It’s Sunday evening and the thought arrives uninvited.
Maybe it’s time to start looking for a new job. Between finishing dinner and thinking about the week ahead you open LinkedIn or Indeed, scroll for a bit, close the tab.
By Tuesday, the feeling has faded. Work is fine again and the thought goes back wherever it came from, and you carry on.
Then a few weeks later, it’s Sunday evening again and the same thought shows up. And then again. For some people, this cycle runs for months. For others, years.
The question you’re asking yourself isn’t really “should I get a new job.” It’s “how do I know if this feeling means something, or if it’s just a temporary feeling.”
Why this is harder to work out than it sounds
If the answer were obvious, you wouldn’t still be ignoring it over on a Sunday evening six months after the first time you noticed it.
Part of the difficulty is that the current job comes with a kind of gravity. You know how things work here. You know the people, the systems, the unwritten rules. Even a job that isn’t quite right has the comfort of being familiar and familiarity is a powerful thing to walk away from, even when the role itself has stopped serving you.
There’s also the simple fact that most people have never been taught how to evaluate this properly. Career advice tends to swing between two unhelpful extremes: “just stick it out, every job has bad patches” on one side, and “life’s too short, follow your gut” on the other. Neither is a framework and both just tell you to feel a certain way about a decision you still have to make rationally.
The useful question isn’t how you feel right now, it’s whether what you’re feeling is an ongoing pattern or a temporary moment.
Signals worth taking seriously
These are the things that, when they’re genuinely true over a period of months rather than days, tend to mean something real.
Your growth has stalled and there’s no real sign that’s changing. Not “I haven’t been promoted yet”, that’s normal in most careers. This is closer to: you’ve raised the question, nothing has moved, there’s no plan, and the conversations about it have started to feel like a formality rather than a genuine intention. A stalled trajectory that’s been acknowledged but not addressed, over a sustained period, is a real signal.
The work itself doesn’t engage you most of the time – not just on hard days. Every job has difficult weeks. This is different: most days feel like something to get through rather than something you’re invested in, and that’s been true for a while, not just during a rough patch.
A values or culture mismatch keeps resurfacing. Maybe it’s how decisions get made, how people are treated when things go wrong, or what actually gets rewarded versus what’s claimed to matter. If this is a recurring theme rather than a one-off frustration (you keep noticing the same gap between what the business says and what it does) that’s worth thinking about.
You’ve confirmed the ceiling, rather than assumed it. There’s a real difference between believing you’ve hit a limit and actually knowing it, because you’ve had the honest conversation and been told clearly what’s possible and what isn’t. If you’ve had a conversation about progression and the answer wasn’t what you hoped, that’s a fact you can at least act on.
Signals that are more noise than signal
These feel urgent in the moment, and usually aren’t, on their own, a reliable basis for a decision.
A single hard project. Difficult projects are part of most jobs worth having. A bad few weeks on a tough piece of work tells you about that project, not necessarily about the job.
A tense conversation with your manager. One frustrating interaction, even a genuinely unfair one, is worth noting. Not yet worth acting on.
Missing out on a promotion you wanted. This stings, understandably. But a single disappointment is different from a pattern of being repeatedly passed over with no explanation. Give it time to settle before deciding what it actually means to you.
A flat patch in motivation. Everyone has stretches where work feels less engaging than usual. That’s part of having a job, not necessarily evidence the job is wrong.
Comparing yourself to someone else’s highlight reel. Seeing a former colleague’s new role announced online can trigger a sudden urge to update your CV. That reaction says more about the moment than about your actual situation. It’s worth noticing the feeling and worth being a little suspicious of how much thought to give it.
None of this means these things don’t matter. It means they’re usually better processed and thought about than acted on immediately. Give it a few weeks, then if the feeling is still there once the specific event has passed, that tells you something. If it fades along with the moment, that tells you something too.
What to do before deciding either way
Have an honest conversation where you are. If something specific isn’t working (growth, recognition, workload, direction) say so directly to the person who can actually do something about it. You might be surprised by their response. But you might also get the clarity you need to know that nothing is going to change and it is time to look for a new job. Either outcome is useful.
Give yourself a defined window. Rather than deciding in the moment, give it a month, or a quarter, and notice whether the feeling is still there once the immediate frustration has passed. Decisions made from a place of calm tend to be better ones than decisions made from a place of irritation.
Explore quietly, without deciding anything yet. Looking at what opportunities are out there, having an informal conversation with a recruiter, or updating your CV doesn’t commit you to anything. It’s simply useful information. Knowing what’s realistically available (the kind of roles, the kind of salary, the kind of opportunity) can clarify your thinking either way. Sometimes it confirms that where you are is genuinely a good place to be. Sometimes it confirms that the grass is in fact greener.
There isn’t a universal right answer
Sometimes the honest conclusion is that the current role is genuinely worth staying in it and working on how you can improve it. Sometimes it’s that the patterns have been there for too long to expect anything different.
What actually matters is making the decision from a place of clarity, rather than from whatever Sunday evening scaries happens to feel like. The signals are there if you really think about your current situation – most of us just don’t usually take the time to separate the pattern from the moment.
That’s the whole exercise. Not “should I leave,” but “what is actually true here, once I look past how I feel today.”
If you’re somewhere in the middle of working this out, talking it through with someone outside the situation can help, even if you’re nowhere near ready to apply for anything. At Impact Recruitment, that conversation comes with no obligation attached. We’re happy to have it whenever it’s useful to you.
