Frontpage Journal | Business Insights
In today’s workplaces, a new vocabulary has quietly taken root , one shaped less by organisational psychology textbooks and more by Instagram carousels and TikTok explainers. Terms like boundaries, gaslighting, triggered, and narcissist have leapt from therapeutic contexts into everyday office exchanges. What was once clinical language grounded in evidence-based psychology is now being repurposed as shorthand for everything from avoiding awkward projects to sidestepping feedback.
I recently heard a colleague turn down a non-urgent project by saying she needed to “protect her peace,” “manage her nervous system,” and “preserve her emotional bandwidth.” The phrasing was polished, empathetic, and entirely borrowed from the self-care vernacular saturating social media. It was also, if we’re honest, a sophisticated way of saying, “I don’t want to do this right now.” She hadn’t completed the task, but she had thoroughly processed not doing it.
This is the power, and danger, of pop psychology. It simplifies the complex, strips away the messy, and offers digestible, shareable phrases that feel insightful without demanding deeper engagement. True psychology is an unvarnished discipline: empirical, often uncomfortable, and resistant to easy answers. It requires us to examine root causes, challenge our own biases, and sit with the reality that sometimes we are part of the problem. Pop psychology, by contrast, turns the long arc of human behavioural understanding into neat, clickable moments of relatability.
The trouble is that when every unpleasant interaction is “toxic” and every difficult colleague is a “narcissist,” we dilute the meaning of these concepts. It becomes harder to differentiate between a genuinely harmful workplace dynamic and the inevitable friction that comes from collaborating with other human beings. The language designed to foster awareness starts to erode resilience. The shield of “protecting our peace” can quickly become a socially acceptable form of avoiding growth.
Workplaces thrive on trust, accountability, and constructive conflict. These require nuance, the ability to distinguish between a legitimate violation of boundaries and the discomfort of being challenged. If every disagreement is framed as emotional harm, feedback as hostility, or adaptation as self-betrayal, organisations risk fostering cultures where self-reflection is replaced by self-justification.
This is not to dismiss the importance of mental health or emotional well-being at work. These matter more than ever. But awareness is not the same as mastery, and language without depth is no substitute for understanding. The real challenge, and opportunity, for leaders and teams lies in moving beyond the comforting phrases and towards the harder work of discernment: knowing when to rest and when to lean in, when to set boundaries and when to stretch them, when to recognise harm and when to accept that discomfort is simply part of the job.
Because if everything is trauma, nothing is.
