Why Work/Businesses Depend on Mental Wellness

Everything we do for work directly depends on mental functions. Absolutely everything!

Although we work with the “head”, relying dominantly on inner mental functions to get our work done, the approach in workplaces to this vital resource has been of a reactive type – becoming highlighted only when serious mental health problems emerge.

The approach to mental wellness needs to be very systematic and proactive. It also needs to be practical and provide useful knowledge tools (skills), so that people can activate themselves and keep their inner mental capabilities in good shape.

When everyone is equipped with methods to effectively handle everyday challenges as they emerge, pressures will not escalate and seeds of illness can be kept away. Flexible working arrangements, taking a vacation and doing breathing exercises are good enough for a quick fix, but in the absence of practical intrapersonal skills, remain only compensative in nature.

The need for a new proactive mental health approach is obvious

Employees expect employers to present a solution, but they don’t have one! According to statistics, 87% of people admit to overworking, with employers themselves in a worse position (only 29% satisfied with work-life balance) compared to managers (37%) and team members (51%).¹

Why every workplace urgently NEEDS to take notice:

• On average a company already loses 700-1000 € / per employee every year because of stress, burnout, and mental ill-health². Imagine those losses stopped?
• More than 80% of people aren't engaged or passionate about what they do for work³. However, they don't need more motivation training. Instead, people are overwhelmed with stress, burning out, or struggling otherwise with handling their inner mental reactions. Boredom and indifference aren't physical issues, right? Reinforced with skills to stop stress from escalating, a big portion of those people can easily be won back. Everyone who can do the maths understands the differences in revenue when there would be 60% of the engaged and motivated workforce instead of the current 20%.
• Costs to presenteeism (showing up to work, unable to perform at a personally optimal level) are higher (58%) than those of absenteeism (33%) or workforce turnover (9%)⁴.
• The study by Killingsworth & Gilbert highlights that 50% of the time our mind is wandering⁵ and 91% of people attending meetings admit to daydreaming⁶. Since awareness is the tool everyone uses for concentration and time management, education about its practical application is a must, enabling people to restore their productivity independently.
• When people are mentally unwell at work, they report decreased ability to get stuff done (62%), also employees aren't engaged (63%), and often unmotivated (62%)⁷.
   

The difference between mental wellness and mental illness (often talked as mental health)

Too often ‘mental health’ gets confused with ‘mental illness’. The two couldn’t be more different.

Mental health is something that every person enjoys when their inner functions operate in the most optimal manner. It is a level of psychological well-being. Without training our mental fitness, we can't see the actual benefits of excellent mental wellness that enable us access to different practical mental 'superpowers' like creativity, insight, intuition, the ability to concentrate on something as long as we need, and personal initiative. Without those 'superpowers', we are already losing our jobs to robots and AI systems that don't suffer from stress, burnout, or mental illnesses.

Mental illness is a lack of health – a result of not dealing with the problematic way of functioning in time due to the absence of specific education – the intrapersonal skills.

Illness is a direct result of neglecting the need for proactive mental wellness education, a biased focus to reactively fire-fighting the consequences. As the topic of illnesses is often also stigmatized, people postpone speaking up and getting help.

If we as a society and workplaces don't pay more attention to normal mental functions and wellness and don't reach for skills to sustain it (and seek professional help, if an illness has already formed), then the escalation of mental illness into a global epidemic can't be stopped.
 

What is mental wellness?

In fact, when somebody uses the name of a diagnosis in a sentence, it isn't any longer about wellness, but illness.

Good mental health equals wellness, optimum inner functioning, and effective use of innate potentials: purposeful attention, embracing the change and unknown, initiative, creativity, inner motivation, having insights, awareness of emotions, good management of their activities in time and more. These are all specific inner capabilities, developed into practical and applicable skills within the well-crafted curriculum.

Mental wellness is a proactive approach, just like going to the gym is for good physical health and overall wellbeing. What you and your team need in this sense, is a mental wellness gym for learning knowledge tools and practices to direct their own inner functions and the brain!

Workplaces benefit from becoming educators

Although personal responsibility for one’s mental state is elementary, it would be naïve to expect people to be able to apply skills that they haven't learned yet.

In the situation where there is almost no practical education about mental wellness and intrapersonal skills at schools and the wellness-centered proactive education side isn't the “business” of medicine either, it only leaves workplaces capable of filling in this major gap in education.

Mental wellness investments offer up to tenfold ROI (return on investment) as the major win here is improved employee engagement and productivity (click on the link to see data from 2022 and more detailed descriptions).

As employees spend most of their waking hours at work then employers need people who are mentally well capable to perform their tasks.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is about humans, ourselves

The next crucial thing to be developed isn't technology or a rocket to enter outer space.

The next most crucial development concerns understanding and upgrading the human mind – people need practical skills to direct inner mental functions. To the surprise of most people, the solution isn't something waiting on the shelf, ready to be used.

Employers have equally limited knowledge about inner mental functions and what makes them operate in a non-optimal way, as have employees. Mental health professionals have been focused more on illnesses (diagnosing and treating them) than on wellbeing. Apart from enthusiasts like Dr. Helena Lass and a handful of others, a systematic approach to proactive mental wellness hasn't reached even the phase of "baby steps".
 

How to empower your staff and improve mental wellness?

Dr. Helena Lass has written a scientific article about this topic, which will be featured in a forthcoming newsletter next year. Until then, her practical method is already available across the globe – a gym for your brain has been born and offers practical mental fitness e-trainings.

The mental wellness gym we designed for you is now open 24/7 and with the potential to simultaneously train tens of thousands of people in a totally new and proactive way.

CONCLUSION

Focusing on mental wellness is a unique opportunity to positively influence the lives of all employees, entrepreneurs, and gifted achievers.

Everyone can have mental superpowers like the ability to differentiate and focus, access to deeper insights, intuition and creativity. However, those abilities need to be trained regularly, just as your muscles do. This is why we turned to build easy-to-use digital mental wellness solutions – to provide regular and continuous build-up of skills, now only a few clicks away!

 

    

---

► References:

1. The online survey by Wrike, 1 915 respondents

2. The European Agency for Safety and Health at Work, document on "Calculating the cost of work-related stress and psychosocial risks". Referring to the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health survey (2007) about the costs of mental health issues in the UK

3. Gallup 142-country study "State of the Global Workplace", 2013.

4. The European Agency for Safety and Health at Work, document on "Calculating the cost of work-related stress and psychosocial risks". Referring to the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health survey (2007) about the costs of mental health issues in the UK

5. Killingsworth & Gilbert, Published in Science 2010, "A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind"

6. Atlassian survey: https://www.atlassian.com/time-wasting-at-work-infographic

7. Global Wellness Institute 2016, "The Future of Wellness at Work" report

---

This blog post is written by Dr. Helena Lass. Latest update  14.06.2022