The Student Room Group

Retail job is killing my mental health. Need advice

This is my first retail job, and so far I've just not had a great experience. It's been about 3 weeks now and my anxiety, instead of improving, seems to be getting much more severe as each shift goes by. This is ironic, since the whole point of me getting a retail job was to improve my anxiety. Not to degrade it further to the point where I'm not having frequent panic attacks before my shifts, and savouring every moment I get at home religiously.

I feel like I'm constantly clueless as to what's going on, and I'm starting to get really severe brain fog while at work that stops me from focusing and just generally dissociating while on shift. I'm also the least sociable employee there, mostly because socializing takes a lot of energy away, energy I can't spare while at work. What's really been the last straw is that they have given me extra shifts (without consulting me first) as the sale is coming up. Shifts eating up both weekend days first thing in the morning. Oh, and another thing I am missing two pay cheques now. I get paid weekly, and both have had my entire wage deducted, leaving me with £0 for my hard work. I've contacted my store manager, but they don't see, to be solving the issue. And every time I try to chase them up about it, I get dismissed. That was one of the final nails in the coffin on top of my extra shifts and social anxiety, and now I just want to quit. Any advice? I've known retail was a poor option for me, but with a gap-year, I haven't had much of a choice.
Regarding the pay deductions, I'd suggest getting in touch with your local CAB. Wage theft is a crime! Might also be worth seeing if there is a trade union for your profession/employer that you can join (although they can't help with anything that happened before you joined them).

For the other things, I can sympathise as I had similar experiences working in customer service (albeit at a call centre rather than in retail directly, for those experiences). In the end I just had to leave the role and haven't been able to go back to similar roles, although for a while I was able to manage it well enough. I'd recommend speaking to your GP about your anxiety generally as they might be able to help.

Do reflect on what aspects of your work are causing the anxiety though, and how that might be different (or not) in a different role. If it's dealing with difficult cusomters then that is certainly a challenging aspect but if you're a new starter I think you should reasonably be able to refer them to a supervisor - if it's a real issue though you may want to look into e.g. more office based roles. If it's just because you are still learning things and not yet 100% on all the systems, then I would say not to worry too much, as that will always be the case in any job at first - and for retail it definitely takes time learning how to use all the POS systems etc!

As for the actual work, I think it may not be "brain fog"/"dissociation" as a psychiatric issue but just the natural boredom of such roles. When I previously had worked in retail it definitely was mind-numbingly dull - especially if it was quiet and there weren't any/many customers. I don't really have a solution for that but I guess it helps to have an active imagination? :redface:

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