Hippie CEO Life #12 - Anxiety Doesn’t Need to Hold You Back
July 1, 2022
If you have anxiety, you are not alone.
If you have anxiety, you can be elite at your craft.
If you have anxiety, you can still create amazing things.
While i am incredibly grateful that more and more companies are taking the importance of mental health seriously there is still a lot of work to be done.
Mental health is still a very taboo subject at many, many places of employment. So if we still struggle to just talk about it, how are we ever going to get to a place where we are proactively designing our work environment with mental health in mind?
On a spectrum of diagnosed anxiety disorders that can manifest in pure panic and inability to work to isolated moments of extreme work and life based stress, every one of your employees, your teammates, are impacted by anxiety.
If you are building a company, running a team, leading an organization, or you have influence on policy, then you need to be thinking about how your choices are impacting the mental health of the people you are leading.
At a minimum, companies need to:
Create a safe environment in which mental health topics can be discussed
Encourage employees to take meaningful time-off
Set reasonable work schedules (STOP FORCING YOUR EMPLOYEES TO BILL MORE THAN 40 HOURS A WEEK)
Give employees autonomy (For me, lack of autonomy, lack of control over how i worked, was one of the biggest stressors, which drove a high anxiety state, that i faced in the workplace)
Be realistic about deadlines. Not every little task needs to be an emergency that needs to be turned around in 24 hours
Provide mental health resources
Select insurance plans that cover mental health
If you are reading this and you are an employer, please take 10-15 minutes today to think about how you are addressing mental health in the workplace.
If you are reading this and you are an employee, be honest with yourself and ask the question ‘is my current employer contributing in a positive way to my mental health?’ If the answer is ‘NO’, then something needs to change.
To one degree or another, all of us, at some point in our life, will struggle with overwhelming stress and anxiety on the job. Let’s support each other, let’s continue to remove the ‘taboo’ label from mental health, and let’s create and support workplaces that take mental health seriously.
And finally, if you are an employer or work for an employer that is doing amazing things for their employees regarding mental health, please let me know as i want to learn from leaders and companies that are doing this right.
