By Daniel Wells | Living Wisdom | June 18, 2026 | 13 min read
Informed by personal experience and published research in workplace psychology, conflict resolution, and organizational behavior
How to deal with a difficult coworker is a question most people eventually have to answer — and the answer matters more than it might initially seem, because the person you have to work alongside every day has an outsized influence on your daily experience of life.
I’ve encountered difficult coworkers in more than one form. The chronically negative presence who turned every meeting into a recitation of what wouldn’t work. The credit-claimer who consistently presented shared work as individual accomplishment. The person who communicated through hostility rather than directness, keeping the interpersonal environment at a temperature that made simple interactions feel risky. Different kinds of difficult, but each one affecting daily work life in ways that extended well beyond the specific incidents.
The common effect: anxiety before walking in. Not dramatic dread, but a low-grade tightening — the anticipatory awareness that today would involve navigating something beyond the work itself. And this would follow me home, too. Not obsessively, but present — a residue of the day’s interpersonal friction that hadn’t fully cleared by the time I sat down for the evening.
The first approach — direct conversation, addressing the behavior — didn’t work. Not because the conversations were badly handled, but because the other person wasn’t particularly interested in changing, and direct appeals to change someone who doesn’t want to change rarely produce the change they’re hoping for.
What eventually shifted things was changing not the other person, but my approach. Specifically: becoming much more direct in how I communicated about work matters, and much less emotionally invested in how those communications were received. Stripping away the layers of relationship expectation and focusing on the functional, professional content of the interaction. Less warmth, more clarity. Less hoping they would behave differently, more explicitly addressing what I needed from the working relationship.
It didn’t make the difficult coworker pleasant. It made the situation workable. Which turned out to be enough.
Learning how to deal with a difficult coworker is less about changing the other person and more about developing a set of practices that protect your own wellbeing and professionalism while navigating a situation you didn’t choose.
Why Difficult Coworkers Are So Draining — The Psychology Behind It
Before the eight ways, it’s worth understanding why difficult coworkers have such a disproportionate effect on wellbeing — because the size of the impact often seems larger than any individual incident would warrant.
Research on workplace relationships consistently shows that negative workplace interactions have a disproportionately larger effect on wellbeing than positive interactions of equivalent intensity. This “negativity bias” in workplace relationships means that one persistently difficult coworker can undermine the satisfaction produced by multiple positive working relationships.
This is compounded by the captive nature of workplace relationships. Unlike difficult relationships in other areas of life, you generally can’t simply exit a difficult coworker relationship without significant cost — leaving a job, transferring departments, or finding another role. The combination of significant negative impact and limited exit options makes workplace relationship difficulties particularly wearing.
Research by Christine Porath at Georgetown University on incivility in the workplace found that even relatively mild forms of workplace rudeness and disrespect — not extreme conflict, just consistent discourteous behavior — produced measurable decreases in effort, time spent at work, quality of work, and commitment to the organization among those exposed to it. Read more at psychologytoday.com →
Understanding this helps explain why the impact feels disproportionate — because it genuinely is, by the mechanisms of how negative social interactions affect us.
How to Deal With a Difficult Coworker: 8 Honest Ways
Way 1: Accurately Diagnose What Kind of Difficult You’re Dealing With
Not all difficult coworkers are difficult in the same way, and the most effective response varies significantly depending on what’s actually driving the behavior.
The major categories: the chronically negative person (brings consistent pessimism and complaint to shared work), the credit-claimer or boundary-violator (takes more than their fair share, whether of credit, resources, or others’ time), the hostile communicator (expresses disagreement or frustration through aggression rather than directness), the passive-aggressive (communicates displeasure indirectly, through compliance without engagement or subtle undermining), and the simply incompatible (not malicious, but working in a style that creates friction with yours).
Each requires a somewhat different response. Chronic negativity often responds to redirection and firm limits on how much of your attention and energy it receives. Credit-claiming requires documentation and explicit, professional communication about contributions. Hostility typically requires a combination of firm limit-setting and escalation to management when the limit isn’t respected. Passive-aggression is the hardest to address directly because the indirect nature of the behavior makes it difficult to name specifically.
