We are halfway through May, and no doubt it’s an especially busy time for working parents. You may be engaging in end-of-the-school-year activities, college graduations, summer vacation planning… and more. Yet your work stress isn’t magically taking a break to accommodate, is it?
So how’s your mental health and the mental health of your organization? Are you taking care of yourself and your teams? If you missed the last resource email about how to watch for signs of organizational burnout, you can read it here.
☎ Contact me about the Addressing Anxiety and Beating Burnout Virtual Lunch & Learn for your organization and hear what you can do to support your team.
One can make a business case for supporting good mental health in the workplace, showing measurable gains in employee productivity and engagement. Adam Nemer, former CFO at Kaiser Permanente’s Northwest Health Plan, attests to that.
In his book, Simple Mental Health, Adam shares his heartwrenching and inspiring personal story about how a 5-minute conversation with his boss saved his mental life, allowing him to ‘come clean’ about his 20+ year struggle with mental health issues. Detailing his experience as an advancing executive at an $80B health care company while secretly coping with significant mental health challenges, his story proves that building a culture where mental health is supported can measurably increase business value.
📚 Read: Adam’s story about how his leader became mental health literate, and in a 5-minute conversation, transformed Adam’s life.
There’s also a business case to be made for taking care of your brain health, which is related but different from mental health. We may think of brain health negatively, associating it with memory loss and aging. Yet bad brain health can lead to cognitive decline, anxiety, burnout, and depression — again showing up in the workforce, regardless of age.
Here are 4 things about brain and mental health for you to know:
Adults spend roughly 90,000 hours at work over the course of their lives — more waking hours than almost anywhere else. That matters because brain health is shaped far more by daily environment and lifestyle than most employers realize.
🧠 Brain health consists of the overall health and performance of the brain across its full range of functions, including cognitive performance (memory, focus, processing speed), emotional regulation, social connection, sensory and motor coordination, neurological health, and mental health.
😌 Mental health focuses specifically on emotional and psychological well-being and can be affected by challenges like depression, anxiety, and burnout.
🔗 Many of the risk and protective factors for both brain and mental health are deeply intertwined. Things like social connection, financial security, sleep, physical activity, and psychological safety at work improve both mental health and brain health at large.
There is certainly a business case for supporting both brain and mental health in your organization. Reducing heat and noise, adding short recovery breaks, and easing financial stress – all low-cost workplace changes that support brain health – can raise productivity. Some interventions deliver returns as high as 256% and productivity worth 54 times the cost.
Adam will tell you that investing in workplace mental health will provide a strong ROI. He argues that simply talking about mental health (your own or your commitment to it) should be part of your job as an effective leader.
“Not because the ROI is extraordinary (though it is). Not because it’s good PR (though it helps). But leadership means creating environments where people can show up whole, get the help they need, and thrive.”
👉 Schedule a 20-Minute Discovery Call and let’s explore how to strengthen your brain and mental health, and build a business case for helping your organization, too!
Here’s to celebrating Adam’s story,
Loretta