Mental health has recently been a huge topic in the media and politics in the United States and the rest of the world for the past few years. It seems like, more often than not, we are hearing about new ways to combat these symptoms in adults and children with a new product or treatment that is gaining popularity, or a food or medicine. Mental health awareness is very much on the rise, but should we be paying more attention to it in the workplace?
Currently, depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide. Almost 75% of people with mental disorders remain untreated in developing countries with almost 1 million people taking their lives each year. According to the World Health Organization, 1 in 13, globally, suffers from anxiety. Anxiety disorders are the most common mental disorders worldwide with specific phobia, major depressive disorder, and social phobia being the most common. With this many people living with and fighting mental illness every day, should businesses be taking it more seriously? Why are so many people afraid or embarrassed to take a “mental health” or sick day? I believe it’s because we still don’t take our own mental health seriously enough, so why should our employer?
As a stay-at-home mom with two full-time jobs, I could use a “mental health day” from work, my beautiful baby boy and my husband once in a while (but not my dog because she’s perfect), and you want to know what… THAT’S OKAY! There is this stigma that we need to hide our mental health vulnerability from people, especially at work. With everything basically relying on technology, we need time to disconnect with the world and reconnect with ourselves. What are ways you can manage your mental health?
Take Care of Your Body
By eating nutritious meals, drinking plenty of water, getting exercise and getting enough sleep, you can improve your mental health. When your body is happy, your mind can be happy too!
Surround Yourself with Positivity
Make sure the people around you are supportive of you and are available to boost you up if you need it. This also means treating yourself with kindness and respect; try to avoid too much self-criticism.
Do Things You Love
Make time to set down the laptop, tablet, or phone to read a new book, go on a walk, play a game with your family, or take a nice long bubble bath with a glass of wine (my personal favorite). Try and disconnect for a little bit and enjoy things you used to love before Wi-Fi.
Volunteer Your Time
Try something new, by helping others. By volunteering your time at a homeless shelter, your local humane society, or after-school activities, you help someone in need and meet new people.
Practice Mindfulness
This meditation originates from Buddhism and is the practice of being present and deliberately aware of our inner thoughts and surroundings. This practice combines traditional cognitive therapy techniques and mindfulness practices. This can mean anything from relaxation exercises, doodling, adult coloring books, or traditional meditation.
Know When to Seek Help
Being aware of a little bit of stress vs. a full mental breakdown is very important. Seeking help is NOT a sign of weakness, but rather a sign of strength. People who get appropriate care can recover much quicker and lead full rewarding lives.
Taking your mental health into your own hands is important, but so is getting support from those around you including your place of employment. It’s not an easy conversation to have on either end, but it’s time that it started happening everywhere. Mental health affects worker productivity and the bottom line. Workplaces consultant, Peldon Rose, did a survey for office workers in July 2018 and 72% of employees want employers to champion mental health and well-being. This was rated more important than equality (48%), sustainability (38%), and diversity (31%). So, the next question is, how can employers help?
Increase Awareness
Giving your employees access to resources and education on the topic from not only your HR department, but also national organizations is a great way of increasing awareness. You can also increase awareness by starting a program within your company. EY (formerly Ernst & Young), is one of the largest professional services firms in the world and is one of the “Big Four” accounting firms. They launched their “r u ok?” program to address mental illness and addiction at EY. The program incorporates employee champions, cross-country presentations, virtual events, e-learning curriculums, peer-to-peer connections, and follow-up services, like EY Assist, EY’s EAP program.
Offer Manager Training
Require managers to attend mental health seminars to better give them an understanding for detecting somebody in mental distress and how to help. Managers are usually under the impression of a one-size-fits-all fix, but it’s important to know that every employee is different and may need a different solution.
Create a Positive Team Environment
Engaging employees in ongoing conversations about different solutions, constructive feedback, and positive reinforcement can help reduce negativity and defensiveness in the workplace. As much as you have these conversations with your employees, recognize that it is just as important to listen, so your employees really feel like they are being heard. By strengthening your relationships with them, you will have a more positive atmosphere in your office.
