Being made redundant can affect you in ways you did not expect. Coping with redundancy can become particularly difficult when losing your job starts to affect more than your income.
The obvious concerns may be practical. How long will the money last? What jobs are available? What should you tell recruiters? How quickly do you need to find something else?
A few weeks later, you may realise that losing the job is affecting you in ways you had not expected.
You sit down to look at jobs and struggle to get going. Roles you would once have considered leave you cold. You wonder whether you were too highly paid before, whether you have become too senior, whether someone younger or cheaper will be preferred. The thought of sitting in an interview and having to prove yourself all over again can feel surprisingly exhausting.
Perhaps there is another question underneath all of that:
What do I actually want to do now?
For years, your career may have provided a reasonably clear direction. Each role led somewhere. You built experience, became more competent, took on more responsibility and got used to being someone other people relied upon.
Then the role disappears and the next step is no longer obvious.
Redundancy can affect much more than income. It can disturb your confidence, routine, relationships, sense of purpose and some of the assumptions you have gradually built about who you are.
Research supports the idea that losing work can affect wellbeing in significant ways. A 2023 meta-analysis brought together 46 samples from 29 longitudinal studies across developed economies and found unemployment was associated with poorer mental health and life satisfaction, with greater effects as unemployment lasted longer. That research concerns unemployment more broadly rather than redundancy specifically, but it helps explain why losing work can matter psychologically as well as financially.
When work has become part of who you are
Most of us know that work provides money. Its other functions can be less obvious until they suddenly disappear.
Work gives shape to your week. It gives you somewhere you are expected to be. There are people who know you in a particular role. There are problems you know how to solve, decisions you are trusted to make and things you have become good at through years of experience.
Over time, all of this can become woven into your sense of yourself.
You might have been a manager, teacher, accountant, engineer, salesperson, administrator, director, technician or partner in a business. The particular title matters less than the fact that you spent years becoming competent at something.
Then somebody asks a question that used to be very easy to answer:
“What do you do?”
Now there can be a hesitation.
You might say, “I was…” or “I’m between roles at the moment,” and try to make it sound casual. The conversation moves on, but you may remain conscious of what you have just said.
This can be difficult to understand if you have always thought of work as simply something you do rather than who you are.
A 2024 study using UK Understanding Society data found that life satisfaction fell when people became unemployed. Among the men studied, the effect was greater for those with a stronger work identity. That does not mean work identity is inherently unhealthy, nor that everyone experiences redundancy in the same way. It does suggest that losing a job can have greater personal significance when work has become an important part of how someone understands themselves.
Why has redundancy knocked my confidence so much?
There can be a large gap between what you know intellectually and what you feel.
You may understand the commercial explanation perfectly well. The company restructured. Costs had to come down. A division closed. Your layer of management disappeared. Other capable people lost their jobs too.
You may even have made redundancy decisions yourself earlier in your career.
And yet the organisational decision can start to feel like a judgement about you.
Why me?
Was I really as valued as I thought?
Was I as good as I believed I was?
What if I cannot get another role at the same level?
The job search can reinforce these doubts. You see a position and immediately start calculating. The salary is substantially lower than you were earning. Perhaps they will think you are overqualified. Another role looks interesting, but you have not done one part of it for several years. You wonder whether employers will prefer someone younger, cheaper or easier to mould.
Before long, uncertainty about the market can become uncertainty about your own value.
For people who are accustomed to solving problems through effort and competence, this can be particularly uncomfortable. Most of your working life may have taught you that when something matters, you work harder, learn more and find a way through it.
Redundancy gives you less control.
You can speak to recruiters, prepare carefully and make good applications. You cannot decide whether another organisation wants you.
That loss of agency can be difficult when being capable and taking action have been central to how you have managed life for years.
The strange loss of motivation
Redundancy seems as though it ought to create urgency.
You need another job, so you should get on with finding one.
Sometimes that is exactly what happens. For other people, motivation seems to disappear at precisely the point they think they should be most motivated.
You wake up later than usual. Make coffee. Check LinkedIn. Look at a few vacancies. Think about updating your CV. An hour passes and somehow you have done very little.
By lunchtime you are annoyed with yourself.
This can feel especially strange if you were previously able to run a team, manage several problems at once, move between meetings and make decisions all day. Sending a straightforward email to a recruiter should be easy, yet it feels like an effort.
There may be several things happening here.
Redundancy often begins well before your final day. There may have been rumours, restructuring announcements, consultation meetings, closed-door conversations and weeks of uncertainty while you were still expected to function normally at work.
