You know you’re stressed at work. But what’s underneath it?
Explore six sources of workplace stress, the feelings hiding in plain sight, and how emotions coaching can help you understand what you need.
You close your laptop, but the day stays in your head. There’s the email you haven’t answered, the conversation you wish had gone differently, the project that is now somehow yours. Someone asks how you are and all you can think to say is, “A bit stressed,” because dinner needs making and you haven’t quite found the right words for everything else.
It’s a useful word, stressed. It can hold so much. The anxious feeling before a meeting. The frustration of another moveable deadline. The loneliness of being the person everyone comes to while wondering who you can turn to yourself. Sometimes we know we’re stressed long before we understand what is contributing to it.
For Stress Awareness Week, I’ve been thinking about a framework from the Health and Safety Executive. Its Management Standards identify six areas of working life that can contribute to stress: demands, control, support, relationships, role and change. These are areas for employers to address; employers have a duty to assess and act on work-related stress risks. You can read the HSE’S guidance here.
Below we get into the emotional side of these stressors. Perhaps one of these will help you find a little more language for what’s happening.
Demands: when everything needs something from you
There’s the work you’re paid to do, and then everything else that gathers around it. The messages, the organising, the remembering. You begin the day already behind and end it thinking about what you didn’t manage. This is when we can start to experience a feeling of overwhelm, alongside guilt about stopping for the day or anxiety about letting someone down.
Before asking how you could become more organised, it might help to ask: What is being asked of me, and what capacity do I actually have? Include the things that don’t appear on your calendar but still take time and energy.
Control: when you have responsibility without much choice
Perhaps you’re accountable for something but have little influence over the deadline, the process or the decisions affecting it. Or you’ve built your own business for greater freedom and discovered that clients, finances and expectations can make that freedom feel surprisingly small.
There might be frustration here, or a sense of being trapped. You may recognise anxiety in constantly anticipating someone else’s next decision. Where would having more say make a difference? It could be a substantial change, or something smaller that just needs articulating in a conversation.
Support: when being capable becomes being left to cope
If you’re usually the person who manages, people can stop checking whether you need help. And you might have become so accustomed to carrying things that you don’t think to ask until you’re exhausted. Even then, explaining what you need can feel like another task.
Feeling disconnected can happen in a busy workplace, surrounded by people. Support might mean practical help, clearer guidance or someone listening without immediately offering a solution. What would help, and who might be able to offer it?
Relationships: when the conversation follows you home
You’re replaying a comment while brushing your teeth. Rewriting an email so nobody could possibly misunderstand it. Saying yes because you can already imagine the discomfort of saying no. The work itself might be manageable, but the relationships around it leave you watchful and tired.
This is somewhere to notice anger, hurt, apprehension or resentment, without deciding you’re being too sensitive. What happens between us that I keep holding onto afterwards? Sometimes the answer points towards a boundary or conversation. Sometimes it points towards behaviour that needs addressing within the organisation.
Role: when you no longer know what is yours
Your responsibilities have grown, but nothing has been taken away. Two people want different things from you. You’re praised for stepping in, then find that stepping in has somehow become your job. It gets harder to know when you’ve done enough.
Feeling lost can begin here: unclear expectations gradually affecting your sense of yourself and your work. What am I responsible for, what am I assuming responsibility for, and where do I need clarity?
Change: when you’re adapting before you’ve caught up
A new manager, a restructure, a colleague leaving. Change can bring possibility and still feel unsettling. You may be learning new ways of working while missing something about the old ones, without much opportunity to say so.
Uncertainty needs room in this conversation. What do I need to understand, what have I lost, and what support would help me adjust?
You don’t need to explore all six today. Start with the one you recognised most quickly. Notice what comes with it: anxiety, overwhelm, disconnection, uncertainty, feeling lost, or exhaustion that has you wondering about burnout?
If you need more support for what you’re experiencing, what you need and what choices might help explore our 1:1 coaching sessions here.
Stress Isn’t the Problem: When There’s Simply Too Much to Carry
Stress isn’t always a mindset issue. For many high-achieving women, it’s a natural response to carrying too much. A compassionate look at stress, overwhelm, and what helps.
We often think of stress as something that comes from chaos or crisis, but what if it’s also connected to competence.
It can belong to women who are good at things. Women who care. Women who hold the threads of their lives — and often other people’s lives — quietly and reliably. Women who show up, remember birthdays, keep projects moving, make dinners happen, check in on friends, plan ahead, stay present, stay kind, stay capable. Women who are praised for “managing it all,” even as something inside them tightens a little more each day.
If this sounds familiar, you may have wondered — at some point, usually late at night — Why does everything feel so hard when I’m doing everything right?
This is often where stress gets framed as a personal problem. Something to manage better. Something to calm down. Something to fix.
But what if stress isn’t the problem at all?
What if stress is simply the body and mind responding honestly to a life that’s asking too much?
When stress makes sense
Many of the women I work with arrive believing they are stressed because they’re not coping well enough. They talk about poor boundaries, busy minds, anxious tendencies, the feeling that they should be more resilient by now. And yet, when we slow down and gently look at their lives, something else becomes clear.
