The first Monday back has a way of making things clear. Two weeks away, a bit of sun, and suddenly the job you have put up with since last winter looks completely unbearable. The overflowing inbox alone is an argument.

That feeling deserves to be taken seriously. It is also a bad moment to act on it.

 

First, a myth worth binning

Every August brings posts about the “September surge” – the idea that jobs flood the market as everyone gets back from holiday. We went looking for the UK figures behind it. There are none. No big job board has published anything to back it up.

What the official numbers show is more useful.

Look at when people actually move jobs and the busiest stretch is October to December. It runs about 30% ahead of January to March, and it has been the strongest quarter in seventeen of the last twenty-one years. January – the month everybody links with fresh starts – is reliably the quietest.

So autumn is real. It is just not September, and it is not caused by a wave of new job ads. It is when people who have been thinking about it all summer finally do something.

 

Where the new-job feeling actually comes from

This is the finding that changed how we think about it.

Researchers in Germany tracked thousands of people over many years. Those who moved to a new employer reported a sharp lift in how much they liked their job. Then it faded.

So the researchers checked it against a different group: people who changed jobs because their workplace shut down. Same new job, but the move was not their choice. That group got no lift at all.

The glow does not come from the new job. It comes from having chosen.

Money matters less than you would think, too. Researchers pulled together 115 studies on pay and job satisfaction. The link between the two turned out to be weak. How much you earn tells you very little about whether you will enjoy the work.

 

The four weeks

None of that means stay. It means find out whether you want to leave the job or leave the feeling.

Try this: for four weeks, write down every Friday the one specific thing that was worst that week. Not “I hate it” – the actual moment. Patterns show up fast. Sometimes it really is the work. Very often it is one person, one recurring meeting, or one task that has quietly grown to fill everything.

Then try changing the job you already have. Researchers have looked at what happens when people reshape their role instead of leaving it. It works, though not dramatically. And the biggest gains come from cutting the parts that drain you, not from adding interesting ones.

Most people try to add. Ask instead what you could stop doing, hand over, or do half as often.

Pro tip: apply for one job you would genuinely take. Not twenty. One. Writing that application will tell you more about what you want than a month of brooding.

 

And the bit that argues against us

We would be cherry-picking if we left this out.

An economist ran an experiment with people who were genuinely torn about a big decision. Quitting a job was one of the commonest. They tossed a coin: heads meant make the change, tails meant stay. Nobody had to obey it, but the coin clearly nudged people, because the ones who got heads were far more likely to go. Six months later, those people were measurably happier than the ones the coin had nudged into staying.

That sounds like it contradicts everything above. It does not, quite.

The coin never took the choice away. It broke a deadlock, and then the person decided. Compare that with the people whose workplace shut down, who got no lift at all. Choosing is what does the work – and among people who are genuinely torn, choosing to go seems to beat choosing to stay.

 

Which is exactly why the four weeks matter. They are not there to talk you out of it. They are there to find out whether you are actually torn, or whether you are just fed up after a fortnight away. If you are genuinely torn, the evidence says go. If you are reacting, the diary will show you that before you hand in your notice.

Four weeks, not four years.

What would actually have to change for you to want to stay in your current role?