Try this: Write down, as specifically as possible, what this person actually does that makes them difficult — specific behaviors, not character assessments. Then ask: which category does this fall into, and what does the research suggest works best for this type?
Way 2: Shift From Emotional Reactions to Professional Responses
This was the change that made the biggest practical difference in my own experience — and it’s the one I’d recommend addressing first.
Difficult coworker interactions are charged precisely because they happen in a space that isn’t supposed to be charged — the professional context, where the expectation is functional collaboration rather than interpersonal friction. When that friction arrives unexpectedly or persistently, the natural response is emotional: frustration, hurt, anger, anxiety.
Emotional reactions, while understandable, tend to escalate difficult workplace situations rather than de-escalating them. The difficult coworker who is operating from their own emotional reactivity or poor relational skills is unlikely to be calmed by your emotional reactivity meeting theirs.
The shift to professional response means: addressing the specific, functional issue rather than the interpersonal dynamic, using clear and calm language rather than charged language, focusing on what needs to happen rather than on what was wrong with how they behaved, and removing the expectation that the interaction will feel satisfying from a relationship standpoint.
How to be more assertive is the practical skill underlying this — the ability to communicate your genuine needs and concerns clearly and directly, without the emotional charge that tends to put difficult people on the defensive.
Try this: Before your next interaction with the difficult coworker, decide in advance what the specific, functional outcome you need is. Focus the interaction on that outcome, and release the expectation that the process will feel warm or collaborative.
Way 3: Set and Maintain Clear Professional Limits
Clear limits — stated directly and maintained consistently — are one of the most reliable tools for managing difficult workplace relationships.
This means being explicit about what you will and won’t accept in a professional context, communicating that clearly when it’s relevant, and following through consistently. “I’m not going to be able to take on that aspect of the project — here’s what I can contribute” is a limit. “I’d prefer we address disagreements directly in our conversation rather than in group email” is a limit. “I need you to send that to me in writing so I have a record” is a limit.
Limits in workplace contexts are most effective when they’re stated in terms of what you need or what you’re going to do, rather than in terms of what the other person should stop doing. This keeps the communication professional rather than accusatory and makes the limit harder to dismiss as personal.
How to set boundaries addresses the broader practice of communicating and maintaining limits clearly — including in the professional contexts where the stakes of getting it wrong feel higher than in personal relationships.
Try this: Identify one specific behavior from the difficult coworker that you’ve been tolerating without addressing. Write down, in professional language, what you would say to address it. Practice the statement until it feels calm and specific. Use it the next time the behavior occurs.
Way 4: Document What Happens — Specifically and Consistently
In situations involving a difficult coworker, documentation serves multiple purposes — and it’s consistently underutilized by people who find themselves in these situations until they wish they’d started earlier.
Documentation provides: a factual record of specific incidents that you can refer to accurately rather than from memory (which is subject to emotional distortion over time), evidence for conversations with management if escalation becomes necessary, and a useful check on your own perception — because seeing a pattern in writing sometimes clarifies whether the situation is as serious as it feels, or alternatively, reveals a pattern more serious than individual incidents suggested.
Good documentation is specific: date, time, what was said or done, who was present, what the impact on the work was. It’s not a record of your emotional response — it’s a factual account of specific behavior and its concrete consequences.
Try this: Start a simple documentation log this week. For each significant incident, record: date and time, what specifically happened, any witnesses, and the concrete work impact. Keep it factual. Review it in two weeks and notice what pattern emerges.
Way 5: Depersonalize the Behavior
This way is psychological rather than tactical — and it’s one of the most protective things you can do for your own wellbeing while navigating a difficult coworker situation.
Most difficult coworker behavior is not actually about you. It’s an expression of something happening in the other person — their stress, their insecurities, their poor relational skills, their defensive patterns, their difficulties with the work — that happens to be directed at you or performed in your presence because you’re in their vicinity.
Depersonalizing doesn’t mean pretending the behavior doesn’t affect you — it does, and acknowledging that is important. It means not treating the behavior as revealing information about your own worth, capability, or value. Their hostility is not evidence of your inadequacy. Their credit-claiming is not evidence that your contributions don’t matter. Their negativity is not evidence that your optimism is naive.
How to deal with insecurity is relevant here — because difficult coworkers have a way of activating insecurities that go beyond the specific workplace relationship, and distinguishing between what’s actually being communicated and what your insecurity system is adding is an important skill.
