I work in a field that is immensely stressful and for a while people were leaving my particular field in droves, before the tech layoffs of the last year.
I've tried a number of different strategies to eliminate the stress, and where things are less stressful with more boundaries, limiting my time to 40 hrs, being more direct with my communication, so on … I find the depression and anxiety caused by my job are often more than I can bare and in the last year starting to take a physical toll on my body too.
Normally when it gets this bad I just changed jobs and that makes it better for a little while but right now because of all of these tech layoffs and the increased assumption that AI will take on some of the work in my field even though that is not proving to be very beneficial, jobs are scarcer than they have been in the last decade, I talked to my peers about this all the time.
I try not to care, but when I don't care I do a poor job, and when I do a poor job the situation gets worse and then I end up more stressed than I was in the first place. I've tried communicating with my managers or the peers who cause issues but nothing seems to be changing.
I've been so depressed about things going wrong and about how stressed I am it's almost 4 PM on a Saturday and I haven't gotten out of bed all day.
I am trying to save of a sabbatical and during that sabbatical plan for a career change. I wanted to plan for it now, but I've met with several advisors and two career coaches and they basically all say I need to recover from burnout before I make a change.
I'm afraid I'm going to give myself a heart attack if I keep dealing with the stress the way I am. I need help. I don't know what to do. I'm so miserable.