizational culture.

(00:14:28):

So General Electric, GE had this famous policy a while ago of laying off the bottom 10% of its workforce by performance every year. So technically there was job insecurity inherent in your job from the very beginning. So this concept is actually a little bit broader than you think. It’s not just someone who was feeling good in their nine to five and all of a sudden there’s a threat to their employment. There’s a lot of interesting mix here to think about. I believe one of your later speakers might be addressing an element of precarious work, which is a lot of folks who have undocumented immigrant status end up in precarious work. They don’t have a lot of power. They have work that is not guaranteed, and so that’s another element of job insecurity that can affect mental health, but I’m mostly focused on the broader term today. Okay. Any questions about this conceptual clarity piece of things? No. Yeah,

Candace Y.A. Montague | Independent  (00:15:31):

Pass the microphone now.

Jordan Gass-Poore’ | Independent (00:15:38):

Hey, I’m Jordan Gosia, a freelance journalist, and I feel like I fit under the precarious work model, but I wanted some clarification though. Would a career like acting or the entertainment industry, for instance, work in that field, would that be considered precarious work? Even journalism from the get-go?

Dr. Jason Wang/Inflection Points Therapy (00:15:59):

I would call that precarious career as opposed to precarious job, right?

Jordan Gass-Poore’ | Independent (00:16:06):

What is worse? Yeah, work or career being precarious,

Dr. Jason Wang/Inflection Points Therapy (00:16:09):

Right? Your career is precarious versus, and we’ll talk about employability. Employability could be the other term that’s related to that, but that’s a little bit different from are you going to lose the job you are currently doing?

Jordan Gass-Poore’ | Independent (00:16:21):

Okay, thank you for that.

Dr. Jason Wang/Inflection Points Therapy (00:16:22):

Yeah, okay. All right. Okay. I won’t worry about those questions. Moving on. So what I’d like to talk about is the relationship between job and security, job uncertainty, and these broad categories of outcomes. There’s job attitudes, organizational attitudes, health and work-related behavior. I’m actually mostly focused on the mental health piece of it, but I’m going to, there’s slides on all the other categories, and I’m just going to briefly touch on them. If you want me to come back to them, I can. Okay. So basically the meta analysis, which are kind of the summary of the literature in a quantitative way says that, I’m just going to put these all up at the same time, that when you feel insecure about your job, the more insecure you feel about your job, the less satisfied you are with your job. That’s a duh one, but it’s nice to see the research support that.

(00:17:25):

The other one I’ll point out is interestingly, the more insecure you feel about the job, the more you hide knowledge in the job, meaning you want to hold on things that you uniquely know and do so that they keep you around basically is what the implied mechanism is of that. I thought that was a really interesting result. These are correlations. Technically you can’t prove causation, but anyways, they’re correlated. They’re strongly correlated or moderately correlated. You become, the higher your job in security, the less you become committed to your organization. That makes sense. The lower your trust is the organization and in management, these are strong relationships there, and the higher or the more insecure, uncertain you feel about your job, the worse your physical and mental health are. The physical health link is a little bit weaker. It’s not quite as strong of a relationship. The mental health one is moderate, so it’s significantly higher than this physical health link.

(00:18:37):

It’s also related to career satisfaction quite negatively. Cynicism positive effectivity meaning the experience of positive emotions goes down as well. I will dig in a little bit more on the health aspect of this job. Insecurity and health has been looked at longitudinally, so that means there is better causal, better causal evidence that it is job insecurity that leads to worse mental health. You can see from a research point of view you want to look at as well, if your mental health tanks for whatever reason, maybe that makes your job less secure, you’re more likely to get fired. Your mental health is affecting your performance, so you can see it going the other way. But the longitudinal studies have pretty much given strong evidence that it is job insecurity primarily that leads to worsening mental health, not the other way around technical but important. There are fewer studies that look at the mechanism of why that is. One study that I wonder if it was a little outdated, even though it’s only 10 years ago, is this idea of psychological contract breach. I’ll explain this, but basically there’s this idea that we as employees expect there to be a fair exchange between we give our loyalty and effort to our organizations and they give us job security and our salaries and benefits, and that’s the fair trade.