Try this: The next time the difficult coworker’s behavior produces a strong internal response, pause and ask: is this about me, or is this about something happening in them? Usually, the honest answer is mostly the latter. Let that answer inform how much of the emotional weight you carry from the interaction.
Way 6: Manage Your Own Stress Response — Don’t Let It Build
The cumulative stress of persistent difficult coworker interactions doesn’t stay in the workplace. It tends to accumulate and spill — into your mood, your energy, your relationships outside work, your sleep.
Managing this requires deliberate, regular decompression rather than waiting for the accumulation to clear on its own. Physical movement after difficult workdays. Genuine disengagement from work-related thinking in the evenings. Talking through frustrations with someone not involved in the situation. Any practice that allows the physiological and emotional stress response to actually discharge rather than being carried forward.
How to deal with stress addresses the broader framework — because the stress of a difficult coworker situation is genuinely significant and deserves the same intentional management as any other chronic stressor, not just occasional acknowledgment.
Try this: Establish one specific end-of-workday transition practice that marks the shift from work to non-work and gives the stress of the day somewhere to go: a walk, a workout, a deliberate period of unrelated activity. Make it consistent, not just available on especially hard days.
Way 7: Know When and How to Involve Management
Escalating a difficult coworker situation to management is something many people defer too long or avoid entirely — out of concern about appearing unable to handle professional relationships, about retaliation, or about the impact on the team dynamic.
The situations that warrant escalation: behavior that crosses into harassment, discrimination, or hostility that constitutes a hostile work environment under employment law; behavior that is directly impacting your ability to do your work in ways that documentation can demonstrate; behavior that you’ve directly addressed and that has continued or escalated; and behavior that other team members are also experiencing.
When escalation is appropriate, the approach matters: focus on specific behaviors and their specific work impact rather than on personality or character, bring documentation, frame the conversation in terms of what the work situation requires rather than what you personally feel, and be clear about what you’re asking management to do.
How to be more confident at work — including in the professionally demanding situation of raising a difficult issue with management — is directly relevant here. Confidence in your own account of events, and in your right to a functional work environment, is what allows escalation to happen at the appropriate time rather than being deferred indefinitely.
Try this: If escalation has felt necessary but has been deferred, ask honestly: what specifically is preventing me from raising this? Then ask: are those concerns proportionate to the ongoing cost of the situation continuing without escalation?
Way 8: Protect Your Own Energy and Focus
This is the most important long-term strategy — and the one that’s most easily neglected in favor of trying to manage the difficult coworker directly.
A difficult coworker relationship will consume as much of your cognitive and emotional energy as you allow it to. Every replay of the frustrating interaction, every anticipatory anxiety about the next encounter, every attempt to decode their motives or predict their next behavior — each of these consumes real resources that would otherwise be available for the work that actually matters to you.
Protecting your energy means deliberately limiting how much of it the difficult coworker situation receives. Not suppressing the impact — it’s real and deserves acknowledgment — but setting a practical limit on how much of your mental bandwidth the situation occupies. The goal is not to not care. It’s to care efficiently: address what needs to be addressed, and release what doesn’t.
How to stop overthinking is directly relevant here — because the rumination that difficult coworker situations generate is one of the most significant ways they consume energy beyond the immediate interaction. Learning to interrupt the replay and redirect to more productive mental territory is a genuine wellbeing skill in these situations.
Try this: Set a specific mental “budget” for this situation — a defined amount of time and cognitive space you’re willing to give it per day. When you notice the situation consuming more than the budget (in replaying, planning, worrying), deliberately redirect your attention to something else. Let the budget be the practical limit.
How Difficult Coworker Situations Affect Your Mental Health
The mental health effects of sustained difficult coworker relationships are significant and deserve direct recognition.
Chronic workplace anxiety. The anticipatory anxiety that difficult workplace relationships generate — the low-level dread before entering the work environment — is a genuine, persistent stressor with the same physiological effects as other forms of chronic anxiety.
Reduced confidence and self-doubt. Persistent exposure to critical, dismissive, or hostile behavior in a professional context gradually erodes the confidence that professional functioning requires — even when you recognize intellectually that the behavior reflects the other person rather than your actual capability or worth.
