I’ve long had a suspicion that the happiest people in the workplace are the ones who just don’t care as much.

In every office, you’ll encounter a few. They do averagely good work, rarely apologise for anything and pack up cheerily at 5.30pm on the dot every day. They use their lunch breaks to watch YouTube or sell things on eBay. And they always leave after a year and a half, for a better position and more money elsewhere. The Johnny That’ll-Dos. The Susan Shrugs-a-lots. I envy them.

Because staring glumly at their backs as they head to the pub is a Katie Cares-too-much, and she’s frazzled. Not necessarily from being any better, but from worrying far more that she’s not. Her lunch hours are eaten up with extra tasks; redrafting emails to nail the perfect breezy yet efficient tone, and racing back to her desk to trill “Sorry sorry, Pret was manic!” to people who hadn’t even noticed she was gone. I know this, because I’m that person.



She’s more likely to be a she, too. Numerous studies have found workplace stress levels to be higher for women – up to 67% higher for women between 34 and 44, as last year’s study by the Health and Safety Executive found. But that stress is not just because we’re more likely to pick up the kids. We’re also picking up the emotional slack.

Where is all the pressure coming from?



Clinical psychologist Dr Jessamy Hibberd, co-author of This Book Will Make You Calm explains that workplace anxiety results from a mixture of external demands (work you’re given by others) and internal demands. “These are the pressures you place on yourself,” she says. “For example, checking and rechecking work, spending too long on each task, taking work home and setting excessively high standards.”

Talking to school friends about their work woes (office politics, inconsistent managers, unreasonable workloads – the full megamix) makes me wish that somewhere along the way, we’d been taught not to care quite as much. As promising students we were told ‘aim high! Join in! You can do anything!’ – but nobody thought to mention we could also aim lower, opt out or do exactly what our pay cheque required and no more.

While muting our devices, streamlining our social lives and shaking off the haters have fast become new ambitions for the 21st century, can we also shrug off our once-steely work ethic and say ‘pfft ... that’s good enough’?

One fan of caring less is Sarah Knight, reformed overachiever and author of The Life Changing Magic of Not Giving a F**k – a parody of Marie Kondo’s famous tidying up bible that promises, rather than rearranging our drawers, to declutter our minds.



Knight has had more than one boss in her career tell her she cares too much. “For a long time, I couldn’t figure out whether it was a veiled insult or a piece of advice,” she says. “I would often look around at my co-workers – mostly the men – and think, how are they not reacting to all this bullshit?”

How indeed, when water off one duck’s back can feel like enough to drown another? “I think one important part of caring less is not catering to the male ego,” says Hazel, 28, an advertising account manager who is used to working in male-dominated teams.



“One way I found to keep myself going in my last job was realising that the male managers who were making my life difficult were in a testosterone-filled environment that encouraged them to shout the loudest, whether it was helpful or not. I thought ‘is that how I want to be?’ and ultimately, the answer was no.”



What else can I do to become unbothered?



Dr Jessamy advises: “Rather than caring about everything, choose what’s most important and let go of the pressure on the things that don’t matter to you so much.” And so for the past week I have tried to let go of a list that includes: sounding pleasant in emails; sounding clever in meetings; how many retweets I get; whether I offer to make people tea enough; whether subeditors hate me; whether I should be trying to write a book, or at least trying to read one; whether I write too little about serious issues that matter and too much about custard and 90s pop culture. But everyone’s list will be different.

Knight advocates ducking out of professional life’s more pointless rituals, like conference calls. “I have never been on a conference call where something actually got decided or accomplished,” she says. So during the last year or so of her corporate life, she has simply said she can’t make it and will catch up with the people on the call later. She hasn’t missed anything important and has gained hours of productivity.

“If you can free up your mental clutter from the less important things, you’re bound to have more time and energy for the kinds of accomplishments and relationships that lead to greater success,” says Knight.“But I’ve stopped caring quite so much about what other people perceive as success anyway.”



Talk to us on Twitter via @GdnWomenLeaders and sign up to become a member of the Women in Leadership network and receive our newsletter