Managing the Emotional Roller Coaster of a Job Search

Author: Rebecca Zucker

While a job search can be a time of excitement and hope about new opportunities to come, it can also be a time of great uncertainty and anxiety. Not only will you probably feel the full range of possible emotions during your search, but you may also experience these highs and lows in the span of a single day or week. You might be elated one moment to learn that you are a top candidate for a desired position, only to be disappointed to find out that the job went to someone else. Or perhaps you were unhappy with your performance in a job interview but were later relieved to learn you’ve still made it to the next round of interviews.

The job search process is fraught with ups and downs, not to mention the angst that comes with the uncertainty about the future of your career and livelihood. Here are a few strategies to manage the emotional roller coaster of the job search.

Know What’s Coming

A job search can be as short as several weeks or as long as several months. As with any other process, there are peaks and valleys. One week you have networking meetings and interviews scheduled, people are responding to your emails, and you feel encouraged and hopeful. The next week there is radio silence, making you feel confused, frustrated, or even helpless. Knowing from the start that you will experience these swings in activity and emotion can help prepare you to better anticipate and handle them when they do occur. When you know something is coming, you will be less surprised or shaken by it, as well as less likely to personalize it, and you will therefore rebound and move forward in your search more easily.

Process Your Emotions

Engaging in activities like mindful meditation or journaling can help you process negative emotions as they arise. In contrast to avoiding, suppressing, or ruminating over your emotions—habits shown to be correlated with anxiety and depression—processing your emotions through mindful meditation or journaling involves actually feeling these emotions more fully. It is this ability to experience our emotions, without judging them or trying to change them, that allows us to move through them more quickly and effectively. In a classic study, unemployed engineers journaled about their thoughts and feelings on being unemployed, writing for just 20 minutes a day for five days. Eight months later, 52% had found new jobs, compared with only 18.6% for the combined control groups. In addition, brief mindful meditation creates improved emotional processing and reduced emotional reactivity and has been shown to enhance our emotional processing, even when we’re not meditating.

Get Support

Having someone to talk to—such as a career coach, a therapist, or a job search work group—throughout your search can provide much-needed emotional support beyond that of friends and family. An experienced career coach who is an expert in job hunts can also help normalize what you are experiencing and feeling at any given phase of your search and can be a good sounding board for when you are feeling unsure of yourself or what to do next. Like an individual coach, a job search work group can also help you feel a sense of partnership. The group can help mitigate feelings of loneliness that often arise at this time, create a sense of community, and provide tangible help to advance your search.

Engage in Energizing Activities

Make sure your days include activities that energize you, such as exercising listening to your favorite music, or doing some other activity that revitalizes you. Your mood and overall energy level will show in your interactions with others, whether it’s a coffee meeting with a former colleague, a networking event, or a job interview. Exercise in particular not only improves mood but also increases self-esteem, sociability, motivation, and cognition and can help you be at your best. David, a client of mine, started exercising daily during his job search. He not only lost 15 pounds and three inches from his waist but also felt mentally and physically stronger, had a greater sense of agency, and was more confident going into interviews.

Put Things into Perspective

It’s easy to feel powerless or discouraged when things don’t progress in the job search the way we would like. Perhaps a contact hasn’t yet made an important introduction for you like they said they would, or a recruiter hasn’t gotten back to you in the time frame initially indicated. Although you can send a friendly reminder, take a step back to think about these other people’s possible existing priorities. Chances are, your job search isn’t in their top five priorities on any given day. This perspective can help you depersonalize the situation and mitigate the negative emotions surrounding it.

Roberta, another client of mine, was deeply depressed when her job search hit the one-year mark after she lost her finance job in the last recession. Her depression, while understandable, created an unproductive cycle of negative thoughts and feelings that kept her paralyzed in her search. I asked her what “Roberta 20 years in the future” would say about her year of unemployment. Without hesitation, she said, “Oh, it’s a blip.” This “it’s a blip” perspective allowed Roberta to emerge from her depressed feelings to not only envision a more successful future but also move forward much more productively. Ultimately, she landed another job as a partner at a top-performing investment management firm.

Feelings are temporary, as are many of the situations that create them (such as a job search). Seeing these challenges as impermanent is a key part of being optimistic, and optimism is associated with higher levels of motivation, achievement, and well-being and lower levels of depressive symptoms.

Using these strategies can help make the inevitable shifts between the highs and lows of the job search more manageable, as well as help you stay motivated and productive for the duration of the ride.

Rebecca Zucker is an executive coach and a founding partner at Next Step Partners, a leadership development firm. Her clients have included Amazon, Clorox, Morrison Foerster, Norwest Venture Partners, the James Irvine Foundation, and high-growth technology companies like DocuSign and Dropbox. You can follow her on X/Twitter @rszucker.