(00:20:13):

And so what this study found is the higher that you expect this to be true, that you think there is a psychological contract, the more that is meaningful to you, that is the mechanism that leads to your mental health going down when you’re experiencing job insecurity because it’s a violation of that implicit contract. There’s only one study on this, and it was interesting, so I put it in here. I don’t know that people expect job security anymore. I feel like that’s been kind of killed along of the last few decades. So I’m not sure this is explaining it as much these days. That’s my personal opinion, not research supported.

(00:20:57):

Okay. Other things, I think this one’s interesting. There’s the meta-analysis. Looking at all the studies that looked at the link between job security and performance work performance, the results are mixed. There’s kind of a weak, moderate relationship, meaning the more insecure you feel about your job, the more your work performance suffers. So there’s some link there, but there was another meta-analysis. This is a series of four meta-analysis over the past few decades that found no relationship between job uncertainty and work performance, and they don’t explain it. It’s just analyzing the data out there. But my suspicion is it comes back to what we were talking about earlier. There’s certain jobs, for example, where the bottom 10% of performers are kicked out, where you might be motivated to work harder in order to reduce your job in security. But there are other jobs where I’m thinking about the federal government jobs right now, where it’s like your work performance is not really what’s going to cause you to be cut, and so there’s not a clear or strong relationship between how uncertain you feel about your job and how much your work performance suffers. I think that’s interesting, and we’ll talk about another causal mechanism for that in a little bit as well, or a moderating influence on that. What is clear is that the more insecure you feel about your job, the more likely you are to want to jump ship, which is called turnover intention.

(00:22:33):

There are a few other things that I’m not going to focus on. I just want to cover maybe one or two other things. I’ve got more slides than that, but moderators, if you’re familiar with research literature, is what changes the relationship between two variables. So for example, if the relationship between job and security and mental health is the more job insecure you are, the worse your mental health, some things can make that relationship stronger and some things can make it weaker. So the one that I want to focus on is, well, yeah, I’ll talk really quickly about work centrality and self-esteem based on performance. If these things are important to you, then job insecurity is likely to make you worse in terms of your mental health. That makes sense. The more important work is to you, the more job insecurity will affect your mental health negatively.

(00:23:38):

This graph, bear with me. I think it’s important enough to actually cover here. This is the idea of perceived control and how it changes the relationship between psychological distress, mental health and job uncertainty, job insecurity. So perceived control is the general idea. It’s not a work specific idea. It’s a general idea that I have control over what happens in my life and over the outcomes in my life, the events and outcomes of my life. So these are people who are like, things don’t just happen to me randomly. I’m helpless. That’s the opposite end of that. I’m helpless to do anything in my life. Things are going to happen regardless. If you have high perceived control, it means you have agency. You feel like you can do things to make a difference in your life. Okay, so these two lines, let’s look at the solid line is the important one.

(00:24:40):

I think basically as your sense of perceived control, the sense that I can change things in my life and I can control things in my life. As that increases, your distress goes down. If you are in a situation where you feel like the chance of job loss is high, okay, so let’s think about federal employees right now. If you have a strong sense of agency that I can make a difference in my life by my actions, then yeah, it kind of makes sense. Your stress goes down as you feel more control of your situation. Maybe I can influence the chances that I will lose my job. Maybe I can work harder and therefore lower my chances of losing my job, and so I feel less distress. Okay? What’s interesting is that a certain point, your level of perceived control, as it gets higher, your stress levels go back up when you have a high chance of job loss.

(00:25:42):

And so the interpretation there is if you’re someone who thinks everything that happens to me in my life, I have control over. So that’s the extreme end of things, and yet you still are facing a high level of job insecurity. You can’t do away with the job insecurity piece of it. Then your stress goes back up. It’s basically violating your sense of control. You think you have control of your life, but you can’t get rid of this sense of job uncertainty, so your distress levels go up the higher that is. So it’s a really interesting, if you’re interested in research, there’s some really interesting stuff out there. So this is just really fascinating stuff in my opinion. I hope you all find that way too. Okay, so I’m going to just run through these so I can do questions, but basically other things that affect the relationship between job and security and mental health include how employable you feel you are. So how easy it is to get another job for you age can make a difference as well. Mental health suffers more under job uncertain conditions if you’re older economic climate as well.

