Why managing stress is more important than you might think...

Stress is a part of everyday life. From work deadlines to personal responsibilities, it can feel overwhelming when the pressure builds up. While some stress can be motivating, chronic stress can negatively affect your mental and physical health. Learning how to manage stress is crucial for maintaining wellbeing, productivity, and overall happiness.

UKIM's Lead Psychologist, Dr Kayode, explains why stress management matters...

"Stress isn’t just a mental burden—it impacts your whole body. Here’s why managing it is essential:

1. Physical Health: Chronic stress can lead to headaches, high blood pressure, heart disease, and weakened immune function. Managing stress helps protect your body from these long-term health issues.
2. Mental Clarity: When you’re stressed, your brain’s ability to focus and think clearly diminishes. Managing stress allows for better decision-making, problem-solving, and creativity.
3. Emotional Wellbeing: High stress levels can trigger anxiety, depression, and burnout. By controlling stress, you maintain emotional balance, resilience, and a positive outlook on life.
4. Relationships: Stress can strain relationships, as you may be more irritable or withdrawn. Learning to manage it helps you maintain healthy and supportive relationships."

How does this impact work?

Ultimately, it leads to employees not being focussed or productive whilst at work, as well as higher levels of sickness, both long term and short term. Stress affects people in very different ways, as discussed by Dr Kayode above, and this then makes employees struggle to conduct work tasks or even attend work at all. The feelings of stress can be caused by work through heavy workloads, a lack of management, and not feeling like staff have someone at work they can talk to. Alternatively, stress can be caused by outside factors and hidden pressures, causing the same negative impacts at work. Just because the stress factor may be external, it doesn’t mean that staff shouldn’t be supported at work- it affects all.

How can UKIM Occupational Health & Wellbeing help?

At UKIM we offer a variety of support that’s bespoke to each business, employees and their needs. Our Employee Wellbeing Strategies include tailored health assessments, employee wellbeing strategy assessments, health improvement, psychological interventions, onsite health coaches, fit for role workshops, healthy living education and digital employee benefits programmes. With this wide variety of support, there’s something suitable for any business and employee to help with stress management. We cover both external and internal stressors so that staff and businesses can flourish.