Mental health and your career: our top resources

The idea this week: people pursuing altruistic careers often struggle with imposter syndrome, anxiety, and moral perfectionism. And we’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand what helps.

More than 20% of working US adults said their work harmed their mental health in 2023, according to a survey from the American Psychological Association.

Jobs can put a strain on anyone. And if you aim — like many of our readers do — to help others with your career, your work may feel extra demanding.

Work that you feel really matters can be much more interesting and fulfilling. But it can also sometimes be a double-edged sword — after all, your success doesn’t only matter for you but also for those you’re trying to help.

So this week, we want to share a roundup of some of our top content on mental health:

1. An interview with our previous CEO on having a successful career with depression, anxiety, and imposter syndrome — this is one of our most popular interviews ever. It gives a remarkably honest and insightful account of what struggles with mental health can feel like from the inside, how they can derail a career, and how you can get back on track. It also provides lots of practical tips for how you can navigate these issues, and tries to offer a corrective to common advice that doesn’t work for everyone.

2. An interview with therapist Hannah Boettcher on the mental health challenges that come with trying to have a big impact — the conversation covers therapy effectiveness, burnout, exposure therapy, tips for finding the right therapist, and more. The episode is particularly relevant for people grappling with perfectionism, imposter syndrome, moral demandingness, or anxiety related to existential risks.

3. My experience with imposter syndrome — and how to (partly) overcome it — researcher and 80,000 Hours podcast host Luisa Rodriguez wrote an in-depth article on her own experience with imposter syndrome. She describes how despite evidence of her strengths, she struggled to believe she was good enough for the roles she’s had. The article offers a lot of actionable tips for coping with and overcoming these feelings.

4. An interview with Tim LeBon on how altruistic perfectionism is self-defeating — Tim is a registered psychotherapist, accredited CBT therapist, life coach, and author of 365 Ways to be More Stoic. One of the subjects he focuses on is moral perfectionism — a pernicious thought pattern that may be more common for people who are interested in 80,000 Hours’ work.

5. All the evidence-based advice we found on how to be more successful in any job — this chapter of our career guide makes a key point: if helpful, you should make mental health your top priority. I think this is good as personal advice and career advice, and it’s what I’d tell a friend. It will be better for you and your altruistic goals in the long run.

6. A discussion with Luisa and digital minds researcher Robert Long on how to make independent research more fun — this chat specifically discusses how challenges like imposter syndrome can impair your ability to do high-impact research, and it provides tips on how to avoid common traps and make your research time more productive.

7. An interview with Randy Nesse on why evolution left us so vulnerable to depression and anxiety — why, exactly, are humans so prone to various forms of mental illness? Nesse argues in his book Good Reasons for Bad Feelings that there are compelling explanations for the origins of some mental illnesses in evolutionary psychology.

8. A blog post on how to cope with rejection in your career — even if you don’t have major struggles with mental illness, you’re still very likely to face difficult rejections in your career. This is even more true if you’re particularly ambitious and aim for high-impact opportunities — which we encourage!

To be clear, we’re not mental health experts, and we don’t offer medical advice. We’d recommend seeing a doctor as your first step if you’re struggling with serious issues. But in our experience, hearing from others on what they’ve learned (and how they’ve struggled) can be helpful as well!

Learn more:

• On a recent episode of the “How I Learned to Love Shrimp” podcast, Tania Luna discussed the importance of employee health and wellbeing for animal advocates.
• The UK’s National Health Service publishes useful, evidence-based advice on treatments for most conditions.
• We recommend this summary of treatments for depression, this summary of treatments for anxiety, and Mind Ease, an app created by Spencer Greenberg.
• We’d also recommend It’s Not Always Depression by Hilary Hendel.
• Some on our team have found Overcoming Perfectionism and Overcoming Low Self-Esteem very helpful.