When I talk to people about the impact of building resilience through mindfulness I like to emphasise its value to all – how mindfulness can increase the resilience in all of us to deal with pressure and with change; and make all of us more able to focus and to make better decisions; and to increase our productivity, our open-mindedness, our empathy and our life satisfaction… and there is evidence to show that teams with mindful members are more effective that those without such members.
Yet it is also important to look at how resilience can help people to deal with stress and to avoid becoming anxious or depressed – especially as my recent work has shown that many people overestimate their reserve of resilience and so that are shocked when they suddenly start to experience problems. And this happens to many people…
I recently noticed that the HSE (The UK’s Health and Safety Executive) have released figures for 2017/18 that show that work related stress and mental illness (anxiety and depression) accounted for over half of work place absences: 57%. (See here )
So nearly 600,000 employees now suffer from such conditions; and the data shows that the growth such problems has yet to plateau; growing by 13% from the previous year. The cost of this absence is now £8Billion per year.
A spokesperson from HSE commenting on the figures said: “The fact that work-related stress, anxiety and depression is estimated to be responsible for 57 per cent of the working days lost to ill health shows how important it is for employers to take action.”
At Carina Sciences we are working with employers to use our Rezl app to build the resilience of employees – to pre-empt such problems, to reduce the impact on those with such problems… and to enable all employees to boost their performance and life satisfaction.