6 Signs You’re in a Toxic Work Environment (and You’re Not Just Having a Bad Day, a Week, a Month…or Even a Year!)
Bad days happen to everyone, but working in a toxic environment goes beyond just a few bad days. A toxic work environment shows up as a pattern of negativity that repeats no matter how you adjust your attitude, your effort, or your approach. Once you start seeing this pattern, you begin to realize that it isn’t just you or your perception of what is happening.
You’re starting to feel like the stress you’re feeling at work isn’t just a bad day.
As soon as you leave the office and head home for the night, you start thinking about everything that happened that day at work. Something was said in a meeting that made you think twice about the person’s motives, you received an email that made clear that your previously shared concerns hadn’t been considered, or perhaps you were passed over for an opportunity to lead a project yet again. You start along your normal path of second guessing yourself; thinking that you might be reading too much into the situation. Or, you start to realize that maybe…just maybe, something about your team was off and you’re one of the only people willing to notice it.
This distinction matters because most of the professionals I work with don’t walk into my office immediately knowing their workplace is toxic. They describe themselves as too sensitive, think it’s their anxiety talking, or they worry that their lack of resilience is what it is holding them back given that everyone else on the team seems to be handling things just fine. Sometimes we find that what’s underneath these feelings are imposter experiences, a persistent sense that you’re less capable than the evidence actually says you are. But other times feeling unsure of yourself is a completely normal reaction to an abnormal situation that keeps generating new reasons for you to doubt yourself. Here are six signs that what you’re dealing with is a toxic work environment.
Sometimes, feeling unsure of yourself is a completely normal reaction to an abnormal situation.
Sign #1: Your body knew before your mind did.
Long before you had noticed that what was going on at work was beginning to form a pattern, your body probably already knew. Have you noticed any of these symptoms showing up in your own life?
You experience the “Sunday Scaries.” This happens on Sundays as the day goes on. The later it gets, you feel your dread about going to work the next day increasing, so much so that you have trouble falling asleep that night.
Your stomach stays in knots from nine to five and initially settles quickly once you leave the office or go on vacation. Eventually, your stomach stays that way almost all of the time.
Stress or anxiety shows up like clockwork around a certain weekly meeting or when you’re preparing to meet with a certain person or team and lessens once the meetings are over. This can leave you exhausted, unmotivated, and even wanting to quit. This is your nervous system doing what it’s designed to do to protect you from danger: responding to a threat without waiting for you to intellectually confirm a threat is there.
None of this by itself proves anything. Experiencing these symptoms is data and deserves your curiosity, whether your symptoms ease dramatically the instant you’re away from work, or the opposite, where they stay with you, clouding everything you do with work always being in the back of your mind.
Your body was felt the toxic patterns long before you were willing to call consider your environment toxic.
Sign #2: Your read on what’s happening is continually challenged.
This sign goes beyond what you’re actually experiencing in the moment and makes you doubt your own perception. You mention an important project detail was changed without notice, and you’re told it was communicated and you must have missed it. You bring up someone’s comment that didn’t land quite right with you, and you’re told you took it the wrong way. You mention that something concerning happened and instead of it being addressed, it is minimized, denied, or spun so that you end up being the one who seems like they’re overreacting. Experience enough of these situations and you begin to run everything through a filter of whether it’s real or whether you’re making it into something bigger than it is. Going back and forth like this can be mentally exhausting.
If you continually second-guess whether what you experienced actually happened the way you remember it, that itself is information.
Sign #3: You’re out of the loop on things that affect you.
Decisions are made. Meetings are held. Information circulates among the people who supposedly need it, but somehow that circle doesn’t includes you, even when the outcome affects you directly. It could be that you learn about a change to your own project from a colleague in the hallway, or you find out a priority shifted weeks ago because someone mentions it as though everyone already knew. Once in a while this is a genuine oversight, the kind that happens in any organization. But when it becomes a pattern rather than an exception, it leaves you continually catching up on information that everyone else in the room seems to have walked in with, and it communicates something about where you stand. It usually has more to do with where information is being deliberately or carelessly withheld than with anything you’re doing wrong.
