Why reaching out for mental health support at work is difficult

You’ve been working at your organisation for over 2 years and you’re comfortable. You get along with your colleagues, you know how to do your job and do it well. You get to work from home and have the flexibility to create a lifestyle where you can balance your home and work life balance.

One day you have this niggling feeling in your tummy. Something doesn’t feel quite right. Everyday that feeling starts to get stronger, until you can’t eat much anymore, you can’t socialise with your friends and waking up every day feels like a burden. This is not something you can ignore.

How do you continue to keep up appearances for work, family, and everyday life? It feels impossible. You’re always known as the happy one, the entertainer and the nothing will get her down person.

You show up to your zoom work calls every day putting on a brave face and it becomes scary to even consider going into the office. How can you continue working while you feel like every fibre in your body just wants to give in. How can you pretend to be happy? Should you just carry-on and act as if everything is normal?

If we really need a day off, how come we have to say that we are physically sick from a cold or flu? Shouldn’t there be allowance for your brain to rest? The brain that is keeping you in a job! Why are we scared to reach out for support at work or tell our managers that we are not feeling ourselves?

 Below are three reasons why we hold back from reaching out for support in the workplace.

1.  Judgement: Feeling judged by others for the decisions and actions we take stops us from being our true selves. I questioned if I should tell my manager that I was struggling with my mental health, as it might lead me to losing my job, then my house, and even my husband. Going down a rabbit hole is not fun especially when the lose feels so great.

2.  Ego: We must admit, we all have an ego, and it can give us pride and confidence. It’s great to possess these qualities, but we must never use that ego to put others down or feel superior to them. I was concerned that if people at work found out that I was struggling with my mental health, that I would appear unprofessional or incapable of doing my job, even though this was not true.

3.  Trust: Do we trust the people at our workplace, our colleagues, and managers to support us? It’s hard to trust others when you can’t even trust yourself. Learning to trust and value yourself is a journey and you need the right support to get there.

What I learnt from my journey was that anything I lost in the process of getting support was not worth keeping in the first place. I let my judgement and ego go and trusted myself enough to tell my manager about what I was going through, it felt like a weight lifted off my shoulders and that’s when my journey of self-discovery began. I was able to keep my job, house, and husband in the process (even though I realistically was not on the path to losing these things).

The question I ask is how can we put the right supports in place at organisations so that no one feels alone or scared to ask reach out for help? To have happier and more productive people at work and at home is beneficial to the companies we work with and most importantly to our families and friends at home who just want to see us happy.