Encourage Work-Life Balance
Offering flexible work options can help reduce stress and prevent burnouts in the workplace. Simply by providing flexible hours, this can help reduce stress in employees because they can avoid busy drive times, get their kids to school, or be out in time to catch a soccer game, schedule medical appointments, etc. For example, Netflix doesn’t stick to the regular 9-to-5 workday; instead, they give their employees the flexibility to choose what is important to them. By giving your employees the opportunity to choose their schedule and time off when their mind and body need a break, you give them control of their mental well-being.
Your mental health shapes how you function and make choices, both in your career and at home. It’s time to end these stigmas around mental health and give your mind a little break to enjoy the things that are truly beautiful and important in this world.
I absolutely agree with offering flexible time to reduce work related stress to promote productivity.
Peter Diaz and Emi Golding with Workplace Mental Health Institute can assist businesses with many of these needs. As a professional counselor with twenty-years of clinical experience and working with business clients, I agree with many of the points in this article. Your mental health and physical health are intertwined, you cannot separate them out because one absolutely influences the other. I speak on the mind-body connection as it pertains to both areas with a focus on boundary setting in personal and professional life. So many companies could save so much if they provided mental health resources to their employees.
As a coach of 25 years and an ex-husband with Bi-polar I am very familiar with the associated problems with living and working with a mental illness. I agree with the content of this article and because of actioning the above points (and more) my ex-husband is medication free and manages his mind without the extreme anger, jealousy’s and mood-swings.
I do think that ‘mental illness’ is a broad subject with one of the big problems, the fear of the unknown and the safety factor. Depression I think is too widely used and the more times an individual is told he/she suffers from depression the more depressed he/she will become. I think this is one reason why coaching is a powerful profession because if we can help more people see potential and possiblility then we have less people being stuck in a problem that for many is either not real or could have a solution.
Its simple really, happy people simply perform better. Lets help more people find their happy place. 🙂
This is very close to my heart as there is so much misunderstanding around mental health causes and too much reliance on a magic pill!
I work holistically with mental health and the major thing that is overlooked is that the majority of mental health issues actually come from childhood experiences which leave deep emotional wounds and perceptions which the subconscious uses to create thought and behaviour patterns even in adulthood.
Without exception every client I see whether it is for depression, anxiety, weight control or addiction has a root cause related to: feeling NOT ENOUGH! Feeling DISCONNECTED or REJECTED, feeling WORTHLESS or UNIMPORTANT.
When I disrupt their thought pattern (in just one or two sessions!) related to those feelings and perceptions the symptoms are then easily dealt with. Even for long term alcoholics, gamblers, smokers etc, the root cause and the result is the same.
People who have been in traditional therapy for years, tried rehab and everything else, get a phenomenal result when I reveal and change their perception of their root cause.
There is too much focus on the symptoms, if medical switched to root cause the outcomes would be so very different.
The question we need to ask people is not
HOW are you?
Instead we need to ask
What happened to you?
preferably in the subconscious mind which has all the answers and where change can be bought about very rapidly.
This is a very good article, thank you for publishing it.
With more and more information becoming available to us now about how powerful our brains are, and how empowering our thoughts can be in order to change the status quo and drive our lives forward, there is hope at last.
The discovery and new research around neuroplasticity is exciting. Over the past year, I have personally found regular brain training exercises, in addition to ‘reframing’ challenging scenarios in my mind, and taking consistent, small actions daily, to be incredibly helpful to deal with what had previously been too hard to do or to decide upon in general daily life.
The key is tiny steps, recognising little achievements or finding moments to savour, creating positives to build on or use as ‘seed’. Remembering always that there is light above the clouds, helps a lot too.
We can change our brains by how we think, in addition to other important factors influencing us, and that is an incredible thought to ponder! Awareness of what and how we are thinking is so important to our peace of mind and to our personal growth.
Best wishes to all who’re needing hope and rays of light!
Holly x