(00:27:01):

So in this study, it looked at 2006 versus 2010. 2010 was fairly soon after the great recession, and so people’s mental health suffered more in 2010 than they did in 2006. How long you’ve been at the organization, the longer you’ve been at the organization, the more job insecurity reduces your mental health. Makes sense as well. Sorry, my PowerPoint is doing weird things. And this study was from so long ago, sorry, in research terms so long ago that I don’t put a whole lot of stock in this, but basically also saying that occupational status affects the relationship between job uncertainty and a couple of things, including work performance and your intention to go to another job, but not mental health. Same thing with the strength of the welfare system of the country you work in. Okay.

(00:27:59):

Sorry, I know I’m going longer than I meant to. I’ll just mention a couple things. With coping, there’s not a lot of research on coping. So this part comes from my clinical experience mostly. There’s some really limited and muddled stuff relating to coping in the research. I won’t go into why, but basically the things that really matter that I’m going to focus on when it comes to job insecurity, to help people cope with this, and this is my clinical perspective, is first of all, how are people thinking about this job insecurity? How are they reacting? Are they feeling helpless, right? If they’re feeling helpless, they’re giving up the sense of control and that we know helplessness, hopelessness is related to negative mental health. On the other hand, some people go into hyper control mode. I can plan for every possible contingency, the possible facing this uncertainty, and that’s not healthy either. You can’t plan away a certain amount of uncertainty to job insecurity. So certain psychological clinical terms that we talk about are catastrophizing and engaging in all or nothing thinking. It’s like either I can control it away or it’s terrible. These are things that are important to kind of acknowledge and understand how are people actually thinking about their job uncertainty and how is that causing them more stress?

(00:29:26):

And then the last thing that I’ll really emphasize is as a society, and I think this is somewhat generational because of the way our society is now structured, we don’t tolerate uncertainty well, it’s not about doing away uncertainty to a large degree. It’s about being able to sit with uncertainty and being okay with uncertainty. I think about these days, how easy it is to find literally any piece of information you want on the internet. There was a time and place where you had a question, unless you had an encyclopedia or whatever that had the answer, you’d just be uncertain about it for a long period of time. They’re literally very tiny things that we are no longer practicing in terms of tolerating uncertainty. And I think that’s a big piece of why our mental health declines when we’re facing job insecurity and other types of uncertainty.

(00:30:29):

Sorry, one last slide. I promise the last slide, and this is my cynicism, but job security is an illusion these days. I’m sorry. I just don’t think it exists in the way that people talk about it or used to talk about it. The other piece is this idea of I want clients to cultivate a sense of adaptability. You can’t do away with a certain amount of uncertainty by planning for it, but what you can tell yourself is, I’m an adaptable person. There have been things that I did not see coming that I lived through and did okay during and survived. COVID is the most obvious recent example for all of us. And so if you cultivate your sense of adaptability, that will I think weaken the relationship between job and security and negative mental health and other things like finding community and support and not ignoring it. A lot of people avoid their feelings of uncertainty, and that just makes it worse. Okay, questions? Yeah.

Julia Carpenter | Independent (00:31:34):

Hi, my name is Julia Carpenter and I am a freelancer. So I really echo what people said about understanding uncertainty. I have one question about the perceived control graph and then another about recessions and years between

Speaker 6 (00:31:50):

Recessions,

Julia Carpenter | Independent (00:31:51):

This perceived control graph. I’m really interested in what you were describing about high perceived control than also being related to high stress or anxiety or bad feelings.

Julia Carpenter | Independent (00:32:11):

And I just want to make sure I’m understanding it, is that because if you have a very mature sense of agency that you see your job loss as resulting from that, that you see it as or your job? Yeah. Can you,

Dr. Jason Wang/Inflection Points Therapy (00:32:29):

Yeah. Lemme clarify. Lemme clarify. At this point, it’s about no one’s been laid off yet, right? So your hypothetical people in this scenario say federal government are feeling really uncertain about their jobs. They think layoffs are imminent, and they think that they could very likely be cut. And so this is filling in a vignette here. So that person is someone who feels like I can control all the things that happened in my life so I can control the likelihood that I will be laid off. So I’m going to maybe start working 10 times as hard. I’m going to kiss up to my bosses. I’m going to maybe even pulling something earlier, hide knowledge. No way they could fire me because I have information that no one else has, and they would lose that and they can’t afford to do that. So you start doing all these things related to your sense of control over the situation, but what happens is that your sense of job insecurity doesn’t decrease. You still feel like you have a high chance of job loss, and so that is a violation of two things that you fundamentally hold to be true, right? It’s like I can control my sense of job insecurity because I’m someone who has a lot of agency, and when that doesn’t actually happen, then your distress goes up.

