What these experts had to say about looking after your mental health in finance

Is your job in finance putting you under stress?  If so, you’re far from alone.  

Research commissioned by iplicit recently found 40% of finance workers felt stressed often or all the time, with 42% feeling stressed sometimes. 

And among those who attended a webinar called Priceless: How Finance Professionals Can Look After Health and Wellbeing, stress was even more prevalent. Responses to a poll during the webinar showed 58% were stressed often and 12.5% all the time. Another 25% were stressed sometimes. 

The webinar, hosted by iplicit COO Olivia McMillan, heard from three guest speakers about how to deal with stress and avoid it turning into burnout. 

‘Performance punishment’: What’s causing stress in finance? 

When webinar participants were asked “What aspect of your work causes you the most stress?”, the result was overwhelmingly clear. 

Almost 70% chose “workload and time pressure”.  

Guests at the webinar were concerned that staff shortages were taking their toll. 

Ildiko SpinFisher, The Business Burnout Buster, warned that staff covering for absent colleagues are at risk themselves of becoming sick with stress. 

“You end up with a team that’s missing vital people and this is a vicious cycle,” she said. 

Javed Bobat is a finance recruiter and Founder of F=@#! Mental Health – a nonprofit devoted to mental health in the sector. He frequently hears from people who tell him they are doing the work of 1.5 or two people. 

“There are finance teams that are making a choice to not optimally resource their teams even though they should. They are choosing to overwork their staff,” he said. 

He said all employers should consider whether they’re responsible for “performance punishment” – the situation where someone who is coping well is given even more work. 

Haydan Firth, Executive Leadership Coach, said teams that perform well in a short-term staffing crisis could find themselves under pressure to keep up the same rate of work. 

This can happen on an individual level too, he said – for example, when someone begins working through lunch during a busy spell. “It can create this new habit of ‘I don’t take lunch breaks’ and I end up imploding further down the line because I’ve got no rest,” he warned. 

Burnout at its worst 

Javed Bobat has spent a lot of time reflecting on his own mental health struggle, which caused him to leave the corporate world in 2018. At one point he was in a place where “I didn’t want to be alive any more”. 

“Even now I’m still in recovery and I think I always will be recovering,” he said. 

He had all the trappings of success, including regular promotions, pay rises and accolades, but felt “grey and unfulfilled and empty”. 

“If you don’t have the proper outlets and turn to bad coping mechanisms and your stress container is continuing to overflow, and you’re not doing anything to look after yourself on a day-to-day basis, then it’s only going to go one way. You can try to suppress it all you want but it just keeps coming back with interest. 

“Listen to your body and mind because they are giving us more signs than we perhaps realise.” 

Ildiko SpinFisher shared her own experience of burnout, which caused eight years of intense suffering. “The level of emotional pain is just unsupportable,” she said. 

“There’s a feeling that you’re losing the plot completely but you can’t lose the plot because people expect things of you. They expect you to be normal and carry on and function and be successful.” 

Some warning signs to watch for 

The problem with stress is that we still have the same nervous systems as our caveman ancestors, Ildiko said. That means our bodies respond to stressors by choosing “fight” or “flight” – and prolonged stress can leave us in a constant, hypervigilant state, perpetually scanning for threats.   

Symptoms to watch for include: 

• Prolonged problems sleeping and anxiety about sleeping 

• Loss of your sense of humour 

• Getting stressed about small things 

• Becoming snappy and irritable 

• Crying for no apparent reasons 

• Digestive problem 

• Back pain from tense posture.  

Some steps you can take 

Haydan Firth shared a few practical ways to reduce your own stress levels. 

Savour the moment: Many of us don’t really focus on what we’re experiencing right now because we’re thinking about the next thing. “Just slowing down will yield so much improvement in how you feel,” he said.  

Measure out your energy: Haydan asks clients to imagine they have 10 energy points to spend every day and consider how they should spend them. “When you recognise you’re spending all 10 at work, that explains why you and your partner are arguing when you get home or why your kids are getting on your nerves so much, or why your health has gone down the drain,” he says. “You don’t have anything left to give.” 

Don’t be passive: Reaching for a bottle of wine and putting on Netflix won’t recharge you as much as more active recovery from your daily stressors, says Haydan. Try a weekend where you go for walks and meet a friend for coffee and compare your energy levels with those of a wine-and-Netflix weekend. 

Be accountable: It’s easy to stay passive when you don’t commit to a plan. Just booking cinema tickets, booking a restaurant table or inviting friends over for a set time can make a big difference. Likewise, you’re more likely to get to the gym if you arrange to meet a friend there.  

Communicate: It’s important to talk to people about stress and burnout – and that includes flagging it up at work. “The great thing about sharing how you’re feeling, particularly with a line manager, is it’s a win-win game,” says Haydan. “You either get the support you need or you recognise you’re not going to get the support you need – and that’s a cue to take some very different action.” 

Read on for more 

We’ve put together some key takeaways and a written guide – also called Priceless – offering practical advice on cultivating good mental health, both for yourself and in your team.  

It features insights from our guest speakers and also from Jenn Barnett, Director and Head of Inclusion & Diversity and ESG at Grant Thornton, and Brad Channer, CFO of UBIO and 2024’s FD of the Year.  

Access the content here.