A therapist's advice to freelance journalists on coping with job uncertainty

In my Facebook groups and personal texts alike, the same questions keep arising among freelance journalists: Where is the work? Is the silence I’m hearing from editors just me? Will this dry spell last a season — or forever? 

Knowing that talented writers in the field are struggling can be demoralizing (“Where does that leave me?”) or comforting (“At least I’m not alone!”). Either way you take it, I don’t have much revolutionary advice, though you can check out past posts on how AHCJ’s freelance members are dealing with financial challenges and what they’re taking on as side gigs. This webinar on finding sustainable work in an era of relentless layoffs is motivating, too. 

For this post, though, I wanted to learn — and share — some mental and emotional strategies for persisting in an inherently unstable career. So I turned to Jason Wang, Ph.D., a therapist in the Washington, D.C., area with special interests in career development, meaning in work and coping with unemployment.

I interviewed Wang a few years ago for an American Psychological Association story about Americans’ desire for meaning and stability in work. One qualitative study (not conducted by Wang) I cited involved researchers asking how 94 former or unemployed newspaper journalists navigated not just job loss, but also the decline of the industry as a whole — and often their sense of identity and purpose too. 

The study authors found that the journalists with a more “flexible” mindset tended to recover more quickly from the sadness of their loss, and even found a sense of freedom along the way. Those with a more “fixed” mindset, though, relied mostly on hope that their field would be restored. 

The takeaway, then, is that shifting from a fixed to flexible (or a “growth”) mindset can be helpful for your mental health and career. Various books, guides and one-on-one therapy can guide that change. Meantime, here’s a lightly edited overview of what Wang added to our more recent conversation.

How different is this era of career instability from what you’ve seen in the past? 

The idea of being a “company man” and staying there for the entirety of your career is no longer the norm. We’re also seeing that unemployment, particularly involuntary unemployment, is now really a normative part of people’s careers. It’s a different landscape and it has been for a while, but it’s just become more apparent that a lot of these trends are only accelerating. 

So, I think of it in the context of career self-management: We all have to be proactive. Careers cannot go on autopilot because they will be disrupted in so many ways.

What does ‘career self-management’ look like in practice? 

It’s things like making sure we have updated resumes, updated LinkedIn pages; making sure we’re cultivating and building relationships outside of our company. Making sure we have industry peers and contacts and networks, and keeping up with them. 

Going to conferences, up-skilling, getting certificates — all those are really important aspects of career self-management. It’s important to not be complacent.

[Note: AHCJ has great resources for all of this. Be sure to update your profile in the freelance directory, keep on top of our training and events and join our Slack community.] 

Many journalists aren’t just concerned about not having a job, but about their whole industry (and with it, their values) collapsing. What do you say to them? 

You’re getting at job insecurity, which is slightly different psychologically than unemployment. 

When you become unemployed, you know exactly the context in which you’re unemployed and you can put forth very specific action plans and coping mechanisms. With job insecurity, you don’t know what’s going to happen. There’s a lot more uncertainty, and so many people end up thinking through all the possible negative outcomes, and that’s psychologically exhausting. 

Uncertainty can be positive — things could go unexpectedly well, things could be promising — but we’re evolutionarily adapted to focus on the negative possibilities. 

So when health journalists think about job insecurity, it makes sense that the mind goes to all the ways AI could threaten their careers. Having to deal with all of that causes our mental health to suffer. 

How can we protect against that suffering? 

I find that there are two extremes when you’re faced with job insecurity. One is that you enter a state of helplessness where you think, “My entire industry could disappear. There’s nothing I can do. I’m just going to bury my head in the sand.” On the other end is trying to hyper-control the situation and think through every possible scenario. 

Both of these are detrimental to mental health when taken to an extreme. There needs to be a balance between recognizing what you can control and what you can’t control. 

To do that, you have to learn to tolerate uncertainty. It comes down to recognizing when you are uncomfortable with uncertainty and practicing sitting with it for a while. For example, some news alert pops up on your phone about something that you want to read, but now is not a good time. Wait for a little while before you engage with that topic. 

Another [way to strike the balance between the controllable and uncontrollable] is what I’ve been calling “adaptability self-efficacy,” or the belief that you can adapt when the situation calls for it. Remind yourself and cultivate this ability to adapt and to be resilient and to react as necessary in the moment. 

One way of cultivating that is remembering. COVID is the best recent example. Except for some very specific scientists and maybe health journalists, most of us did not see COVID coming. And yet, those of us who are here got through the pandemic stage and we came out the other end.

Those of us who are facing other domains of uncertainty right now can think: How did we adapt? How were we able to survive and be resilient and move forward in our lives during that period? We can remind ourselves that we have the capacity to do it again.

The other thing comes back to what I started with, which is the idea that job security is kind of an illusion. Acknowledging that changes how we think about our careers. 

What’s your advice for journalists who are, in a way, taking on others’ job insecurity — reporting, for instance, on devastating layoffs at the CDC or brilliant scientists losing funding?

My job in many ways has some parallels in that I care a lot about my clients, I’m quite invested in their lives, and yet I have to have very good boundaries and not let it affect me in a way that is not helpful to my clients and is definitely not helpful to me. I imagine journalists have to do something very similar.

You’re dealing with these things that are very seriously impacting your sources in a negative way — traumatically, even. So maybe health journalists need the same training that disaster journalists get in terms of dealing with their own mental health while they’re covering very difficult things. [Note: The Global Center for Journalism & Trauma has good resources for that.]

Another strategy is to really hold on to your goal for any individual article. Are you aiming to accurately capture and make accessible some new science? If that’s the case, you have to try your best to ignore all the political spin that might come out as a result. On the other hand, if your goal is to combat disinformation, then you have to kind of go into the political fray and you have to become very clear: What is the purpose of your reporting? And thus: Where do you set your own boundaries around what you engage with when it comes to the topic you’re covering?