When Work Becomes a Mental Health Risk

There's a difference between a stressful job and a job that's destabilizing your mental health. I learned to tell them apart the hard way.

Every job has stress. That’s fine. I’m not going to sit here and say work should be some zen garden where nobody ever feels pressure. Stress is part of being alive, and learning to handle it is part of being an adult.

But there’s a line. And if you have a mood disorder, that line is closer than you think, and crossing it doesn’t just make you tired — it can destabilize your entire mental health in ways that take months to recover from.

I’ve crossed that line. More than once. And I want to talk about what it looked like, because from the outside it just looked like “a rough patch at work.”

The slow erosion

The first thing to understand is that it doesn’t start with a breakdown. It starts with sleep.

For me, the pattern was always the same. Workload increases. Deadlines stack up. A manager adds pressure in ways that feel personal rather than professional. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, your sleep starts to fray.

You’re lying awake thinking about tomorrow’s meeting. You’re waking up at 4 AM with your chest tight. You’re sleeping 5 hours instead of 7, then 4 instead of 5. And each night of bad sleep makes the next day harder, which makes the next night worse.

If you’re neurotypical, this cycle usually self-corrects. The deadline passes, the pressure eases, you catch up on sleep over the weekend. Done.

If you have bipolar, this cycle can trigger an episode. The sleep disruption isn’t just uncomfortable — it’s a clinical red flag. Multiple nights of reduced sleep is literally one of the earliest warning signs of mania or hypomania. And once that cascade starts, a weekend of rest might not be enough to stop it.

The manager problem

I’ve had managers who were tough but fair. Demanding but respectful. Those relationships produced stress, sure, but it was functional stress. The kind that pushes you to grow.

And I’ve had managers who were something else. Not just demanding — demoralizing. The kind who make you feel like your job is at risk for small mistakes. Who raise their voice, then act like nothing happened. Who create an environment where you’re not just working hard, you’re surviving.

There’s a specific flavor of workplace stress that comes from feeling psychologically unsafe. It’s not “I have a lot to do.” It’s “I don’t know if I’m going to get yelled at today.” The unpredictability is the thing. And for someone whose brain is already managing its own unpredictability, adding external unpredictability on top is like running two operating systems on hardware that can barely handle one.

I’m not going to name companies or people. That’s not the point. The point is that there’s a type of workplace dynamic that is genuinely dangerous for someone with a mood disorder, and it often looks from the outside like normal workplace friction.

When I knew it was time to leave

The signal wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t one big incident. It was looking at my tracking data and seeing the trend.

Mood had been declining for about three weeks. Sleep was disrupted — some nights barely 3-4 hours. Energy was either spiking (which sounds good but isn’t, in context) or crashing. My stability scores were consistently low. And the symptom notes I was logging — anxiety, irritability, mental fatigue, emotional flatness — were the same ones that had preceded my worst periods in the past.

The data was showing me a pattern I’d seen before. And last time I’d let it continue, things got really bad.

So I left. Walked away from the paycheck, the stability of employment, the structure that having a job provides. It was terrifying. I was the primary earner. I had financial obligations. There was no safety net.

But I also knew — from the data, not just from how I felt — that staying was going to cost me more than leaving would.

The aftermath

Leaving didn’t fix things overnight. My stability was at its lowest point when I resigned. The first few weeks were a mix of relief and free-falling anxiety. No income, no routine, no idea what was next.

But here’s what did happen: I started sleeping again. Within a week of leaving, my sleep normalized. Within two weeks, my mood started climbing. Slowly, not dramatically, but the trajectory changed. The data showed it clearly — removal of the stressor broke the cycle.

I eventually found a new role. A better one, in an environment that doesn’t make me feel unsafe. My data since then has been the most stable it’s ever been. Not perfect — there are still dips, still hard days. But the baseline shifted upward in a way that’s unmistakable when you look at the trend line.

How to know the difference

Not all work stress is a mental health risk. Here’s how I’ve learned to tell the difference:

Normal work stress is about the work itself. Tight deadline, complex problem, heavy workload. It’s uncomfortable but it has an end. When the project ships or the deadline passes, the stress resolves. Your sleep might be disrupted for a few days but it bounces back.

Mental health risk is about the environment. It’s persistent, it doesn’t resolve after any specific event, and it starts affecting your baseline. Your sleep isn’t disrupted because of one deadline — it’s disrupted generally. Your mood isn’t low because of one problem — it’s trending downward across weeks. And the symptoms you’re seeing in your data are the same ones that have preceded episodes in the past.

The key question I ask myself now: is this stress about something, or is it about everything? If it’s about something, I can deal with that something. If it’s a pervasive feeling of dread that doesn’t attach to any single cause, that’s the environment, and the environment needs to change.

Track it. Seriously.

I can’t say this enough: if you have a mood disorder and you work a demanding job, track your mental health daily. Not because you’re looking for problems, but because you need an early warning system.

Your brain will normalize the decline. You’ll adapt to sleeping 5 hours because it happened gradually. You’ll accept that you’re irritable because “work is just like that right now.” You’ll push through because that’s what adults do.

The data won’t normalize anything. It’ll show you the trend. And if the trend is heading somewhere you’ve been before and don’t want to go back to, you’ll see it in time to do something about it.

That’s not weakness. That’s engineering applied to your own life.

I build software for healthcare and I live with bipolar disorder. I’ve learned the hard way that protecting your mental health sometimes means walking away from things that look good on paper. More about the tool I built for this at steadyline.app.