Whether you’re a manager or a colleague, it’s important to understand the difference between stress and a mental health problem — especially if you plan to confront a fellow staff member about the subject.
What is stress?
Stress is the body’s response to a perceived threat or demand placed on it. The body’s reaction when under stress is similar to that of anxiety – which is why it is often confused – but stress is not a diagnosable mental illness.
Instead, stress is a normal condition, experienced by everyone.
A small amount of stress from time to time can actually motivate us to get tasks done, helping increase our wellbeing. It’s when stress is ongoing, or too much to take, when it can start to impact our physical and mental health.
When you experience stress you can:
- Have thoughts like “I can’t cope with this”, or “how am I going to get this done?”
- Go into fight-or-flight mode
- Release hormones that heighten the senses
- Have a higher heart rate
- Have dilated pupils
- Experience excessive sweating
- Grind your teeth during sleep
- Be irritable
- Experience changes in emotions
What is mental illness?
Mental illness includes a wide range of conditions that affect how we feel and think. These can range from common conditions such as anxiety and depression, to more severe conditions such as schizophrenia and other forms of psychotic illness.
People have varying degrees of genetic vulnerability to experiencing a mental illness, but they’re largely triggered by a life event such as grief or drug use, or distressing events in relationships or at work.
Mental illnesses vary in how long they affect people, ranging from a single episode to a lifelong condition that requires constant support. The symptoms of mental health issue depend on the type of problem, but some of the signs are:
- Feeling consistently sad or down (teariness)
- Confused thinking or reduced ability to concentrate
- Extreme mood changes
- Withdrawal from social activities
- Regularly feeling tired, or having problems sleeping
- A reluctance to leave the house
The relationship between stress and mental illness
Perhaps the biggest difference between stress and a mental health issue is that stress isn’t a psychiatric diagnosis, but they’re closely aligned in two main ways:
- Stress can cause mental health problems
The amount of stress a person can handle differs, but ultimately, a prolonged period of stress can lead to mental health problems like anxiety or depression. The symptoms of stress are temporary but offer similarity to the symptoms of a mental health concern. - Mental health issues can cause stress
On the flip-side, the day-to-day symptoms of a mental health condition can be tiresome and can be stressful in itself. Add this high level of stress to the regular stresses of everyday life and it can begin to seem hard to see where stress ends and the mental health problem begins.
Is reducing stress the answer?
While they do share a relationship, there’s a common misconception that lowering stress levels will improve mental health – especially at work.
However, the factors that impact mental health are more complex, because our wellbeing is also impacted by:
- Individual factors: personal resilience, genetics, life events, personality, lifestyle, social support system
- Home factors: differing demands between home and work, significant life events
- Workplace factors: the makeup of the job, the team morale and personalities within it, organisational culture
How to reduce the impact of stress and mental health in the workplace
As an employer or manager, you can only control workplace factors — you have no control over someone’s stress levels or life events outside of the office that can contribute to mental health illnesses.
However, by implementing a few procedures, you can minimise your impact on an employee’s stress levels or mental health issue(s).
- Distribute work: Some people can juggle more balls than others and that in itself is a balancing act when distributing work. However, if someone is clearly struggling to handle their workload and is exhibiting signs of stress or a mental illness, then it is your prerogative to lower the staff member’s workload in discussion with them.
- Create a positive atmosphere: A sociable and friendly team is generally a happy one. While some of this is down to recruitment, you can help create a good atmosphere amongst employees by creating social events and ensuring communication between the team is simple and frequent.
- Rewarding employee’s efforts: Being inadequately rewarded (e.g. wages, promotion, job security, positive feedback) for work efforts increases the risk of stress and mental health problems. Managers and the organisational structure play an important role in ensuring that workplace effort is balanced with reward.
- Creating a fair workplace: Aside from positive feedback and wage benefits, all employees should be treated fairly in any given situation (whether that be good or bad). Under this umbrella is ensuring that the confidentiality of employees’ personal information in all communications is maintained and treating people from all cultural backgrounds fairly.
- Implement a mental health and wellbeing strategy: A mental health and wellbeing strategy is vital if the organisation is to prevent the development of stress and mental health problems among employees. It should address work-related risks to employee mental health, using a systematic approach to planning, implementation and monitoring.
- Provision of workplace support: As well as creating an environment where people feel comfortable talking about their stress levels or mental health issues, ensuring employees know where to go and who to talk to about any issues that arise is vital.
