What we get wrong about stress | Thijs Launspach | TEDxVUAmsterdam

foreign is called Felix I met him when I was 16. we were both long-haired hard rockers we were into beer and we were into Ivan Maiden so we bonded and Felix has a huge tattoo of the skyline of Amsterdam across his old chests and his both of the arms but you can't see it when he wears a dress shirt or a suit and Felix is someone you can call in a crisis situation and he'll come and help but not without mocking you relentlessly um he's also the only person I know that still converts Euros back

to gilders in his head and Felix can push himself so hard when he wants to achieve something he writes down all the steps in between and starts to take them no matter what happens and just between you and me he can be stubborn as hell but it's the same stubbornness he's had to depend on for all of his life because he never got anything in life for free a stubbornness that took him from growing up in a difficult part of Amsterdam to where he is now the managerial position in a finance department the salary the

Tesla the nice office and back in 2022 Felix was trying to combine the responsibilities of three different full-time jobs into one work life and I have never seen anyone work as hard get up at six to talk to the Asia team sure need this document first thing tomorrow I will work late need me to respond to emails during meetings okay I can multitask and with every step he took they just gave him more to do until one day even for Felix the stress just became too much and Felix has been home now for about eight

months he's doing well although he still hasn't really fully recovered yet but I can again see the old feelings I've had all of these adventures with he's sure of one thing though he is not going back and I remember times in my career when I felt a bit like Felix and I'm sure you've had those moments too for me it was months where work was never not on my mind weeks I had to scramble to meet all of these demands people were depending on me and I couldn't let them down now could I but all

of these interesting things I was doing kept me up late losing sleep and if I'm honest my work ethic was eating away at my health making me unhappy and a less pleasant person to be around today though I basically have the best job on the planet as a psychologist I get to write and speak about mental health all of the time and I get to meet loads of people and they tell me what's on their mind and a thing that comes up a lot is stress and through my work I get to meet teachers and

lawyers and care workers and students and entrepreneurs and managers and CEOs and they all have a story and I get to listen and here are a couple of the things that I've learned we are crazy busy our days are filled up to the brim with news updates and emails and notifications and of work we strive to be the best versions of ourselves and on top of that we're blasted with emails notifications news updates that keep us occupied and alert for every waking hour and awake for even more hours and being a bit busy of course

isn't necessarily a problem in fact a bit of stress can actually be good for you stress is just the way that your body and your mind reacts to a situation that needs your undivided attention whether that's nearly avoiding an accident while cycling through Amsterdam or giving a very important presentation it's just something that happens and you shouldn't be too afraid of stress in fact you often need a bit of stress to get you going chronic stress though that's the stress you stay in for longer periods of time the stress you don't really recover from that's

the stress that leads to motivation issues health problems and eventually even burnout stress is universal I've learned from The Boardroom to the garbage facility virtually everyone has to deal with stress in some way for some that's merely a minor inconvenience for some it's a daily challenge to keep up with all demands from work and from home and some like Felix burnout and we are in a burnout epidemic an epidemic is a big word even controversial I know but I do use it consciously in my country in the Netherlands one in seven workers report having to

deal with so much stress and that they essentially it becomes dangerous for them it becomes unhealthy and in some sectors like education and Healthcare that's not one in seven that is one in five and people who burn out so saying sustain so much stress for such a long time they had that they essentially break down and they have to recover often from months at a time and if that hasn't been you you surely know at least a couple of people who went through that and while these numbers may vary from country to Country this is

also due to different ways of defining burnout this is a global phenomenon and we still cheat stress and burnout as individual problems and in part of course that's true some people are just a bit more vulnerable to stress than other people because of their individual psychological makeup or because of something bad that happened to them in the past because of a mismatch between the job that they're doing and the talents that they have or because they're dealing with all kinds of stuff in their private lives divorce disease financial hardship in addition to the stress from

work and all of that may be true and it partly explains why some people burn out and others don't but there's this crucial thing we forget this is the thing I think we get wrong about stress it is also a work problem as much as we individualize the problem people do also get sick from their environments and as we spend a huge portion of our time at our jobs our mental health is also thoroughly affected by our work environment work environments that in our time regretfully often make us ill the productivity culture within organizations can

be toxic productivity is great it's our contribution to the world it's also what we're paid for but there comes a point from productivity culture becomes damaging so when is a work environment toxic well when people feel they have to be responsive 24 7 and emailing at nights any weekends is encouraged if not expected environments where people are pushed to come in early stay late skip their breaks in order to finish that one little project that just must be done today work environments where talking about stress is taboo and tall tales about all-nighters are considered virtuous

and this is what I worry about we are creating environments work environments that are toxic in which people are treated as productivity machines monitoring their inputs and their outputs and not like human beings and here's the thing it's incredibly difficult to remain healthy in an unhealthy work environment you can be as resilient as you can be you can be you can have a stable Foundation you can be brimming with self-confidence and still be negatively affected by a toxic work environment and it doesn't have to be this way there are plenty of organizational interventions that we

know of that work wonders shorter working days switching off phones and emails after hours installing better support systems for employees allowing for mental health days creating a culture of compassion and meaning leaders speaking up about their own mental health challenges and of course increasing awareness and knowledge about stress and burnout within the organization and just in case you might be worried about this let me take that persistent misunderstanding out of the way once and for all no burnouts don't spread just by talking about them we need environments that are less toxic and more human and

this is not only for purely philanthropic reasons either after all all research points to this healthy workers are happy and happier workers produce better results it's as simple as that we need a human revolution in the workplace we need to take mental health far more seriously for Catherine for Ishmael for Michael for Alice and for Phoenix because he should have his talent and ambition work for him instead of used against him we need to take mental health more serious than we do and of course that's a task for our leaders and in my experience leaders

in companies are either part of the problem or part of the solution so let me talk to them for a second yes it's about the culture that you install and yes it's about the example that you give so here's a question for you how can you make your culture more human your employees more resilient and your company a healthier place to work what's the very first thing you can change immediately and it's not only about our leaders it's also for the rest of us we do all have a role to play in this we can

either conform to the Norms or we can reject them together we decide what is normal we can change the conversation we can vote for legislation and we can vote with our feet we can decide what companies what kind of companies to work for the kind that exploits us or the kind in which we're allowed to grow when we all decide to do so we can change the story and if you're listening to this and you happen to be struggling yourself here's the thing you can do take a breath experience the air that you are breathing

look at the people that are sitting beside you feel what you are feeling allow yourself to be human and let that be your superpower [Applause]