Why Mental Fitness, Not Just Mental Health, Matters at Work

BY Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | November 19, 2022

“What we need now, more than ever, is a new approach capable of building mental strength. We need to manage challenges, enable peak performance, build productive working relationships, and create organizations that employees seek out and where they want to remain,” said Marissa Berman, a licensed clinical psychologist and a senior behavioral scientist at BetterUp, a platform to transform performance and growth for people, teams, and organizations in the areas of career and leadership development, proactive mental health, and inclusion and belonging.

“If we’re languishing, it’s difficult to be present, do your work, collaborate, and get along with others, manage the complexities of life, learn, and grow. Now multiply that individual experience by your entire workforce and you’ll get a sense of why this is so important, especially at scale.”

During From Day One’s webinar on mental health and wellbeing, titled “How to Build and Maintain Employee Well-being at Scale,” Berman gave a one-hour presentation on BetterUp’s platform and the importance of what the company calls mental fitness.

What Is Mental Health?

Mental health comprises emotional and cognitive capacity, said Berman. “Our ability to be present, to manage, and direct our thoughts and emotions, to maintain perspective about what’s most important, and to respond to the challenges of each moment with intentional and constructive actions.”

Mental fitness, she said, is an approach to building mental strength that is both proactive and preventative and meets a broad spectrum of employee needs. It is an approach that can improve productivity and prevent health crises.

Why This Matters at Work

Employee well-being affects the business. According to Berman, who cited data from BetterUp’s own research, mentally fit employees miss fewer days of work due to illness, and are more engaged, more productive, and more likely to be top performers.

“If you really dig into the research on mental health and wellbeing, you’ll see that it’s not only connected to health outcomes and keeping mental and physical illness at bay, but it’s connected to almost every business outcome we care about at work, like productivity, performance, engagement, teamwork, belonging, retention, and our ability to learn, grow, innovate, and change.”

Marissa Berman, a senior behavioral scientist at BetterUp (Company photo)

With this in mind, employers should expect the events since 2020 to have long-lasting effects on workers, she said, and should prepare to care for their workforces accordingly. Berman used the example of her own past career as an acrobatic skier on the U.S. Ski Team (she was national champion in inverted aerials): “When my mental health and well-being were strong, it literally helped me to fly through the air with the greatest of ease. But when my mental health and well-being were low, it was hard to focus, hard to manage emotions like fear, frustration, self-criticism, and it made it so much more likely that I would crash and burn with disastrous consequences.”

Focusing on Mental Fitness for the Sake of Workers and the Business

Berman says the current return to workplaces will present another stressor on workers, so employers have a responsibility to proceed with care in mind, lest it come back to bite. “Low mental health does not equate to mental illness, but it is a risk factor for developing not only mental illness, but physical illness.”

Begin by teaching your workforce about the importance of mental fitness, which considers longevity. “You have to start with the acknowledgement that so few people actually understand what mental health and wellbeing are,” she said. “So you need to start there to build awareness of what it is and incentivize people to participate, to build it, help people understand the benefit to them.”

Berman called for what she and BetterUp name a “mental fitness movement,” or a culture that prioritizes proactive and preventative care for one’s mental health and well-being. This means also considering employee needs on an individual level. Therapy isn’t for everyone, she said, but everyone does need help in one way or another.

“Our behavioral health and digital solutions that are primarily focused on clinical needs take a reactive approach, or are just not sticky enough to build real behavior change. The bottom line is that this has left a really big gap in the support that’s needed for the majority of our workforce. And it’s kept a lot of us stuck, or worse, it’s led to personal and professional crises that could have been prevented with the right kind of support.”

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance writer based in Richmond, Va. She writes about the workplace, DEI, hiring, and issues faced by women. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Fast Company, and Food Technology, among others.

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