Sign #4: You’re competing with colleagues who should be your allies.
In a healthy team, co-workers work together to attain goals. They don’t compete with each other. In a toxic team, scarcity is built into the culture, which can show up as a team split in half: those who are “with” the toxic leader and those who aren’t. Or, it could look like favoritism that determines who gets the good projects or even a sense that there’s only room for one person to look good in any particular setting. Over time, people start hoarding information, playing it safe in meetings, and keeping paper trails of who said what, because the environment has made it unsafe to do otherwise. A workplace culture that pits people against each other rarely does so by accident, and this toxicity almost never stays contained to just one relationship.
When a coworker’s success starts to feel like a threat to yours, the environment has usually taught you to see it that way.
Sign #5: You’re managing everyone else’s mood.
In the beginning you may have been able to communicate with your team simply and effectively without second guessing your messaging. At some point, you found yourself tailoring your messages and choosing your words carefully based on how you anticipate the recipient reacting. If the message is an email, it can take three drafts, a full hour (or more) of tweaking, and a trusted colleague reading it over before you’re comfortable sending it to the recipient; and even then, you feel a cloud of stress and anxiety hovering over you as you wait for the recipient to answer.
If you’re communicating in person, you rehearse what you’re going to say so many times that by the time the conversation actually happens you’re a nervous wreck and think about it long after the conversation is over.
This type of communication is exhausting and keeps us continually on guard for the next bad thing to happen; causing our anxiety to spike. In situations like this, it’s worth noticing how much of your attention is going to what might happen rather than the projects you should actually be spending your time on.
Sign #6: You raised the concerns, and nothing changed.
Of the six signs of a toxic work environment, this one tends to be the most telling. You’ve gone to whoever is in charge at your workplace with real, specific, even documented concerns. During your conversation it feels like you were heard, they were sympathetic, and promised to look into it. You feel good in that moment. Like things will change. Then…weeks pass and the issue you raised is exactly where it was, except now you’re also the person who raised it, which carries its own awkwardness. If others share their concerns independently and still nothing changes, it becomes much harder to attribute the problem to one person’s sensitivity. Feeling listened to and being helped are not the same thing, and once an organization has shown you it’s capable of doing the first without making any steps toward the the second, it tells you something important about what to realistically expect going forward, no matter how the next conversation goes.
What these signs actually mean.
No single one of these signs proves anything on its own. Everyone has a rough week, an off meeting, or a colleague they don’t quite click with. What matters is the pattern where several of these signs show up together, persist over months rather than days, and don’t improve regardless of how much you adjust your attitude, your effort, or your approach.
When this is what’s going on at work, it deserves a second look. If you’re reading this and a few of these landed with a little too much accuracy, try noticing which signs you’ve explained away, and what you’ve told yourself each time one of them happens. This habit of explaining things away is common among highly capable people because it can feel like resilience, which is celebrated in both the corporate world and in life.
What you do with this awareness is a question about what you value as much as a question about your options going forward. And that’s exactly where the rest of this series is headed.
This is the first piece in a series I’m writing about toxic workplaces: why they’re especially hard on high achievers, how to decide whether to stay or go, and what to do if leaving isn’t an option yet. If today’s list felt uncomfortably familiar, the rest of the series is for you.
If you’re in Indiana, Ohio, or Minnesota, virtual sessions mean you can get support for this without adding another logistical hurdle to something that’s already exhausting. And if you’re in or near Bloomington, I can support you in person at my office on the square.
You don’t have to figure out whether it’s you or the workplace on your own.
No pressure, just a conversation.
Related Articles
—>Is It Imposter Syndrome, or Is It Your Workplace?
Additional Support
Whatever’s underneath this for you, work stress, imposter experiences, or wondering whether it’s time for a change, here’s more on how I can help with each:
—> Work stress and burnout therapy for professionals
—>Therapy for imposter syndrome
—> Career counseling for professionals navigating transitions