Why Prioritizing Mental Health Is Essential to Your Business Strategy
Did you know that depression is the leading cause of disability? A recent study by the WHO confirmed this. They also found that levels of depression increased globally by 25%, during the first year of the pandemic.
As entrepreneurs and business owners, it’s no secret that we take on more stress, workload, and risk than the general working population.
Isolation, lack of resources, competition, ‘hustle culture', and the pressure to succeed are reported to lead to higher levels of mental health symptoms in business owners compared to the general population.
Let’s talk about burnout.
In our industry, we work hard. During the peak season, it’s non-stop. And let’s face it, things go wrong and they go wrong often.
From my own experience, speaking to customers, colleagues, and peers, it’s clear that we all fall victim to overworking.
Now don’t get me wrong. Sometimes you need to put in the hours to make the business work. But, has it ever crossed your mind that you may be overworking as a coping mechanism to deal with stress?
Do you ever feel like you work best when you're in a crisis or when the stakes are high?
This is where the notion of ‘hustle culture’ comes into play.
Hustle culture is the feeling that you should never take your foot off the gas, you need to stay in motion and keep pushing, pushing, and pushing.
Now, if you are in the events industry, you know there is always work to be done. You can always find a challenge, an issue, or an opportunity.
This is where burnout comes into play.
Sherry Walling, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist who works with entrepreneurs, cautions that burnout is a lot more serious than it sounds. “Burnout is essentially a repetitive stress injury, where we’re using the same neurological circuitry over and over and over,” she says. “It’s brain damage. We can see it visibly on an FMRI, in someone who has high levels of burnout.”
When high stress and a high workload become the standard mode of operating over a sustained period, that’s when the risk of mental health symptoms starts to appear in you and your team.
With depression showing up as one of the leading causes of disability, it’s, therefore, a leading case of absence from work, too.
This is why prioritizing your mental health should be an essential part of your business strategy.
Because if you can’t work or your employees can work… Well, then you have problems.
Conversations to change behavior
The stigmas around mental health symptoms are being removed from society. Gone are the days of unhelpful slogans like ‘chine up’ or ‘man up’.
The issues that were once behind closed doors are now at the forefront of conversations in the workforce.
People are finally ready to talk openly about these issues.
This, in turn, makes it possible to take action and change behaviors.
Caring for yourself = caring for your business
When teams are overworked & stressed they do not work to their full potential. Mistakes are made, deliveries are poor, customer service declines and in the end, your bottom line decreases.
It gets to a point where you realize something needs to change.
But this is the problem.
Business owners and managers look to make changes when things are at their lowest.
Self-care should not be a recovery strategy for burnt-out.
Self-care should be looked at as preventative medicine. It should be part of the day-to-day conversion to prevent burnout from happening in the first place.
To summarize how most companies work
- We’re in events, you can always find more work and more stress.
- You may be overworking as a coping mechanism to deal with stress.
- Overworking leads to burnout, which leads to mental health symptoms in you and your team.
- This leads to mistakes being made in the business which affects your bottom line.
- Business owners and managers will make changes to deal with burnout when they hit rock bottom.
- The cycle repeats itself.
How we should embrace self-care
- Stigmas around mental health symptoms should not exist
- We should have conversations about burnout.
- Selfcare should be factored into work life as a preventative measure to prevent burnout.
- We continue delivering exceptional customer & employee service, running a sustainably profitable business.
- Our mental health is balanced.
When running a business there are times when we feel out of control with how things are going. The one thing we can control is how we take care of ourselves.
