By Marcus Hoo
When you feel good both mentally and emotionally, you will approach your job with good mental health. But when you’re struggling with poor mental health at work, even if it isn’t extreme, it will negatively affect your job in many different ways. Such examples are: interaction, productivity, decision making, physical capability and engagement with one’s work. Here are explanations on how it can affect your job.
- Productivity and job performance: High performance is a key mental strength in motion. Performance is directly affected by our mental health and state. If we feel good, accessing the behavioural skills that foster creativity and resilience is easy. With these skills, we have the psychological resources to perform well at our jobs.
- Physical capability: Mental health massively affects your daily living and physical capability, both positively and negatively. Having a poor state of mind will negatively affect your capabilities at work. Such examples include: social anxiety, and reduction in cognitive performance and working memory. This means that you will feel more often depleted and sluggish at work.
- Interaction: It’s difficult to interact well when we’re emotionally not feeling well. Poor mental health may lead to miscommunication over colleagues. It may come across as speaking with a passive-aggressive tone, being a poor listener, or having a negative attitude. This may in turn accidentally anger someone you do not intend to.
- Work engagement: Poor mental health leads to demotivation and a lack of focus. When we have mental health issues, our minds tend to wander about or fixate on our problems, making it difficult to regulate our thoughts and emotions, and focus on our work.
- Degraded decision-making: Having a degraded mental health can lead to a lack of impulse control, unhealthy thoughts, and poor decision-making, which may lead to missed meetings, showing up late, dropping commitments, or not adhering to company policies.
Summary
Positive mental health at work allows us to cope with changing roles and responsibilities. It helps us flourish in our roles, manage stress, and boost our resilience. Most importantly, it allows us to reach our highest potential. This is therefore why you need to take initiative to help protect your mental health.