(00:34:07):

And so you can see here there’s three conditions, low chance of job loss, moderate chance, and high chance the low chance of job loss. That’s not really significant. It doesn’t really mean a lot. It’s under conditions where your chance of job loss is quite high, that you feel this distress because your pre C control is not making a difference. That’s the explanatory.

Julia Carpenter | Independent (00:34:29):

That’s super helpful. Thank you. I have another question about recessions, unless someone else has one that’s, so, I write a lot about different generations and their reactions to economic events and perceived generational differences there.

(00:34:46):

I just wrote a story about millennials coping with the great recession then the 2020 recession, and I interviewed a whole bunch of people who said, I can’t believe I’m going to do this for the third time in 20 years. We obviously don’t know yet if a recession will happen or not in one. I’m so curious from your clinical perspective, what the threat or the perceived inevitability does in these circumstances. I’ve talked to so many people who say that they’re already feeling right now they are in a recession, whether that be maybe not even because of their personal financial situation, but just because they’re convinced it’s happening. And I wonder what you see there, what that does. Yeah,

Dr. Jason Wang/Inflection Points Therapy (00:35:40):

I think it’s a really interesting question. I don’t know. I don’t have an instinct on why people feel like there’s a recession when technically there isn’t one. I don’t know what the research says about that, and I don’t have a clinical instinct on that. What I will say is I think what happens is it’s that uncertainty piece where if you think you’re in a recession, then you recognize how much harder it is to look for a job in a recession, how hard it is to find a new job if you lose your current job in a recession, and you probably perceive the possibility of you losing your job as higher. And so all those things will lead to probably more suffering, mental health suffering as a result. But why people feel like there’s a recession when there technically isn’t. I can’t have any good answers for that.

Clavel Rangel Jiménez | The Guardian (00:36:31):

Yeah.

Dr. Jason Wang/Inflection Points Therapy (00:36:32):

Thank you.

Alyssa Goldberg | USA Today (00:36:37):

Hi, my name’s Alyssa with USA today. I’m a health and wellness reporter. First off, it’s fun getting back into the psych terms. My bachelor’s is an applied psych and global public health, so I feel like kind of familiar with all this stuff, but it’s fun getting back into it. For my question’s almost kind of related to the recession question. My first gut instinct with that is just mass panic. I think a lot of people tend to catastrophize,

Dr. Jason Wang/Inflection Points Therapy (00:37:03):

Catastrophize

Alyssa Goldberg | USA Today (00:37:04):

Catastrophize, and if everyone’s talking about how a recession is imminent, I think it just makes you feel like, and people are struggling financially, the cost of living is going way up. So even if maybe the country’s not in Avery recession, I think a lot of people are still feeling the impacts of just not making livable wages and not being able to afford a lot of our basic needs and loans that we were supposed to get loan forgiveness, and that never happened. Yeah. But anyway, I have an actual question for you. So with that being said, people who are fearing this recession, my question, you talked about how voluntarily losing your job isn’t job uncertainty, but what about people who are really unhappy in their current jobs and they want to leave, but they’re too scared that they won’t be able to find another job, so they stay and are feeling unhappy in their current roles and unsure if they’ll find another job?

Dr. Jason Wang/Inflection Points Therapy (00:38:05):

Yeah, no, I think that’s a whole different concept because those folks do not inherently, there’s no inherent job in security. They’re worried about employability, which is a whole different concept. How employable are they out in the marketplace, and that’s keeping them cemented to a job they don’t like. So that’s more about the colloquial term, I would say, is career insecurity or career uncertainty rather than job uncertainty.

Alyssa Goldberg | USA Today (00:38:38):

Just to follow up, how much of that do you feel like is overlapped then? Or do you feel like this is completely distinct from each other? I would think that there would be some sense of overlap in the emotions that arise and the way that the stress impacts your life.

Dr. Jason Wang/Inflection Points Therapy (00:39:01):

Yeah, I mean, conceptually, yes, conceptually in that you feel trapped either way. If you’re in this situation where you feel uncertain that you’ll continue to have a job, but there’s not much you can do about it, you feel trapped. Your job is secure, but you hate it, but you feel like you can’t go anywhere else, you also feel trapped. So I think that is probably the nexus of overlap. I had one other thought on that. Hold on. The difference though is in the job insecure condition, there’s a threat that’s hanging over your head. It’s, it acts hanging over your head. That could fall at any moment. That is, I feel like clinically it feels like a different feeling than I’m trapped and I’m just trapped, versus I’m trapped and an ax might fall on me, if that makes sense. It feels a little different to me. So yeah.

