Guest post by Graeme Mills of wellbeing-training.co.uk
It is estimated that mental health costs businesses in the UK £35 billion per year. It’s a figure so big, it seems almost meaningless. However, this promotes only a one-dimensional view of mental health; focussing on the negative aspects of mental health rather than the opportunities and business advantages by providing, promoting and facilitating ‘good mental health’ in your organisation.
Firstly, we need to understand that we all have mental health, as much as we have physical health. Mental health is not just about illness or the acute conditions of depression and anxiety; it is also about how we feel about ourselves and how we respond to work, our managers and colleagues. Keeping ourselves mentally well requires deliberate activities in the same way as keeping physically well.
In our new Mental Health eLearning course, developed and written by Clinical Psychologists, we describe how we can all be subject to harmful thinking patterns, such as catastrophising, which can impact on our performance and general well being. But by being mindful of how our thoughts are impacting on our feelings, we can prevent them from becoming dominant and safeguard our mental health.
There are many positives for businesses and organisations too. Accepting we all have mental health and developing positive strategies such as empowerment, emotional intelligence, promoting a sense of purpose, and creating strong supportive teams, not only develops good mental health for your employees it has also been proven to strengthen business performance.
Even the arch enemy of mental health, ‘stress’, can have a positive impact on individual and business performance. The stress bell-curve developed by Yerkes-Dodson, illustrates this perfectly. Too little stress leads to boredom and inactivity and too much leads to burnout and breakdown. There is a sweet spot of optimum performance at the apex of this curve.
A greater focus on ‘good mental health’ will begin to destigmatise mental health as well as enable businesses to see the commercial advantage of a positive mental health culture.
A first step is to help your people truly understand mental health and we can help with this. All customers of The Holiday Tracker can get a 20% discount from our Mental Health Awareness and Emotional Wellbeing eLearning course by using the voucher code holidaytracker20 on our website: wellbeing-training.co.uk. If you are an HR Manager, then please get in touch with us directly and we may be able to set you up with a free trial.
Guest post by Graeme Mills of wellbeing-training.co.uk
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