They are juggling multiple roles that each carry real responsibility. They are doing emotional work that is rarely named or shared. They are living inside systems — workplaces, families, cultures — that still quietly expect women to absorb more, adapt faster, and complain less. They are trying to be present and productive, nurturing and ambitious, grounded and forward-looking, all at once.
Stress, in this context, isn’t a failure of mindset. It’s information. It’s the nervous system saying: this is a lot.
A quieter kind of burnout
This kind of stress doesn’t always look dramatic. There may be no breakdown, no obvious crisis. Instead, it shows up as a low-level hum: tight shoulders, shallow breaths, a short fuse, constant tiredness, the sense that even rest requires effort.
You might still be functioning — showing up, delivering, caring — but with less joy, less ease, less connection to yourself.
This is why so much stress advice misses the mark. When the message is “slow down” or “do less” or “think differently,” it can feel tone-deaf. As if the reality of your life hasn’t been fully seen.
Because often, there is no simple “less.” There is just what needs doing, and the quiet knowledge that if you don’t do it, it may not get done at all.
The question we rarely ask
Instead of asking, How do I get rid of stress? A more honest question might be: What is my stress responding to?
When we treat stress as the enemy, we turn against ourselves. We add another layer of pressure — to be calmer, better regulated, more together — on top of an already full life.
When we treat stress as a signal, we begin to listen. And often, what we hear isn’t a demand to change who we are, but an invitation to relate to our lives more honestly.
You don’t need to be less sensitive, less caring, or less capable. You may need more support, more honesty, and more permission to stop carrying everything alone.
This isn’t about lowering standards or giving up on what matters to you. It’s about recognising that sustainability is not the same as endurance.
A life can be meaningful and still be too heavy. You can be strong and still need support. Both can be true.
Small ways to begin listening to stress
Rather than offering a long list of things to do (because that’s rarely helpful when you’re already overwhelmed), here are a few gentle places to start:
You might try reflecting on one or two of these, slowly, over time:
Notice where stress shows up first. Is it in your body, your thoughts, your energy? This isn’t about changing it — just noticing earlier.
Name what feels genuinely full. Not everything. Just one area of life that feels particularly heavy right now.
Ask yourself what support would actually look like. Not in theory, but in real, practical terms. Less advice. More presence? Fewer expectations? Shared responsibility?
Pay attention to self-blame. When stress appears, do you turn it into a story about what you should be doing better? What happens if you pause that story, even briefly?
These are not tasks to complete. They are ways of standing beside yourself with more kindness.
A different way forward
If stress is not the problem, then the work is not about erasing it. The work is about changing your relationship to it — and, often, changing the conditions that keep it alive.
This can include practical changes, yes. But it also includes deeper questions about worth, responsibility, and the quiet agreements many women have made with the world about what they will carry without complaint.
This is not work that needs to be rushed. It’s work that benefits from patience, warmth, and support. And it’s work you don’t have to do alone.
Stress doesn’t have to be something you battle in private. Emotions coaching offers a place to slow down, make sense of what you’re carrying, and explore more sustainable ways of living — without pressure to fix yourself or have it all figured out.
If you’re curious, you can find out more about working together through one-to-one coaching, where we gently untangle stress, responsibility, and support in a way that fits your real life.
M.Y.O (Make Your Own)
A London studio designed for grown-ups to discover their own creativity, with all the wellbeing benefits of making.
Go here if: you’re wondering how to bring more creativity into your life, you are feeling lonely and looking for more connection, or you need to find a strategy for destressing, learned here, then taken home with your creation.
What is it: M.Y.O. (Make Your Own) is a space where grown-ups can play around with materials and making. The creative studio was launched in 2017 by Sam Lehane and Diana Muendo, both chartered accountants who were coming into their own creativity but could not find the environment that they needed to support their new interests.
Why you’ll love it: M.Y.O. gives you permission to be creative because Sam and Diana believe that everyone is. There’s no worrying about outcomes, or getting it wrong, or that you’re not really ‘Arty’ or an ‘Artist’. Just the space to explore and find the medium or practice that works for you.
What you need to know: Small classes take place in a two-level studio in Borough that has all the materials you could possibly imagine to get you making things and a space where it feels ok to get messy. There’s a huge variety of classes (refreshed every few months) on everything from watercolor painting to macrame plant hangers. Adults get a break from it all and a chance to explore arts and crafts skills without judgment or prior experience.
How to bring this into your life wherever you are: In parallel to the bricks-and-mortar space, M.Y.O. hosts a similarly wide array of virtual class options hosted with sister company Creative Jungle Co (which also offers Virtual Team Building with teams across the world).
Why we think it matters: The well-being benefits of creativity are becoming ever clearer (anyone who has picked up a watercolor brush or taken up baking in a lockdown can probably now attest to this). M.Y.O. is increasingly thinking about creativity in terms of how it helps us function in the world, helping reduce stress and loneliness. The classes offered by the studio give you an easy way into figuring out if creativity can have a place in your life and what shape that might take for you.
In their own words: “An art gym for your creative muscles.”
Something to do: You don’t need to be good at art to do it. You don’t have to make perfect pots to mold clay. All you need is the willingness to try, and an openness to seeing where it takes you. What would you try creatively if no one was watching and it’s really just for you? Start there.