Michelle Marchante | Miami Herald (00:40:08):

Thank you,

Anne Godlasky/NPF (00:40:11):

Candace. And then let’s get the mic over to that end.

Candace Y.A. Montague | Independent  (00:40:17):

Good morning, I’m Candace Montague. I’m a freelance journalist. Hi. So my question is, is there any existing research or studies that show that people from certain backgrounds actually handle job insecurity better than people who come from other backgrounds? I’m sorry if you covered this already, but I was thinking people who grew up in tough situations where they have witnessed insecurity around them, parents losing jobs, housing insecurity, food insecurity, crime in their neighborhood, or I think of children of immigrants who have come here and they’ve watched their parents struggle and get through. Do they have more strategies because of their background versus someone who grew up privileged and has not had the struggle like that and maybe they’re a stock broker on the market and the market crashes and they commit suicides?

Dr. Jason Wang/Inflection Points Therapy (00:41:11):

Yes.

Candace Y.A. Montague | Independent  (00:41:12):

Is there any study like that?

Dr. Jason Wang/Inflection Points Therapy (00:41:13):

Oh, I would love to see studies along those lines. I have not seen anything. I know, and I think the problem is to the degree that research is funded by grants and by the sources of funding, there’s not a whole lot of incentive to go in that direction. Think you’re not allowed to study that anymore. Right now, you’re not allowed to study anything related to identity. But if I had to break that down, you’re kind of asking do past examples that have helped you develop resilience, make you more resilient to things like job insecurity and uncertainty? I have to imagine the answer is yes, but I don’t actually know.

Candace Y.A. Montague | Independent  (00:42:03):

Maybe there’s some related study like that. Not necessarily about job insecurity, but like you said, resilience. Resilience and how people handle it that something’s better than others.

Dr. Jason Wang/Inflection Points Therapy (00:42:12):

Yeah, there’s probably definitely studies out there studying the link between how resilience changes the relationship between facing something difficult and your mental health. But yeah, nothing specific that I know of.

Katie Brandt | Chicago Health Magazine (00:42:29):

Yeah, thank you. Let’s go Katie, then Amira, then Alex. Okay. I was wondering, what does that do to a society when as you perceive and as I feel too, there is no more job security anymore. What does that do from an individual level to a societal level?

Dr. Jason Wang/Inflection Points Therapy (00:42:56):

On the individual level? This is basically what the field of vocational psychology is looking at. The concept that I most focus on related to this is the idea of career self-management. So that is a fairly self-explanatory term. We have to actively manage our careers now in a way that a lot of people didn’t have to back in the day. We have to think proactively, what is our next step? How do we increase our employability? How do we maintain work networks and industrywide networks of friends? There’s a reason why LinkedIn is the most popular, has grown exponentially. There are a lot of things on the individual level that you need to be able to do in order to think about how you want to stay working for the rest of your work career on a societal level. That’s a really interesting question. Maybe more a question for sociologists, but I don’t know. It brings me to the idea of this is why people are so focused on work-life balance these days is because why would you sacrifice your personal life for a career that is in no ways guaranteed in any shape or form? I think we are seeing reports of younger generations prioritizing different things in of work-life balance and pushing for more. You all know the reporting, so I can’t remember off the top of my head, but definitely the priorities seem to be more so that they are not putting all their eggs in the work basket. And I think that’s the reason why. Yeah,

Amira Sweilem | NJ.com  (00:44:56):

Thank you for the presentation. Maybe you covered this, and I know you did say economic factors sort of exacerbate this,

(00:45:05):

But I guess I’m still confused about how the, these studies manage to isolate confounding factors like the toll if someone is more financially insecure, which we know that a lot of Americans are, how is that not the mental health stressor? How is it just the uncertainty in general is sort of the universe that these studies are looking at somewhat? In a perfect world where rent is paid for money is not an issue, we know are these studies saying that in a perfect world, essentially just the insecurity is what causes the mental health issues? Yeah, I guess I am just sort of struggling with the potential confounding variable of economic.

