Cry if you want to

WORK LIFE: When Anne Kreamer graduated from college in 1977, the world was divided into two spheres. One was work — “the hyper-rational realm of logic, filled with timetables, organizational charts and returns on investment", as she describes it on her blog — and the other was everywhere else. Emotions were allowed only in the second sphere.

After Kreamer started her first real job (in a bank), however, it didn’t take long for her to discover that emotions were “simmering everywhere”. Every few days, she watched as one of the three executive women working near her rushed into the ladies' room, returning with a red and blotchy face. Sometimes she would even see men dash into the men’s room, leaving a few minutes later, “tight-lipped and ashen”.

Kreamer is the author of It’s Always Personal: Emotion in the New Workplace, a book based on two years of exploring American attitudes towards emotion at work today. Her research showed her that our home lives, with all their “messy, complicated emotional currents”, have become more and more a part of our work lives.

Anne Kreamer


"If men and women expressed more emotion at work, we might not feel so chronically anxious and overwhelmed."

In the past, we used to take our bad tempers from work back home with us. Now, says Kreamer, it is harder to keep our emotional selves out of the office. Or our work out of our home. Technology and social-networking sites, such as Facebook, have contributed to this change. People text and email friends and family during work and receive messages from colleagues in their spare time. Flatter hierarchies and more informal relationships between bosses and employees complicate matters more. In the workplace today, it is often hard to know how free we are allowed to be with our emotions.

Should we make jokes with our boss, for example? asks Kreamer. Or what do we do if we hear a colleague crying behind a closed door? She believes that if we openly acknowledged the role of anger, anxiety and fear in our working lives, we would learn to manage our emotions better. “I like to imagine that if men and women were to express more emotion routinely and easily at work — jokes, warmth, sadness, anger, tears, joy, all of it — then as a people we might not feel so chronically anxious and overwhelmed," she says.