Hate your job? Why you shouldn’t ‘rage quit’ this January

So, how are you feeling this Blue Monday? It’s probably been a struggle to get out of bed. Maybe you’ve been given an unrealistic deadline, or your passive-aggressive co-worker just made a snarky comment. Maybe someone used the last of your almond milk, despite the extremely polite Post-it note informing colleagues about your lactose intolerance. Everyone fantasises about quitting their job from time to time, right? Today is not the day to do it.

While it can be cathartic to picture your very own Jerry Maguire moment – storming out, causing a scene, sticking it to the man and taking a fish (and Renée Zellweger) with you as you leave, for most, such scenes stay firmly in the realm of fantasy. However, on days like today (officially the most depressing day of the year), a few will flip the fantasy into reality. According to a survey of more than 3,500 Brits, commissioned by international schools group ACS, one in 10 workers said they planned to quit their job this January. Nearly a quarter said their work was making them unhappy.

It’s hardly surprising that the temptation to walk out can be stronger in January than at any other time of year. The combination of having just had time off with loved ones, being plagued by January blues and feeling panicked by the “new year, new you” pressure is powerful, cautions Professor Anthony C Klotz of UCL’s School of Management. His upcoming book, Jolted, explores the science behind why people choose to leave or stay in a job.

He cites research that shows returning to work after any kind of holiday is a negative experience for many employees, despite the common expectation that time off will recharge and revitalise us. “You’ve experienced this completely different, more relaxing environment that gives you time to reflect on life – and then all of a sudden, you come back into the workplace, and there’s a really strong contrast effect between the stress levels you had on vacation and the ones you have now,” he says.

Another piece of research asked participants to attribute different levels of positive and negative emotions to everyday activities over the course of a few weeks. Unsurprisingly, work had the least positive and most negative emotions attached to it; spending time with family and leisure time were at the other end of the spectrum. “There’s this very normal contrast effect where we’ve all just spent two weeks with family and friends enjoying leisure time, and then we come back to work. There’s maybe nothing wrong with work, but it’s less happy and less satisfying than what we just did. It’s very normal to feel this roller coaster of emotions, says Klotz, pointing out that they affect everyone from junior staff to the CEO.

Julian Lighton, author of Navigating Your Next: Discover the Career You Want and the Path to Get There and one of Silicon Valley’s leading business coaches, describes returning to work after Christmas and New Year as the ultimate example of the “Sunday Scaries”. “You’ve been off for a week, two weeks, three weeks, depending upon your particular situation, and suddenly you’re immersed back. And so that pressure of being back in something, where you actually have to do something, is very often a significant trigger.”

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It could be that the employee is being asked to be accountable, or hop on a call they don’t want to be on, or “some proximate thing that really, really winds them up”. A common response to that feeling, particularly if it comes off the back of longer-term underlying frustrations, is “quiet quitting”: staying in one’s role but doing the bare minimum to fulfil the job requirements and nothing more.

For a select few, it will prompt something referred to as “rage quitting” or “impulsive quitting”: resigning as a reactive, unplanned manoeuvre because you’ve suddenly reached boiling point. According to research, only around 5-10 per cent of resignations fall into this category, estimates Klotz.

“What precedes impulsive quitting is a spike in negative emotions caused by an event,” he explains. “It can be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, where it’s the final incident in a long-term accumulation of stressors that have led to burnout. Or it could be that you’ve been on autopilot coasting along, not really thinking about your relationship with work very much, and a negative event happens that causes a negative spike in your emotions – it goes from zero to 60.”

Research has shown that the “event” itself typically comes from one of two places. The first, unsurprisingly, is a person’s manager. It could stem from a disagreement, personality clash or perceived incompetence; Klotz describes in his book an instance in which an employee threw in the towel immediately after his manager made a derogatory comment about his daughter.

The second type of event is external – something has occurred in the worker’s personal life. Maybe you or somebody in your family gets some negative health news. “It puts things into perspective and makes you realise you can’t spend a minute more in your current job,” says Klotz. This can happen even to people who like their jobs; suddenly understanding in a visceral way that they have a limited amount of time on this Earth prompts them to rethink every aspect of their life.

In may seem that making a shock decision like rage quitting could be good for us, forcing us to proactively pursue new opportunities if we’ve been stuck in a rut. Jennifer Aniston’s character Rachel Green in Friends only successfully builds her dream career in fashion after impulsively resigning from her job at the coffee house – heeding Chandler’s advice that she needs “the fear” in order to force her hand.