Dr. Jason Wang/Inflection Points Therapy (00:46:00):

Lemme see if I understand this quickly. I think if, for example, you’re studying the effect of unemployment on mental health, that’s really tough because unemployment has a number of different outcomes. It could be financial, it could be the loss of meaning in your work or meaning in your life. It could be the stress it’s putting on you to your family. There’s a lot of things there, but uncertainty, technically, your finances have not changed. Do you see, when you’re insecure about your job, technically nothing about your job has changed. It is just the perception that you may lose your job sometime soon.

Amira Sweilem | NJ.com  (00:46:38):

But wouldn’t that be like if you are someone who maybe does not have a safety net, what is it that they say? Dave Ramsey’s always like, you need 10 K or whatever. Wouldn’t that insecurity be like, I’m about to lose my job. Oh my God, how am I going to pay for rent next month?

Dr. Jason Wang/Inflection Points Therapy (00:46:59):

Yeah, it could be. And so that would be considered a mediating variable. So there’s not a lot of studies out there. Mediating variables are what explains the link between two variables. So what you’re basically saying is job security affects mental health through the mediating variable of perceived financial stress in the future, right? So you’re basically saying, really, so what you’re saying is if you’re about your job but you feel good about your financial future, even if you lose your job, then your mental health is fine, right?

Amira Sweilem | NJ.com  (00:47:37):

Yeah. I think that’s the question I’m asking. Are these studies basically saying when they’re looking at participants, these participants come from have an economic situation that is it buffering them from the financial hardships of potentially losing a job. And so then the mental health outcomes are sort of what you were talking about, like the uncertainty, the looming, I’m sorry. I know, I’m not sure if my question is really landing.

Dr. Jason Wang/Inflection Points Therapy (00:48:07):

I think we’re almost on the same page here. Most of these studies, the moderators are a little bit, are more individual studies, but these are all quantitative studies. So meaning they try to find, find a representation and average things out. So if they’re doing their job well, and you’d have to go back to the original study to check, they try to balance out the sample. It’d be balanced sample of gender that’s representative of the population. It should be a balanced sample of wealth and of salary earning and of race and of et cetera, et cetera. So that it’s a balanced one. And so the relationship should reflect the average so that none of these individual factors should be the reasons why the overall trend is the way that it is.

Amira Sweilem | NJ.com  (00:49:01):

I see. Okay. So it really is this factor of, and then sorry guys, I will be done. But it really is this factor of the insecurity that is leading to these negative mental health outcomes. It’s not the factor of what economic insecurity does.

Dr. Jason Wang/Inflection Points Therapy (00:49:20):

At least that’s what the studies can’t definitively say yes or no to that. And that’s how research works. But I think it’s entirely possible. It just hasn’t been studied in that way. Okay, thank you.

Anne Godlasky/NPF (00:49:41):

And then you can send that mic that way.

Alex Viveros | Jackson Hole News&Guide (00:49:45):

So I work in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and you mentioned seasonal workers. We have a lot of people that come in for a few months on the work on the mountain and then leave because they have to because the snow melts. And then same thing, people come in the summer river rafting and they have to because the snow comes back. I guess when that kind of seasonality is inherent in your work, does that change to stress levels? Do we know when you know that your job has to end for things completely out of anyone’s control, does that change things?

Dr. Jason Wang/Inflection Points Therapy (00:50:18):

I don’t think the literature says, but my assumption is my logical kind of working through that. If you know your job is going to end, then you’re not facing job insecurity. When I said seasonal workers, what I was thinking of is say you get hired for the, oh, I’m sorry, you get hired. I was like, who’s doing that? When you get hired for the Thanksgiving Christmas season and you’re told you might have a job after the season ends, but you might not. It depends on how it goes. Then there’s job uncertainty or you’re hired because someone, I don’t know, got funding for something, but there’s no guarantee that that funding is sustainable. And so those are situations in which I would say it falls under this category, but I think it’s different if you know your job, employment is going to end at a certain point.

Randy Yohe | West Virginia Public Broadcasting (00:51:15):

Yeah. Hi, I’m Randy with West Virginia Public Broadcasting. Two quick things. You said pretty quickly that the longer that you’ve been at an organization, the more job insecurity influences, perhaps negative mental health. I mean, is that when you’re talking about, I had a couple of colleagues that were working in St. Louis, been there quite a while and were let go because were older. Maybe their salary, their salary would pay for three reporters and that spawn job insecurity throughout not just their market, but the country. Is that what you mean by longer you’ve been in an organization?

