5 Tips to Improve Your Mental Health Today

Statistics show that 1 in 5 adult Australians suffer from a mental illness, often as a result of chronic stress, which ultimately impacts their work. Therefore, taking care of employee mental health not only shows good ethics, but it’s also good for business.

It’s been estimated that the annual cost to a company of an employee with untreated depression is $9,660. Amazingly, untreated depression results in over 6 million working days lost each year in Australia. That’s a lot of wasted production!

In Victoria, stress is the second most common cause of workplace compensation claims in Australia, after manual handling. There has been a huge surge in Victoria of job-related stress recently, with 58 compensation claims for psychological injuries being approved every week!

There are many different factors that can cause depression and mental health issues, including some predispositions. In this article, we’ll focus on a key psychological factor that affects mental health - STRESS.

The Fight or Flight Response

You’ve most likely heard of the fight or flight response. Well, going back hundreds of thousands of years, stress was actually a good thing! In small doses, stressful events trigger the body to release hormones called cortisol and adrenaline.

These two hormones create a physical response in the body including elevated blood pressure, increased heart rate, elevated respiration, improved acute concentration and hype the body up for an event like running away from a tiger. This survival mechanism enabled humans to survive life threatening events and situations.

In 2015, we don’t face the same life threatening situations as our ancestors, but constant work stressors, making ends meet, rapid increases in technology and having greater access to things like e-mail, results in a much more hectic lifestyle and puts us into the fight or flight response constantly. This is due to never “switching off” and always being "on the go".

This response is still useful from time to time, especially in regards avoiding car accidents and potential dangers to our life, but overall, the response just serves to keep us in a highly alarmed state, which is not good for the body. Long term activation of this survival mechanism has detrimental health effects on the body, including the following;