A 2026 longitudinal study followed more than 14,000 people across 4,251 redundancy events. The researchers found that mental health was already declining before job loss occurred. Among people who later returned to work, mental health tended to recover substantially. The findings suggest that the period leading up to redundancy can itself be difficult, especially when there has been prolonged uncertainty.
When you do not know what you want next
Redundancy can also bring you face to face with a question that years of working have allowed you to avoid:
Do I actually want another version of the job I just lost?
Earlier in your career, the direction may have been clearer. More experience. Promotion. Greater responsibility. Better salary.
Later, things can become less straightforward.
Perhaps you are perfectly capable of getting another senior position but feel tired at the thought of returning to the same environment. Maybe you have spent years travelling, dealing with organisational politics, carrying responsibility or finding it difficult to switch off.
Perhaps part of you sees redundancy as an opportunity to change direction, but you have no idea what you want instead.
People around you may try to encourage you.
“You could do anything now.”
“Maybe this will turn out to be the best thing that happened.”
“You’ve always talked about doing something different.”
They may mean it kindly.
But when you have followed a recognisable career path for twenty years, being told you can do anything can be more confusing than reassuring. You still have to work out what you actually want.
There can be pressure to turn redundancy quickly into a positive story about reinvention. Sometimes you need longer to understand what has ended before you can make a useful decision about what comes next.
The shame of being made redundant
Shame does not always announce itself clearly.
It may appear when you see somebody you have not spoken to for a while and anticipate them asking what you do.
You may avoid changing your LinkedIn profile because removing the old role makes the situation feel more real.
Perhaps you meet somebody at a social event and they ask the ordinary question:
“What do you do?”
Your old answer is still there. Then you remember that it belongs to the past.
There can also be shame at home.
You may have been accustomed to providing well for your family. Now you are explaining that the holiday needs to wait, that spending needs to change or that you would rather not commit to something until another salary is coming in.
Perhaps money genuinely is tight. Perhaps you have savings and a reasonable redundancy package but are frightened to spend them because you have no idea when they will be replaced.
Either way, the conversation can touch something deeper than the money.
You may hear yourself saying, “We just need to be sensible for a while,” while experiencing it privately as having let your family down.
NHS Every Mind Matters notes that unemployment and money problems can affect self-esteem and may bring feelings of guilt or shame. Separate NHS guidance on coping with financial worries says that feeling low or anxious after losing your job or being made redundant can be a normal response and does not necessarily mean that you have depression or an anxiety disorder.
That distinction matters. Being deeply affected by redundancy does not by itself make your response pathological.
When redundancy comes home with you
The decision may have happened at work, but much of the emotional impact can unfold at home.
The first few days can even feel pleasant. You finally have some time. There are jobs around the house you have been putting off. You can exercise, walk the dog, collect the children or meet somebody for coffee.
Then the days begin to stretch.
Your partner leaves for work. The children go to school. You are still in the house.
You may become more irritable than usual. A well-intentioned question about how the job search is going feels intrusive. Your partner sends you a vacancy they have seen and you become disproportionately angry.
They may be trying to help.
You may hear something quite different:
Why haven’t you sorted this out yet?
Money conversations can become loaded too. Should you still book the holiday? How much do you cut back? How long will the redundancy money last? When do you tell the children that things need to change?
A British longitudinal study using data from around 13,000 couples found that more involuntary and unexpected forms of job separation, including redundancy, were associated with larger reductions in wellbeing than more voluntary forms of leaving work. Importantly, effects could also extend to partners.
Redundancy can therefore become something the household is living with rather than simply an employment problem belonging to one person.
When the structure of your life disappears
A working life contains hundreds of small structures you barely notice while they are there.
You wake at a particular time. Get ready. Travel or log on. Speak to people. Someone expects something from you. You know what Monday means and you know what Friday means.
Then a surprising amount of that disappears overnight.
Without it, days can lose their edges.
There is also something peculiar about looking for work. There is rarely a clear point at which you have done enough.
You could make another call, rewrite the CV again, contact another recruiter, search one more website or spend another hour researching a company.
This can leave you feeling that you should always be doing something while finding it increasingly difficult to do very much at all.
Some structure can help, but the point is not simply to recreate a working day devoted entirely to job hunting. It can also matter to allow parts of your life to belong to something other than finding employment.
It is easy to underestimate how much of your day work was organising for you until it stops. You may then find yourself having to create that structure for yourself at exactly the point when your motivation is already low.
Redundancy can involve grief
Grief is usually associated with somebody dying, but our responses to other significant losses can contain some of the same feelings.
The NHS guidance on grief and loss explicitly includes losing a job among the experiences that can bring feelings of grief.
With redundancy, several things can be ending at once.