Dr. Jason Wang/Inflection Points Therapy (00:51:53):

Yes. The one thing I’ll clarify here, and I may not have said this earlier, organizational tenure is the research term is a moderator between job and security and a different outcome and turnover intention, not mental health. So what it means is, I’m trying to remember what direction this goes in.

Randy Yohe | West Virginia Public Broadcasting (00:52:27):

Lemme see my notes. It creates a fear. It creates an insecure fear.

Dr. Jason Wang/Inflection Points Therapy (00:52:32):

It does. And shorter tenure. Okay. Okay. So here’s what the research says. If you’ve been at a job longer and you’re facing job insecurity, you are less likely to want to leave that organization. And I think that’s the moderating direction. And what that means is, I think what you’re saying, which is the older you are, the more you might fear about your ability to get reemployed in the marketplace. So even though you’re not feeling great about where you are right now and your chances of being able to continue there, you’re less likely to jump ship because it, it’s brutal out there. I have a client right now who’s in his mid fifties who is just struggling. He commanded too high of a salary, was too specific in what he’s able to do, and is at an age where people don’t want to invest in him, which I mean mid fifties, it’s really, it deserves a lot more attention than I think it’s getting because it’s happening at earlier ages than I think people might think.

Randy Yohe | West Virginia Public Broadcasting (00:53:43):

That’s young. The other one is kind of praised versus profit when it comes to job insecurity. If anybody ever watched Mad Men, there’s Peggy the Rising secretary that says to her Boss, Don Draper, you’re not giving me the praise and am turning in these projects that are good. And he says, that’s what the money is for. And you see in job situations where some managers will put praise along with a raise or a profit, some will not. And that can create job insecurity as well. Can it not?

Dr. Jason Wang/Inflection Points Therapy (00:54:23):

Are you saying that not giving praise makes you feel insecure about your ability to keep your job?

Randy Yohe | West Virginia Public Broadcasting (00:54:29):

Exactly. I mean, places are award based. We want to apply for these awards. How many awards if you won and you start to get insecure with your work, maybe you haven’t won enough awards or maybe you’re not getting the praise, the recognition that others are getting and they say, well, that’s what the money is for. Well,

Dr. Jason Wang/Inflection Points Therapy (00:54:54):

I wonder if you’re thinking about journalism because it’s hard for me to think of another industry that I see frequently that my clients come from where there’s that kind of award. I think there’s something unique to journalism in that I awards mean a lot and can contribute to how secure you feel in your career.

Randy Yohe | West Virginia Public Broadcasting (00:55:22):

Advertising, public relations.

Dr. Jason Wang/Inflection Points Therapy (00:55:25):

Yeah. I don’t know how much they matter in those fields, but I definitely understand that for journalism, and they probably do in some fields,

Clavel Rangel Jiménez | The Guardian (00:55:34):

Hi Clavel. I am an independent journalist. I used to cover immigration. So what advice will you give us to reporting on job insecurity and mental health when there is no studies, resident studies, and we don’t want to sound too subjective or how to do this accountable. And another question is that Rachel used to ask that kind of thing. What kind of stories do you like to see that we are not covering right now?

Dr. Jason Wang/Inflection Points Therapy (00:56:14):

So the first question was how do you report on this in a way that doesn’t seem subjective?

(00:56:20):

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that’s tough. I mean, I went study and research heavy on this out of the assumption that you all need citations and that this is the stuff that you don’t get typically. But I mean, I go off of clinical intuition all the time. That’s a tough one. I didn’t think about that one a little bit. But to answer your second question, what would I like to see reported on more? Basically a lot of the stuff that’s covered in vocational psychology. How do you manage a career over time when nothing is guaranteed? Your ability to stay in the industry is not guaranteed. Your ability to work past 50 is not guaranteed. If you lose your job at a certain point when there are major things like the great recession of 2008 COVID, who knows what else is coming up. There seems to be something major every decade that knocks off 10 to 15% of the workforce into an unemployment.

