Little By Little: Stress Awareness Month

Little By Little, A Little Becomes A Lot

This is this year’s Stress Awareness Month theme and we want to use this as our rallying cry to everyone to take the time to focus on your own mental health and to empower you to have conversations about stress and wellbeing with your friends, family, and in particular, within your workplace.

We all know what it is like to feel stressed – being under pressure is usually a normal part of life. But after the last few years and with ongoing life challenges and uncertainty, some of us are finding ourselves overwhelmed by stress. This can lead to mental health problems or exacerbate existing problems, cause exhaustion, physical illness and impact on every aspect of your life.

April is Stress Awareness Month and we have gathered together important information on our self-care hub about stress, burnout, how to better manage your stress levels and build resilience. We will also be sharing information across our social media channels throughout the month.

Stress Awareness Month has been held every April since 1992 to raise awareness of the causes and cures for our modern stress epidemic. This year The Stress Management Society have chosen the theme of #LittleByLittle

They “want to emphasize how even the smallest steps taken each day towards self-care and stress reduction can yield significant improvements in mental health over time… encourage you to focus on making manageable adjustments to your daily routine. While the impact of small actions on their own may seem little, the cumulative effects of these habits can end up being profound! ”

We hope that we can help you support your own mental health and build resilience. We also want to empower you as employees and employers to talk about stress and focus on workplace wellbeing because…

“New data suggests that for almost 70% of people, their manager has more impact on their mental health than their therapist or their doctor—and it’s equal to the impact of their partner.” Forbes

It has also recently been reported that “People taking sick days because of work-related stress or burnout is costing the UK economy £28bn a year” Independent

We are inviting employers during Stress Awareness Month to challenge attitudes and approaches to workplace wellbeing. Here at Manchester Mind we offer a range of training courses for managers and employees, which aim to eliminate stigma and improve understanding of mental health, enabling cultural change.

If you want to start a conversation with your manager (or you are a manager) Mind’s Workplace Wellness Plans are also a really useful resource to support your our wellbeing and your workplace wellbeing strategy