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Forget ‘Fake it Til You Make It’—Try This Instead
How ‘deep acting’ at work can change your outlook
All of us have That Work Thing: the one element of your job that sparks dread on Sunday nights, that elicits a stress headache even when everything else is going great. Maybe your Work Thing is a person: a micromanaging boss, or a co-worker whose dumb jokes make you want to crawl in a hole. Maybe it’s a pointless meeting that regularly eats up a chunk of your morning. Maybe it’s a mind-numbing task that’s fallen to you.
We all have coping mechanisms we adopt to deal with That Work Thing, and sometimes that’s just smiling and nodding and getting through the day. As a long-term strategy, however, “fake it ’til you make it” — or “surface acting,” as researchers sometimes call it — is a pretty terrible option. One 2019 study found that employees who frequently engage in surface acting tend to be more stressed and less engaged at work, largely because of the mental effort that faking it requires.
“It’s the difference between how you feel and your expressions,” explains Lindsey Lee, one of the study’s authors and a professor of hospitality management at Temple University who studies emotional labor. “I’m smiling on the outside, but inside, I’m having a bad day, or I just had a terrible customer before you. That’s cognitive dissonance, and it’s really draining.”
Still, social norms and professional obligations exist, and just because it’s exhausting to smile politely at all of Tim’s wisecracks doesn’t mean you can be your authentic self and let the eye-rolls fly.
So if you can’t fake it, and you can’t let your true angst show, what’s left? New research offers a third, more viable alternative: “deep acting,” the process of closing that gap between how you feel and how you behave by altering your emotional state.
In a study recently published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, researchers found that deep acting does more than reduce stress levels — it can also strengthen relationships between co-workers and help boost employee performance.
“The finding we were most excited about was the fact that deep actors really reaped so many benefits at work,” says the organizational psychologist Allison Gabriel, the study’s…
