As workplace stress continues to rise, Mental Health Awareness Month is an important reminder that supporting employee mental health requires more than one-off resources or reactive support. Organizations need to understand stress earlier, create space for recovery, and help people build the resilience to navigate modern work in a healthier, more sustainable way.
In recognition of Mental Health Awareness Month, we partnered with WONE (Walking On Earth), a human performance company building stress intelligence to help employees better understand their stress, build resilience, and access support in the moments that matter.
In recognition of Mental Health Awareness Month, we spoke with Founder and CEO Reeva Misra to explore the key drivers of workplace stress today, and how organizations can take a more human-centered, sustainable approach to mental health and resilience.
Solomon Page:
Why is it important for organizations to prioritize mental health in the workplace today?
WONE:
It is important to prioritize mental health in the workplace because it is both a moral and business need. We live in a society that celebrates working harder as a sign of success. But it means we override the very signals in our body that are there to help us stay at our best, high-performing, and healthy. And as a result, we’re seeing mental health challenges rising at work, with work reported as the number one cause of stress and impacting 85% of the workforce, with 45% reporting chronic levels. This isn’t just terrible for individual health but also for business health with rising sick leave, health premiums, and lower employee engagement.
Counterintuitively, what we really need to do to unlock our best potential isn’t moving forward with more grit and long hours, but it is awareness, deliberate pauses, and intentionality. Understanding this can change everything about how we approach work, and I believe the next era of high performance will not be about pushing harder but about reading our signals and choosing how to respond with clarity and conviction.
Solomon Page:
What are the most common workplace stress challenges impacting employees' mental health right now?
WONE:
The modern workplace has removed almost every natural recovery point from the day. We are in back-to-back meetings, have endless notifications, require multiple decisions on the go, and are constantly context-switching. We are operating in an always-on, hyper-connected environment where speed is rewarded, complexity is compounding, and uncertainty - economic, social, geopolitical - has become a permanent backdrop. We also have AI accelerating the pace of change exponentially, so it is no wonder that work today feels less like a marathon and more like a series of unending sprints.
What is important to understand and differentiate is that pressure in and of itself is not bad. Humans are designed for brief moments of stress such as a deadline or large public presentation. It’s an evolutionary response and our body’s way of preparing us to thrive and focus in a high pressure, high stakes moment. The problem is that in our hyper-connected working environment, the stress response is always on, and this is when stress turns from chronic to acute.
To address this, at WONE, we think about recovery the way elite athletes do. We need to build short periods of recovery into the way we work to break the cycle of chronic stress after periods of sprints. And surprisingly, breaking the cycle of chronic stress is simple - neuroscience shows that 90 seconds of deep breathing is all it takes to move from a heightened stress state to recovery.
Solomon Page:
How is WONE leveraging AI coaching to change the way companies support employee mental health in the workplace?
WONE:
At WONE, we’ve built the first integrated system to measure and build resilience to stress in the workplace. Our AI coach, Ori, helps individuals and organizations understand, anticipate, and navigate stress early: transforming it from something we react to into something we can meet with intelligence, confidence, and care. From the beginning, Ori was intentionally trained to reflect what we believe technology should be: clear, compassionate, and focused on long-term resilience rather than short-term optimization.
Underneath Ori is one of the largest intelligence datasets built around stress, recovery, and human performance. Over time, that allows us to understand not just what helps people feel better temporarily, but what genuinely changes their baseline. What we’ve found is surprisingly simple: transformation often comes from very small moments, repeated consistently. A single minute of intentional recovery can change the trajectory of an entire day. It’s the future we’re building toward – mental healthcare that is preventative, personalized, and woven into our everyday lives.
Solomon Page:
What are some practical ways managers and leaders can create a more supportive workplace culture around mental health?
WONE:
First: block time for recovery as a meeting. If it's not in the calendar, it's not real. One thing I've learned building WONE is the best performers aren’t those that push harder; they’re the ones that understand their thresholds and build health and recovery into their lives as a key tenet of performance. This matters more than most leaders realize. Our data shows that managers carry nearly 8% higher burnout than their direct reports, despite scoring higher on overall resilience. When a leader models recovery visibly, the whole team feels permission to do the same.
Second: make stress operational data, not personal failure. In one-to-ones, try asking: "what's draining you and what's giving you energy this week?". That single question, asked consistently, does more for team culture than most wellbeing programs. It also gives you the information you need to manage capacity, which is what great leadership has always been about.
Third: be intentional about who and what you allow into your team's orbit. Ruthless focus and prioritization on highest impact work and ensuring the team is aligned. Working against your grain, in an environment that doesn't reflect what you care about, is a chronic stressor that no amount of meditation will fix. People thrive when they feel psychologically safe, aligned with purpose, and with the environment that allows them to sustain the optimal thresholds for high performance.
Solomon Page:
How can organizations help reduce the stigma surrounding mental health and encourage employees to seek support when they need it?
WONE:
The fastest way to normalize speaking about mental health is by leading by example. Having leaders voice their own personal stories always has the most impact. I’ve experienced this personally as a founder. Building a company can be deeply meaningful, but it can also push you far beyond your limits if you’re not careful.
The other piece that dissolves stigma is reframing the language. If you reframe stress not as a weakness, but as vital information, it becomes your body signaling something specific about what your current situation is asking of you versus what you have available to give. When you shift that frame, the question stops being "am I okay?", which carries shame, and becomes "what do I need right now?", which invites action.