The role itself may be gone, but there can also be the loss of colleagues, routine, income, status, belonging and a future you had assumed was going to happen.
There can be relief as well.
Maybe the job had become exhausting. Perhaps you had considered leaving for years. Some part of you may even feel pleased that somebody else finally made the decision.
Relief does not cancel loss.
Nor does a generous redundancy package.
You can understand the commercial logic and still feel angry. You can know the decision was not personal and still experience it personally. You can recognise that other people have more serious financial difficulties and still find your own situation painful.
There is room for contradictory reactions.
Where do you start when you do not know what comes next?
Eventually you may need to make practical decisions about your career.
But two different questions can easily become tangled together:
What am I going to do next?
and
What has this experience done to me?
The second question can influence the answer you give to the first.
If redundancy has badly damaged your confidence, a much smaller role might feel safer, irrespective of whether that is what you genuinely want.
If you feel humiliated, getting an equally senior or highly paid position quickly may begin to feel like the only way to prove that you are still successful.
If you are exhausted, every career option can look unappealing.
If you are angry, you may want to abandon an industry you previously enjoyed.
There is a difference between deciding that you want something different and wanting to escape how your previous career currently makes you feel.
Understanding what redundancy has stirred up can create more room to make decisions from a clearer place.
That still may not tell you immediately what job to take. It can help you understand the person who is making the decision.
When one recent event overshadows years of competence
One of the difficult things about redundancy is how quickly a recent experience can fill the foreground.
You have spent perhaps fifteen, twenty or thirty years developing experience, judgement and relationships. Yet one organisational decision can suddenly become the most emotionally vivid piece of evidence you have about yourself.
You may begin judging an entire career through the fact that its most recent chapter ended without your choosing.
The competence you developed has not disappeared, though your relationship with it may have changed.
Research cannot tell an individual person exactly how they will recover, but it does provide some useful perspective. The 2023 meta-analysis found that longer unemployment tended to be associated with greater reductions in wellbeing. The 2026 study also found recovery in mental health among participants who subsequently became re-employed. These are average patterns rather than predictions about what will happen to any one person, but they reinforce the idea that the period following redundancy is a transition rather than a fixed psychological state.
When you do not know when something will end, it can easily start to feel permanent.
When talking to someone can help
There are excellent sources of help for redundancy rights, money, CVs and finding another job. Counselling has a different purpose.
You may want somewhere to talk about why the redundancy meeting keeps replaying in your mind, why your confidence has fallen so sharply or why you feel ashamed when people ask what you do.
Perhaps you are increasingly anxious about the future, irritable at home or finding it difficult to motivate yourself.
Maybe you spent most of your adult life knowing roughly where your career was going and now have no idea what you actually want.
Or perhaps you are still functioning reasonably well but do not quite feel like yourself.
Counselling can give you somewhere to understand what the job represented, what its loss has brought into focus and how you are responding to the uncertainty you now face.
Before becoming a counsellor, I spent around 35 years in business and finance, much of it in senior leadership. I know environments where responsibility, performance, difficult decisions and being relied upon become part of everyday life. I also know that people who are very accustomed to solving problems can find it particularly uncomfortable when effort and competence cannot provide an immediate solution.
My role as a counsellor is different from that of a career coach. I am less interested in telling you what your next career move should be than in helping you understand what is happening to you while you try to work that out.
Sometimes the question is:
How do I get another job?
Sometimes another question is sitting underneath it:
Who am I when I no longer have the job that used to tell me something important about who I was?
And, eventually:
What do I want the next part of my working life to be about?
If redundancy, uncertainty about work or a change in career is affecting your confidence, relationships, anxiety or sense of purpose, I offer face-to-face counselling in Shenfield, near Brentwood, Essex, as well as online counselling where appropriate.
You can also read more about my counselling for work stress and burnout in Brentwood.
If you would like to talk about how redundancy or a change in work is affecting you, you can arrange a free 20-minute introductory call.
Research and sources
Gedikli C, Miraglia M, Connolly S, Bryan M & Watson D (2023). The relationship between unemployment and wellbeing: an updated meta-analysis of longitudinal evidence. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology.
Di Nallo A (2024). Job separation and well-being in couples’ perspective in the United Kingdom. Socio-Economic Review.
Longhi S, Nandi A, Bryan M, Connolly S & Gedikli C (2024). Life satisfaction and unemployment: The role of gender attitudes and work identity. Scottish Journal of Political Economy.
Bargain O, Hérault N & Nettle D (2026). Job loss and mental health: The role of anticipation and re-employment in recovery patterns. Social Science & Medicine.
NHS Every Mind Matters. Money worries and mental health.