Difficulty separating work from personal life. The emotional residue of difficult workplace interactions doesn’t automatically clear at the end of the workday. Without deliberate management, it bleeds into personal time, relationships, sleep, and general wellbeing in ways that are difficult to trace back to the source.
Decreased motivation and engagement. Research consistently shows that interpersonal conflict at work reduces engagement, motivation, and the quality of work produced — not because the person stops caring about the work, but because the psychological resources those qualities require are being consumed by managing the difficult relationship.
Risk of burnout. Sustained management of a difficult workplace relationship is an ongoing energy expenditure that contributes to the broader depletion that burnout involves. If the difficult coworker situation is occurring alongside other significant stressors, the cumulative load deserves serious attention.
Difficulty trusting your own perception. One of the most insidious effects of sustained difficult coworker dynamics — particularly those involving gaslighting or chronic dismissiveness — is eroded confidence in your own account of events. Building and maintaining self-trust — confidence in your own perceptions and judgment — is both a protective factor against this erosion and a resource that the situation tends to deplete.
Nighttime rumination. The replaying of workplace conflicts and the anticipatory planning for tomorrow’s difficult interactions often peaks at night, when daytime distraction is absent. Addressing nighttime overthinking connected to workplace stress is an important, practical wellbeing intervention — because the sleep disruption it produces compounds the emotional depletion that already accompanies a difficult coworker situation.
If the situation is significantly affecting your mental health, wellbeing, or ability to function, professional support — both from HR or management within the workplace and from a therapist outside it — is worth pursuing actively. Find a therapist at psychologytoday.com →
How Difficult Coworker Situations Affect Your Physical Health
The physical dimension of sustained workplace conflict deserves direct attention — because the body bears a real cost from the chronic stress these situations generate.
Elevated cortisol and cardiovascular effects. The anticipatory anxiety and daily interpersonal friction of a difficult coworker relationship keep the stress response mildly but persistently activated. Sustained cortisol elevation affects blood pressure, heart rate variability, and over longer periods, contributes to cardiovascular risk — effects that are measurable even at the moderate stress levels that workplace conflict typically generates.
Disrupted sleep. The most direct physical consequence of workplace conflict stress is sleep disruption — both difficulty falling asleep due to anticipatory thinking about the next day, and difficulty staying asleep due to the residual activation that the day’s stress leaves behind. Chronic sleep disruption compounds every other effect of the difficult coworker situation by reducing the emotional regulation capacity and cognitive resources needed to navigate it.
Physical tension and pain. Workplace stress is held physically — in chronically tense shoulders, a tight jaw, persistent headaches, and the general physical fatigue that comes from sustained low-grade alert. Many people in difficult workplace situations carry significant physical tension they’ve stopped noticing because it has become their baseline.
Weakened immune function. Research consistently links chronic workplace stress with reduced immune function — greater susceptibility to minor illnesses, slower recovery, and the general physical depletion that accumulates over months of sustained difficult interpersonal dynamics.
Digestive effects. The gut-brain axis is particularly sensitive to chronic stress, and many people in ongoing workplace conflict situations experience digestive discomfort — nausea before difficult meetings, altered appetite, digestive irregularity — that they don’t immediately connect to the interpersonal stress generating it.
Frequently Asked Questions About How to Deal With a Difficult Coworker
Should I always try to address a difficult coworker directly first? In most cases, yes — direct, professional communication is the appropriate first step for most workplace difficulties, and it preserves the relationship and the work environment better than immediate escalation. However, direct communication is not appropriate in situations involving harassment, discrimination, or behavior that creates a hostile work environment — those situations warrant immediate reporting rather than direct confrontation.
What if addressing the difficult coworker directly makes things worse? This happens, and it’s important to recognize it as information rather than failure. If direct professional communication hasn’t produced change and has been tried more than once, the situation likely requires either management involvement or a change in your own strategy — focusing less on changing the other person’s behavior and more on protecting your own functioning within the situation.
How do I maintain professionalism when I’m genuinely angry? By creating a delay between the stimulus and your response — even briefly. Responding in writing rather than in the moment. Preparing responses in advance for predictable provocations. And distinguishing between what you’re feeling (legitimate and worth acknowledging privately) and what you’re professionally communicating (focused on the work issue rather than the emotional experience).