In fact, “job hugging” – a workplace trend of clinging onto a job, even if there’s little satisfaction or room for development or growth – is on the rise. Monster’s 2025 Job Hugging Report found that 75 per cent of US employees planned to stay put until the end of 2027, while nearly half (48 per cent) said they were staying in their current jobs out of fear and economic uncertainty. “Job security and stability have become emotional safety nets,” said Vicki Salemi, career expert at Monster. “The new loyalty is about survival, not necessarily satisfaction.”

Yet despite the fact that languishing in a role that no longer serves or stretches is clearly not a great long-term career plan, experts typically don’t recommend rage quitting.

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“The only exception would be if there’s a time-limited, can’t-miss opportunity that you want to seize, or the source of your desire to rage quit is really egregious and harming your wellbeing or causing trauma at a rapid rate,” says Klotz. Most of the time, though, our emotions are pretty variable – it’s worth waiting and seeing, he advises.

“Consider what are the things I really love about this job? What are the things I don’t like so much? What are my other opportunities that are out there, and what are the up and downsides of those? Sit with those questions for a while and get a check on how green the grass is on the other side,” says Klotz.

Studies have shown that, on average, people are either no happier or a little bit less happy after they move jobs compared to their prior position. “We think it’s going to be great, but it turns out it’s just a different set of dissatisfiers there,” says Klotz. Researcher Wendy Boswell coined the term “honeymoon hangover effect” to denote this feeling. For the first few weeks or months after starting a new job, everything seems rosy. Then there are some disappointments or setbacks, expectations aren’t met, and reality sets in. It’s worth ensuring, therefore, that any move is calculated and thought through to avoid that “out of the frying pan, into the fire” feeling.

It’s also extremely likely that burning bridges in a fit of pique, either by walking out suddenly or actually losing it with a boss or colleagues, will damage your career in the long run. “It’s very bad for brand and identity,” cautions Lighton. “You’ve got a serious problem if you do it more than once, because most industries are relatively small, and you get a reputation that is very difficult to get rid of.”

Rage quitting can have the effect of “disabling” yourself, he adds – it embeds an idea within you that you don’t have enough resilience to handle trials and weather storms. It builds an interior narrative that, when the going gets tough, you get going.

More broadly speaking, the current climate is far from optimal for trading in a stable income for uncertainty. UK unemployment may climb to an 11-year high in 2026, 48 leading economists predicted in The Times’s annual Economists Survey. Unemployment has already been on the up in recent months, hitting a four-year high of 5.1 per cent in October 2025, while available vacancy numbers have declined.

If you’ve returned to work and found yourself feeling fed up, Lighton recommends two simple techniques for bridging the gap between perception and reality. One is called the Proof Jar: every day, write down on a piece of paper one thing that’s going well at work and put it in a jar. Every week, read back over these. “The brain works on concrete things, on recognising signals – so you basically teach yourself that you’re making progress and that you’re feeling good, and that reduces your stress and symptoms of reaction and rejection,” says Lighton.

The second tactic is called the Three-Line Night Reset. At the end of every day, write down the answers to three questions: what drained you that day? What helped you? And what did you handle or do better than last year? “If you write those things down, particularly through the months of January and February, you end up seeing much more of your reality, rather than the assumption set that builds up that everything’s going badly and everyone’s against me,” counsels Lighton.

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All that isn’t to say you should gloss over serious problems – don’t stick at a job you hate indefinitely just for the sake of it. But take your time and being sure about your next move before pulling the trigger. Klotz recommends assessing four key “buckets” and how full they are: happiness and satisfaction with the day-to-day job itself, such as the tasks you’re performing; satisfaction with your team and the people you work with; satisfaction with the meaning and purpose behind the work you’re doing; and an alignment in vision and values of the organisation and the people around you. If three or four of the “buckets” are net negative, you’ve likely reached the point when an exit strategy is needed.

Even then, handing in your notice might not be necessary. It could mean you talk to your boss about adapting your role or shifting focus; it might mean looking for a lateral move within your organisation; it might mean reshaping the boundaries of your work. It might even mean “quiet quitting” temporarily while you lean back and weigh up your direction of travel. “There are many other options that you can try before quitting,” says Klotz.

Sit tight, give it time – and leave the dramatic, storming out scenes to Tom Cruise.