When Coping is No Longer Enough: Rethinking Workplace Stress and Mental Health
Most workplaces run on an unspoken rule that being professional means keeping it together. You get to work, hit your deadlines, sit through meetings and deliver, regardless of what may be happening in your personal life or the challenges you might be dealing with emotionally and mentally.
For a while, many people manage. But the 2025 Profmed Stress Index suggests that for a lot of South African professionals, that is no longer working. Nearly a third of respondents said stress was affecting their sleep and their ability to exercise, while just under 30% reported changes to their eating habits. Another 44.05% still felt overwhelmed despite using coping strategies such as exercise, mindfulness and therapy, and almost half were concerned about the long-term impact of stress on their mental health.
As Mental Health Awareness Month gets under way, those numbers raise an uncomfortable point. Many professionals are already doing what they have been told to do about stress, and yet, it’s still not enough.
How stress has changed
According to Justine Lacy, Clinical Executive at Profmed, the nature of professional stress has shifted over the past decade. Before COVID-19, it mostly came from the ordinary challenges of life. During the pandemic, it was driven by fear: lost income, health worries and the rising cost of living. Since then, the main source has been work itself, through heavy workloads, toxic workplaces and poor work-life balance.
These pressures no longer arrive one at a time. They overlap and feed each other, which makes stress more persistent and harder to manage. It also builds slowly. Constant tiredness that rest doesn’t fix, a shorter temper than usual, trouble concentrating or small mistakes that aren’t like you are easy to put down to a busy month. Pressure becomes a mental health concern when it stops being temporary, when rest doesn’t help, and when it starts to affect someone’s health, relationships or ability to function.
The person who still looks fine
Many people assume that someone who is struggling will eventually show it in their work. Justine says that often isn’t the case. Plenty of professionals keep meeting deadlines while dealing with serious distress, and sometimes their output stays strong because they are working harder to make up for it, at considerable personal cost.
“We often look for a drop in performance as the warning sign, but by then we may have missed months of struggle,” she says. The earlier signs are usually changes in energy, behaviour, engagement and wellbeing.
The expectation to stay composed makes this harder. People known as dependable may worry about looking incapable or letting colleagues down, so they put off asking for help. Over time, that delay can lead to burnout, poorer decisions and a growing sense of isolation.
Why self-care has limits
Exercise, mindfulness and therapy all help. But they work on the person, and the problem often sits in the job. “You can’t self-care your way out of a situation that’s continually creating stress,” Justine says. Exercise won’t shorten someone’s working week, and mindfulness won’t fix unrealistic expectations or a toxic team.
The World Health Organization lists excessive workloads, lack of control, job insecurity, poor organisational culture and lack of support as workplace mental health risks. None of those can be solved by an individual. As Justine puts it: “Individuals need healthy coping mechanisms, but organisations also need to create environments where people can thrive, not just survive.”
What employers can do
A wellness day or an employee assistance programme has value, but Justine says real support starts with the causes of stress. She points to three things:
Supportive leadership. Managers check in regularly, encourage open conversations and model healthy behaviour themselves.
Healthy work design. Workloads are reasonable, deadlines are realistic and boundaries outside working hours are respected.
Psychological safety. Employees can ask for help or admit they are struggling without fearing the consequences.
Check-ins also need to happen more often than the annual survey. “Burnout rarely happens overnight,” Justine notes, and employers who watch for absenteeism, withdrawal, irritability or persistent fatigue can step in early. The question to ask, she says, is “How do we create a workplace where fewer people reach that point in the first place?”
The cost of waiting
Justine calls cost one of the biggest barriers to getting help early. Many people hold off on seeing a psychologist or psychiatrist until they are in significant distress, and by then the problem is usually harder to treat.
She believes medical schemes and healthcare providers are well placed to move mental healthcare from a crisis response to early intervention, so people can get support when stress first becomes a concern and not only once it becomes a diagnosis.
Success shouldn’t cost your health
Justine’s message to professionals is simple. Mental health matters as much as physical health, and seeking support early is a sign of strength, not weakness. You don’t need to wait until you are burnt out or in crisis. Pay attention to the early signs and check in with yourself and the people around you.
“Being resilient doesn’t mean carrying every burden alone,” she concludes.