What if the difficult coworker is my manager? This is significantly harder because the power dynamic removes some of the options available in peer relationships. The approaches that remain: documentation, clear professional communication about what you need to do your work effectively, and if the behavior rises to the level of harassment or discrimination, HR involvement. If the situation is unsustainable, actively exploring transfer or exit options is a legitimate response rather than a failure.
Is it possible to actually change a difficult coworker’s behavior? Rarely, through direct appeal alone. What’s more realistic is changing the conditions under which their behavior affects you — through clear limits, documented professional communication, management involvement where appropriate, and deliberate protection of your own energy and focus. People change their workplace behavior when the incentives for change are strong enough; your direct appeals rarely create incentives that strong.
When should I consider leaving over a difficult coworker? When the situation is genuinely unsustainable despite genuine effort to address it, when it is significantly and persistently affecting your mental health and wellbeing, when escalation to management hasn’t produced change, and when the alternative — continuing in the current situation — involves costs that outweigh the benefits of the role. This is a legitimate reason to leave a job, not a sign of weakness.
A Final Word — You Can’t Change Them, But You Can Change How You Navigate
I want to end with what the experience eventually clarified for me.
The direct conversations that didn’t produce change weren’t failures of approach. They were accurate information: this particular person, in this particular situation, was not going to adjust their behavior in response to direct feedback from a peer. Continuing to attempt the same approach while expecting different results was genuinely not the path forward.
What was the path forward was adjusting my own approach — not because the other person’s behavior was acceptable, but because my goal was a workable professional situation, not a reformed difficult colleague. Those are different goals, and the second one was within my actual reach.
The shift to more direct, less emotionally invested communication changed the dynamic in practical ways. Not by making the difficult coworker easy to work with — they weren’t, and the relationship didn’t become warm. But by removing some of the friction that had been generated by my own expectation that professional communication would produce professional response. When I stopped expecting that, the gap between expectation and reality closed, and the daily cost of the situation reduced.
You probably won’t change the difficult coworker. But you can change how much of your energy and wellbeing the situation costs you. That’s the goal worth focusing on.
— Daniel Wells, Living Wisdom
Further Reading on Living Wisdom:
- How to Be More Assertive: 7 Honest Steps to Finally Speak Up
- How to Set Boundaries: When You Say Yes but Mean No
- How to Deal With Stress: 9 Honest Ways to Stay Calm
- How to Trust Yourself: 9 Honest Steps to Build Self-Belief
- How to Stop Overthinking at Night: 7 Ways to Finally Sleep
- How to Deal With Insecurity: 9 Honest Ways to Finally Feel Enough
- How to Be More Confident: 9 Steps to Build Real Self-Belief
- Overthinking Therapy: 7 Proven Techniques to Finally Quiet Your Mind
- How to Have a Healthy Relationship: 9 Honest Keys to Try
- How to Stop Comparing Yourself to Others: 9 Honest Steps
Medical Disclaimer: This article is for informational and educational purposes only. It reflects the author’s personal experience combined with published psychological research. It is not a substitute for professional medical or legal advice. If you are experiencing workplace harassment or discrimination, please consult HR, an employment attorney, or a qualified mental health professional.
Sources & References:
- Porath, C., & Pearson, C. (2013). The price of incivility. Harvard Business Review, 91(1-2), 115–121.
- Lutgen-Sandvik, P. (2006). Take this job and…: Quitting and other forms of resistance to workplace bullying. Communication Monographs, 73(4), 406–433.
- Neff, K. (2011). Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself. William Morrow.
- Stone, D., Patton, B., & Heen, S. (2010). Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most. Penguin Books.
- Patterson, K., Grenny, J., McMillan, R., & Switzler, A. (2011). Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High. McGraw-Hill.
- Psychology Today. Workplace relationships. psychologytoday.com
- Psychology Today. Conflict resolution. psychologytoday.com
- Psychology Today. Find a therapist. psychologytoday.com
- Greater Good Science Center. Workplace wellbeing. greatergood.berkeley.edu
- Mind. Workplace mental health. mind.org.uk
- NHS. Managing workplace stress. nhs.uk
