Standard Insights on Mental Health in the Workplace

Regarding the standards for mental health in the workplace, after working as an HRBP for 5 years, experiencing three episodes of workplace anxiety myself, and interviewing nearly 200 professionals from various industries, I have come to the following core conclusion:: There is simply no one-size-fits-all standard. The only key factor in making this judgment is whether your personal threshold for discomfort and your current career goals are in dynamic balance.

Interestingly, last month I met a young woman from an internet company who graduated from a top 985 university. For three consecutive quarters, she ranked first in her team in terms of KPIs and received performance bonuses every month. Her department head had already discussed a mid-year promotion for her. To anyone watching from the outside, her career seems to be going perfectly smoothly. But when she came to see me for a psychological consultation last week, she said that for over a month straight, she would feel nauseous and vomit every Monday morning. She went to the hospital, but they couldn’t find any organic problems. The doctors said it was just a physical reaction caused by chronic anxiety. She even asked me, somewhat embarrassed, “Everyone thinks I’m doing so well right now… Am I being too sensitive?” ”

This is actually the biggest misconception many people have regarding mental health in the workplace: Always trying to force external standards onto oneself. For many years, there has been considerable debate in academic circles regarding this issue. In the early days, Seligman and his team from the field of positive psychology proposed a set of universal criteria for workplace well-being, stating that as long as three conditions were met, someone could be considered to be in good mental health at work: Having a sense of control over one's work, where the effort put in is roughly matched by the rewards received, and feeling a sense of belonging within the team. However, the team led by Christina Maslach, an authoritative scholar in the field of burnout, has consistently opposed this claim. After tracking nearly ten thousand workers across various industries, they reached this conclusion: People at different career stages and with different priorities have vastly different thresholds for what constitutes health. A recent graduate who spends their days assisting seniors with processes and organizing documents may see this as an opportunity to gain experience and learn new things, and thus feel very fulfilled by it ； But if you asked a senior expert with 10 years of experience to do such trivial tasks every day, they would collapse within half a month.

When I used to work as a business line manager for a large company, I also encountered a situation that defied common sense: At that time, we conducted a psychological well-being survey across the entire department. The results showed that product managers who worked 996 hours a week on core company projects actually had significantly higher levels of happiness than their administrative colleagues who left work on time. Later, after talking with everyone, I realized that although the product team was very busy, with each version update, we could see our ideas becoming features actually used by millions of users. This gave us a huge sense of accomplishment—even having a barbecue in the early morning after working overtime felt great ； Although my colleagues in administrative roles can leave work at six o’clock every day, what they deal with on a daily basis are all kinds of time-consuming trivial tasks: Today I fix the printer, tomorrow I mediate a conflict between employees, and the day after that I revise the team-building plan eight times over. After being busy for a whole month, I don’t even know what I actually accomplished – and all this stress is only making me more exhausted inside. You say that according to a unified standard, who would be considered healthy and who would not?

Actually, I’ve also fallen into this trap of “using someone else’s standards to measure myself” before. Two years ago, I was assigned to lead a project involving a large-scale layoff. For three months straight, I spent every day talking with different employees about compensation arrangements and dealing with all the negative emotions that came up. During that time, I didn’t even have the energy to talk to my parents when I got home. My friends would even say things like, “How great of a job is that! Stable HR, high performance on such a key project…” I just felt too tired to argue with them. During that time, I lowered my own health standards to the absolute minimum: I don’t ask for any promotions or raises; as long as I can still stop by to buy a cup of ice milk tea on my way home from work every day, and enjoy half an episode of a drama series in peace once I get there, that’s enough for me.

Many people still have a misconception that mental health means having no negative emotions at all at work, not even allowing oneself to complain about the boss. But that’s definitely not the case at all. Who, when modifying the plan to its 8th version, didn’t curse a few times at the product? Who hasn’t rolled their eyes when encountering a coworker who tries to shift blame onto others? As long as these emotions don’t last for more than three days, and they don’t cause you physical headaches, insomnia, or a loss of appetite whenever you think about going to work, then they are actually within the normal range. We used to have a backend developer who would constantly complain in the department group about how the requirements kept changing. But after complaining, he would immediately start coding. On weekends, he would even come to the office voluntarily to optimize the underlying logic. Could you really say that he was mentally unwell? On the contrary, those who usually don’t show any emotions and hold back all their grievances, only to suddenly resign without giving any notice or even refusing to complete any handover procedures, are the ones who have already reached the brink of collapse.

These days, opinions online about workplace health tend to be quite polarized—some say “it’s better to relax and take it easy,” while others argue “you need to work hard while you’re young, or you’ll regret it later.” In reality, there’s no need to force these perspectives onto yourself. If you think that earning a million a year makes the 996 work schedule seem worthwhile, then just go ahead and work hard ； If all you want to do is go hiking from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays and have weekends off, then working for a small company would be completely fine for you. I once had a candidate who was doing well in a state-owned enterprise. But when he saw his classmates making big money in the internet industry, he got carried away and joined them. After working there for half a year, he couldn’t handle the fast pace and ended up suffering from depression. It took him another half year to pass the exams and get back to a government job in his hometown. All this trouble was caused by his trying to force himself to fit into someone else’s standards.

Oh right, these days many companies are offering EAP psychological services. I’ve heard plenty of my colleagues complain that it’s all just formality. But the problem really isn’t with the service itself; it’s that many companies use the same standardized assessment tools for every position. Salespeople and R&D staff are both asked to complete the same tests, and the evaluation criteria always focus on things like “stress resistance” and “emotional stability.” How can that possibly be effective? Sales inherently requires a high level of emotional intensity, while research and development need undisturbed, autonomous space. Using the same set of criteria will inevitably lead to incorrect results.

Now, when I assess my own situation or help team members figure out their problems, I basically don’t use any professional scales at all; instead, I resort to a rather straightforward method: When I wake up in the morning and think about having to go to work, should I just sigh and get up, or should I lie there and refuse to move at all, trying to fake being sick and get a day off for a whole week? If it’s the former, then there’s basically no big issue; working is bound to be frustrating at times anyway ； If it’s the latter, then you really need to take a moment to reflect: is it because the current job requirements no longer match your needs at all, or have you just set goals that are too high for yourself?

After all, when it comes down to it, we go to work in order to live a good life, not to ruin it. All these standards and criteria are nothing compared to the simple pleasure of eating well and sleeping soundly.