I Dread Going to Work Because of My Boss: What It Means and What to Do

Let’s start with the truth nobody says out loud: that knot in your stomach on Sunday night is not weakness. It’s data.

Your body is keeping a record your mind keeps arguing with. The dread that starts creeping in around dinner on Sunday, the tension on the drive in, the relief that floods you when his meeting gets canceled — that is your system telling you that work has stopped being a place of pressure and become a place of threat. Pressure is deadlines and standards. Threat is a person.

I know that dread personally. I carried it through more than one organization, in more than one uniform, before I understood what it was measuring.

What the Dread Is Actually Measuring

Here’s the question that matters: is your dread about the work, or about him?

Demanding jobs create stress, but stress from work has a shape — it rises before deadlines and falls after them. Dread about a person is different. It’s constant, it’s unpredictable, and it follows his moods instead of the calendar. If you find yourself reading his face when he walks in, rehearsing conversations in the shower, and measuring your days by his temperature — good day, bad day — then somewhere along the way, he became the weather of your life.

And here’s the part I had to learn the hard way: if this started after your successes rather than your failures — after the promotion, the praise, the win that got noticed — you may be dealing with something specific. The Bible calls it the spirit of Saul: a leader whose insecurity turns your excellence into his threat. Scripture says that after the crowd praised David, “Saul eyed David from that day and forward” (1 Samuel 18:9). David’s dread had a start date. Yours probably does too.

The Cost Ledger Most People Never Total

Before deciding what to do, do something most people avoid: total the bill.

There’s a ledger this situation has been running that never shows up on a paycheck — the sleep you’re not getting, the Sunday hours lost to Monday’s shadow, the shortness with your kids, the person your spouse says you’re becoming, the health symptoms you’ve stopped mentioning. A job that is consuming the life it’s supposed to fund has inverted its purpose. No salary buys those years back.

Write it down. Actually seeing the total changes the conversation you’re having with yourself.

Six Questions That Tell You If It Can Be Survived

Not every hard season means leave. Some situations improve; some bosses move on; some storms pass. So run the arithmetic instead of the emotions. Ask yourself, honestly, in writing:

1. Is the treatment escalating — write-ups, formal complaints, HR appearing where it never did?
2. What specifically would have to change for this to get better — and is any of it actually changing?
3. Is his position getting stronger — new allies above him, your allies leaving?
4. Has the cost moved into your body and your home?
5. Am I starting to change — bitterness, cynicism, a hardness that isn’t me?
6. Have I genuinely tried the internal exits — transfers, other departments — and found them sealed?

One or two yeses: strengthen your position and keep playing wisely. Three or more, trending worse: the situation has answered your question, and it’s time to plan a departure — a planned one, on your timeline, not a Sunday-night resignation that hands him exactly what he wanted.

While You Decide, Protect Yourself

Keep your work excellent — it’s your shield, not his gift. Start a private record of incidents, dates, and witnesses. Rebuild the parts of your life he’s been shrinking: the boundaries, the people, the faith, the things that remind you that this job is one room in your house, not the whole address. And take the dread seriously enough to talk to someone — a counselor, a pastor, a doctor. Getting help carrying it is strength, not surrender.

Go Deeper

I wrote a whole field manual for people living this exact dread — how to diagnose whether your boss is demanding or dangerous, why your best work made it worse, and the complete playbook for surviving him or leaving him well: The Spirit of Saul: Surviving the Boss Who Wants to See You Fall.

The dread is real. But it is not the end of your story — and you were built for more than bracing.

Commissioner William Epps is an author and security leadership consultant. His books are published through E.P.P.S Method Publishing Co.