A 5-minute read that’ll do more for your bottom line than another resilience workshop
Gallup’s new State of the World’s Emotional Health 2025 report paints a worrying picture for business leaders, and you need to pay attention to it.
Worry and stress continue to top the list of negative emotions worldwide. Almost four in ten people felt worry yesterday. More than a third felt stressed. Those numbers are lower than at the height of the pandemic, but still far higher than a decade ago.
It’s tempting for executives to dismiss this as “a global mood problem.” But worry and stress don’t just affect people’s feelings. They directly drain performance capability and business results.
How worry and stress feed each other
Worry and stress are closely linked.
Worry is the mental process of replaying or anticipating problems – an endless loop of “what if” thinking.
Stress is the body’s broader response to demands and pressure, whether real or imagined.
When worry becomes excessive, it triggers the body’s stress response. Heart rate rises, cortisol floods the system, muscles tighten, and attention narrows.
And because the brain can’t tell the difference between an actual threat and an anticipated one, it stays on high alert.
Over time, that heightened state becomes the norm. Chronic worry sustains stress even when nothing’s wrong. It keeps the amygdala – the brain’s alarm system – switched on, which drains focus, clarity, decision-making and performance.
The more we worry, the more we activate the body’s stress response. The more stressed we feel, the harder it is to quiet the worry. It’s a feedback loop that quietly erodes energy, focus, and performance.
When worry hijacks focus
Worry is like leaving too many tabs open on your mental desktop.
Every “what if” running in the background consumes processing power that should be spent on actually getting stuff done.
From a neuroscience perspective, worry and stress directly impact your ability to focus and concentrate because they consume critical attention control resources. This often results in impaired working memory, distractibility, and a tendency to focus on perceived threats or negative possibilities rather than productive work or learning.
Research shows that people with high worry levels experience difficulty maintaining concentration, mental fatigue, and reduced cognitive performance.
For businesses, this shows up as slower execution, less innovation, lost productivity, and teams that are busy but not effective.
A worried brain lacks the attention and bandwidth to do great work.
Why leadership matters more than ever
You can’t eliminate stress completely (nor would you want to because we need a certain amount of stress to perform), but you can reduce how much of it comes from within your business.
And the biggest lever is, drumroll please…. management capability.
A global study found that 69% of employees say their manager impacts their mental health more than their doctor or therapist.
Think about how huge that is.
On the flip side, those who feel supported by their manager are 56% less likely to report high work stress. 56%! You’re literally cutting it in half!
That’s not a wellbeing issue, that’s a management issue.
When managers clarify priorities, coach effectively, and create psychological safety, they buffer stress instead of amplifying it.
Training managers to manage well doesn’t just improve engagement, it protects performance.
Building mental fitness at work
Mental fitness is what helps people handle stress and worry in a productive way, without losing effectiveness.
Teams with strong mental fitness:
- Protect focus instead of fragmenting it
- Recover quickly from setbacks
- Think helpfully
- Operate from accountability, not reactivity
- See opportunities instead of obstacles
- Get better results with less effort
So, where do you start?
Upskill your managers!
It’s the single biggest lever you have.
As the data shows, managers have more impact on stress, engagement, and performance than almost any other factor. When they’re equipped to lead well, they protect their team’s energy and capacity. When they’re not, they amplify pressure and burnout.
How well you train your managers will determine whether they’re reducing stress and driving performance or quietly undermining both.
Beyond that, here are some small, tangible shifts you can make right now to build mental fitness across your organisation:
- Reduce unnecessary meetings
- Clarify priorities to eliminate wasted energy on confusion
- Normalise breaks – micro-pauses between tasks, 15-minute buffers between meetings, proper lunch breaks… these little things matter
- Encourage end of week reflections – what went well? What drained energy? What needs to change to make next week more productive and successful?
None of these are revolutionary, but together they compound.
I want you to think about building mental fitness the same way you build physical fitness – through small, consistent reps, not once-a-year initiatives.
The bottom line
You can’t build a high-performing organisation on low mental fitness.
Stress and worry don’t just drain energy – they drain margin.
A worried workforce isn’t thinking strategically, they’re just trying to make it through the week.
And when survival becomes the goal, growth stops.
If your managers don’t know how to manage (and don’t have the skills to create the right environment for people to perform at their best), the cost isn’t just their own performance.
It’s a more stressed team, missed opportunities, slower execution, and a business that’s operating below its potential.
And when your business is running below its potential, that’s not their problem, it’s yours.
It might be invisible on your P&L, but it’s eating into it every day.
The data says the world is still worried. The question is, what are you going to do about it?
How I help you
Most consulting firms will sell you strategy tweaks. Or new systems. Or bigger resourcing models.
We don’t. At Human Tribe, we fix the two root causes most executives (and other consultants) miss:
- Managers who don’t know how to manage
- Cognitive energy leaks that quietly destroy performance
We don’t fix strategy, systems, or headcount. We fix the managers and the energy leaks that undermine all three.
What you need to do
I’ve got just 2 spots left this year to work with executives who are serious about building high performing teams that consistently perform… without burning out. If that’s you, contact me right now before someone else beats you to it.
If you’re not the decision maker, forward this to whoever is – they need to understand that training managers isn’t a “nice to have” – it’s a business necessity.
Here’s to teams who thrive under pressure (and leaders who make it possible),
Jess