(00:57:30):

Unemployment, I think is my main research interest in a particular interest of mine is just, it’s so devastating because there’s so little you can do to mitigate the negative effects of unemployment without finding a new job. It’s just very little. And it’s not just the paycheck, but the paycheck is huge of course, but it’s your meaning in work. It’s having your time structured, it’s having a social circle. All these things tend to be tied into what you get out of employment. And when you lose it, there’s so much stigma and shame and isolation and reasons why your mental health just tanks and it’s really tough. I think the other thing I would say about that, I know I’m running out of time, I’ve run out of time.

(00:58:25):

Part of the issue, and this is why I think IO psychology has a lot more going on at the moment, is when you’re working from the point of view of the organization, you can do a study that you give to A CEO who can implement whatever they learn across the organization. And so it’s affecting a lot of people at once. Whereas vocational psychology is about the individual. I have to reach out to individuals to help them understand an employer is not going to pay me to come in to talk about how to cope with unemployment.

(00:58:57):

It doesn’t make any sense, right? Or maybe job insecurity, but they’re going to want me to cut out anything that I say about go ahead and leave. You know what I mean? It doesn’t benefit them. So I can tell you one thing I’ve been trying to do in DC is I’ve been trying to create some group therapy around the idea of coping with job insecurity, unemployment, and I can’t gain traction because I’m trying to reach individuals and it’s so hard from that point of view. So I would love to see, and I’d love to hear ideas about how to make this work, how to reach a wider audience with this type of work that’s focused on individual workers, that organizations and companies don’t have as strong of a stake in trying to promote and to hire people to teach their employees about. This is the stuff you’re not going to learn from your companies and your organizations along the way, but will very likely affect you deeply, deeply if you face it in your career.

Anne Godlasky/NPF (00:59:58):

What kind of up on time, but Kayla, I think you had questions. Alice?

Kaela Roeder | Technical.ly  (01:00:07):

Hi, I’m Kayla. I’m with the outlet. Technically, you brought up LinkedIn and I’m curious if there are ways that you’ve seen people use social media to cope with Java uncertainty. I think LinkedIn would be the main example there, but I was wondering if you’ve seen people use it in that way.

Dr. Jason Wang/Inflection Points Therapy (01:00:24):

I would say my sense of it is that the greatest thing that LinkedIn has done recently is reduce the stigma around unemployment. They’re open to work banner and their ability, it’s so normalized now for people to put a post that says, I’m open to work. This is why. This is what I’m looking for. And I think in particular, there’s a huge stigma with longer term unemployment that’s still tough. You still have to explain why you’ve been out of work for a longer period of time. When someone tells you, oh, I’ve been out of work for a year. It’s hard to know what to say to that person as opposed to one or two months, oh, hang in there. It’s still early. You can figure this out. I think there’s also this implied thing that a lot of people do where it’s like, oh, you’ve been out of work for a year. Maybe there’s something wrong with you or your resume. That stuff is so hard to combat. So I think LinkedIn is starting to do a good job of combating some of that stigma, but there’s still a long way to go. Yeah.

Michelle Marchante | Miami Herald (01:01:36):

Hi, I’m Michelle Marchante with the Miami Herald. I have two questions. One, is there any research to indicate whether businesses that have unions at companies that have unions or are unionizing Sierra reduction in job insecurity? And then also, are there certain sectors that this seems to be more prominent? Job insecurity? Healthcare, for example, is traditionally be considered a very secure field, but we’ve had nursing unions concerned about AI potentially impacting nurses. So just curious how that’s changed through the years.

Dr. Jason Wang/Inflection Points Therapy (01:02:10):

That’s instinct. The second question, I don’t know of anything that says certain industries are more insecure. I’m sure there, I mean, a Gallup could easily do a credible survey on something like that. So I’m curious if there’s something out there that may not be research-based in this kind of a way, but might be pretty dependable. So I can take a look. You might want to take a look there. I will say I think it’s particularly hellish that federal employees are now dealing with such job insecurity in the sense that one of the major reasons you hear federal employees cite for why they went into federal work is the perceived job security. And so I think it’s particularly devastating in that sector. Your first question, I left it out because I can’t remember what it moderated, but there was a study that looked at whether or not union membership moderated the relationship between job and security and either mental health or one of the other outcomes like work performance or turnover intention. And there was no significant finding. It did not. So I’ve left it out. Yeah, which is interesting. Yeah.

Kaela Roeder | Technical.ly  (01:03:19):

Jason, thank you so much. Yeah,

Dr. Jason Wang/Inflection Points Therapy (01:03:21):

Thanks.

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