It’s Stress Awareness Month: Are Your Managers Getting the Help They Need?

April marks the start of National Stress Awareness Month—a crucial time dedicated to recognizing and combating the modern stress epidemic. But in the hustle and bustle of the corporate world, the focus often narrows in on employee stress. While this is a significant concern for any organization looking to improve workplace wellbeing, lurking behind the curtain of leadership you’ll often find the overlooked stress of managers.

These essential figures who steer the ship face unique pressures that can go unnoticed in the broader dialogue around workplace wellness. This is especially true for younger generations, as Fortune notes, with millennial middle managers being the most likely group to feel stressed, overwhelmed, and burned out at work.

Not only does stress lead to health problems and mental illness, but elevated levels over time can also ripple through the organization, affecting overall morale and productivity. So how can employers help their managers manage their stress?

To understand that, we first need to identify the types of stress we deal with.

As humans, we’ve evolved to have a natural stress response to evolutionary pressures that goes something like this:

1. A person notices a threat or stress trigger nearby, perhaps a fire.
2. The body enters a state of high alert, pumping out stress hormones that increase blood pressure, tense muscles, and trigger the "fight-or-flight” response.
3. The threat passes or they get to safety, and the stress hormones subside as the body recovers.

While emergencies might not happen every day in the office, this kind of stress response can manifest and cause the same fear and anxiety. We've simply replaced physical fires with "fire drills" like deadlines, financial worries, family dysfunctions, social issues, and other day-to-day pressures.

As a consequence of this, not every stressful situation is put out as easily as a fire. Instead, we experience three types of stress: 

1. Acute Stress: This is the most common form of stress, occurring for a brief period due to recent and/or anticipated demands.
2. Chronic Stress: This is the stress that grinds individuals away day after day, often resulting from unrelenting pressures, such as financial stress.
3. Episodic Acute Stress: This type of stress occurs when individuals frequently experience acute stress due to persistent triggers.