Join Mike as he talks through how to reduce poor mental health in the workplace. Learn how to be a role model to your employees and how to create an environment which allows people to talk openly about their mental health challenges. Learn the key to improving mental health and how to ensure your employees are feeling the best they can.
Transcript from video
Hello, connections. It's Mike here. We're on video eight of the happy manager video series. And today, we're gonna talk about mental health promoting good mental health, and reducing poor mental health. Mental health is a very popular topic to talk about and be aware of it at the moment. And the reason for that is, in my belief, because it's more challenging now than it's been before.
So why is it more challenging now than it was, say, fifty-one hundred years ago? Well, the reason for it is that the natural supporters of good mental health that used to be built into our lifestyle have reduced And the external stresses that contribute to poor mental health have increased. So it's a simple mathematical sort of more stresses, fewer promotions of good mental health, which is leading to new challenges. So what that means is that like without health overall, if we don't consciously do things to and make them good, the chances are it's gonna move that. So what are those what are things that used to be built into our lives? that reduced the likelihood of us suffering from poor mental health?
We used to talk to people. Okay? What's one of the most in-demand services for poor mental health right now, psychology and counselling? Talk to people. That used to happen as part of our lives because we weren't on our phones. We weren't distracted. We're in communities. We were we talked to people as a time as a way to pass the time, and we spent time with people that were older than us and wiser than us. We who are the counsellors and the psychologists, whatever else it might be. So that used to be built into our lives.
We also had fewer things to worry about. The things we did worry about might have been more serious such as if it doesn't rain the crops weren't growing, and we might starve to death, but we had a less volume of things to worry balance. So we talk to people as the main thing that's changed. Today, we've got more contributors to our stress.
So like I just said, there might not be a serious, but the volume of them is more. We compare ourselves to the world of people on our phones. We worry about the bills. We're about paying for things. We worry about politics. We worry about the news. We worry about
what's being told to us on television. So we don't talk as much as we used to. We worry about more it's obvious that we're going to have more mental health issues.
In regards to the workplace, the speed at which we work and the volume of work we can do has increased exponentially because of technology. So our jobs are much more mentally demanding now. We have to think more and we can do so much more work in the same period of time that the brain just gets overloaded, combine that with not talking, and not switching off. And it's again obvious that we're gonna have mental health issues. So we need to be a little bit aware of that, oh, why is it happening? The physical health piece as well contributes to it if we're not looking after our health, our mental health suffers as well. So what can we do to handle it better in the workplace in our lives?
The first thing is to embrace it. Don't be fearful of it. If you're scared of poor mental health, you're gonna create more poor mental health potentially in yourself and in your teams, the irony is that if we don't expose ourselves to anxiety worry stress. We can't grow. If we just stay in our comfort zones where we're not exposed to those things, we end up not growing, which ironically leads to poor mental health because we feel unfulfilled in our lives. So we have to expose ourselves to those things. What happens is, obviously, once we expose ourselves to those things we start to suffer a bit. The key thing here, I think, as a manager as a leader, is when that happens, which is it that should happen because you're pushing out from being a role model that instead of being ashamed of it or instead of not talking about it or trying to hide it away because you're a manager leader.
I think the key thing is to share it. I've been working too hard for the last two weeks and actually, I'm starting to feel really burnt out and I'm losing my motivation to share that with your teams because number one, you're doing the key thing that we know increases improves your improves mental health, which talks And number two, and this is probably the most important thing when we think bigger picture, is it makes people realize that everybody has stress anxiety and worry, Because when managers don't do this, and I've been in this position, I've done it myself, and they don't talk about their own experiences.
Number one, they carry on doing it. They carry on a behavior that's contributing to it
because they're not talking about it. But number two, they create the illusion to the people that are below them in seniority that to get to those positions of leadership, you need to be somebody that doesn't suffer from any mental health.
And that if you do suffer from mental health, you're not as good as those people. And that creates a world of trouble because it just leads to everybody holding this stuff inside, not talking about it, which means it builds up until it becomes an issue. But if we accept that poor mental health department, the part of life and that we're gonna suffer and that we're gonna have anxiety that we're gonna have to stress and that that's part of growth. If we accept that but talk about it openly. We're gonna feel better as managers. We're gonna feel better as leaders. our employees are gonna feel better about themselves and feel more human because they know that the people they look up to have the same challenges that they have.
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Mike Jones Better Happy Founder
Mike founded Better Happy in 2018.
He now works with a variety of businesses ranging from small accountancies up to large organisations such as Travelodge on improving employee happiness. Mike's vision and the vision of Better Happy is 'Every employee happy, every business thriving'