"The new job will fix it"

Now the specific ones, because the hum picks its objects and the job is the commonest. You're not bullied and you're not underpaid, or not badly. You're tired of it. The work has stopped being interesting, or the place has, and you've decided that the tiredness is the job's and would stay behind if you left.

Chapter 3 gave you the two job-change studies and I'll only remind you of the shape. Boswell and colleagues, low before, high immediately after, then down. Chadi and Hetschko, an unusually high lift for people who chose to move, short term only, and no lift at all for people who moved because their workplace closed. The lift was in the choosing.

Now use the chapter 6 test. Does the tiredness have a shape? If it's worse on the days a particular person is in and better when they're not, if it arrived when the work changed in a particular way and would leave if the work changed back, then the job is a cause and a new job is a fix. Change it, and expect the change to hold. If the tiredness is the same across the good weeks and the bad ones, if it was there in the previous job too, if it's really a tiredness with working rather than with this work, then the new job will give you the season and then hand you back the tiredness with a new logo on it.

There's a third case, and it's worth its own paragraph because it's common and hard to see. The job isn't the cause, but the way you're doing it is. You're working long hours out of habit, or you're bringing the work home in your head and giving your family what's left, and those are patterns that will follow you to the next employer because they're yours and not the job's. Two earlier books in this series, The work will still be there and Leave it at work, are about those patterns, and if either title makes you wince then the fix you need is in those books and not on the job board.

If you do move, one more thing. The people in Chadi and Hetschko's data who got the lift were the ones who chose to go, and choosing is a thing you can do towards a job as well as away from one. Leaving because of something has a season and then a hangover. Going to something, a particular kind of work you've named and can describe on a Thursday afternoon, is at least a forecast with content in it. Ask which you're doing. If the answer is "because of", you know the shape of what's coming.