Liz Guthridge, Connect’s leadership coach and neuroplastician, helps you think more clearly, act more intentionally and live more fully.
Think you know what the value of employee well-being is in the workplace? Think again.
Traditionally, well-being is considered an employee benefit, a perk. It’s a gym subsidy, healthy snacks in breakrooms, flexible work arrangements, wellness days, a standing desk or ergonomic office furniture, etc. Well-being benefits are intended to support employees in sustaining—or even improving—their mental and physical health.
However, employees have a hard time practicing well-being. It’s no surprise considering the current pace and volume of work, as well as stress levels within the workplace, often exacerbated by the intensity of project work. The overwork and overwhelm employees are experiencing is leading to burnout and other problems. Gallup estimates the global cost of employee burnout now runs $322 billion a year in turnover and lost productivity, a staggering amount that’s unsustainable.
Well-Being: A Performance Issue, Not Just An Employee Benefit
Some employers are now starting to reinterpret well-being as “must-have infrastructure” instead of “nice-to-have benefits.” From this point of view, well-being is fundamental for delivering organizational performance and outcomes. The NeuroLeadership Institute has identified well-being as one of its three workforce trends for 2026.
This shift to considering workplace well-being as a performance metric is notable in another way, too. By viewing well-being as a structural systems issue, employers are acknowledging that employees are humans, not machines with brains. This has implications for leaders and team members alike.
Shifting Well-Being To Recognize The Brain’s Limitations
The human brain is an amazing organ, capable of abstract reasoning, language, complex social systems and continual learning and adapting through neuroplasticity. The brain is also an energy hog. For the average adult, the brain is about 2% of our body weight and consumes about 20% of our energy.
Cognitive Capacity
Yet our brain has limitations, namely, a finite amount of cognitive capacity. Cognitive capacity, which varies by individual, is the total amount of mental resources available to process information at a given time. You also use cognitive capacity for attention, working memory and process speed. The amount of capacity you have depends on your age, your familiarity with the tasks you’re doing, your experiences with complexity and your physical and mental well-being, which encompasses fatigue and stress.
When you’re dealing with chronic overwhelm and stress, you’re operating with reduced cognitive capacity. As a result, the executive network of your brain has less capacity to think critically, make decisions and regulate your emotions. Your brain will continue to operate “below par” until you’re able to take actions to recover and replenish your cognitive capacity.
Cognitive Load
And there’s another challenge. In our always-on digital world, you run the risk of feeling like a hamster on a wheel when you also experience high cognitive load. This is the amount of mental resources that you need to apply to particular tasks. Whenever your cognitive load exceeds your current level of cognitive capacity, you’re prone to take more time completing tasks, make errors, become irritable and fail to learn. Traditional wellness perks can’t solve this type of depletion.
Organizations are finally realizing this and also that work conditions need to respect the limits of the human brain, both the capacity and the load—the amount of brainpower you have available and the load you use for specific tasks.
Fortunately, your brain is able to recover and restore its capacity. Recovery time depends on individual differences, including factors such as sleep quality, stress levels, overall health, personality traits and the types of recovery activities you undertake, as we’ll review next.
Adopting A Work Redesign Framework: Prevention, Recovery, Sustainability
We can redesign work to play to the brain’s strengths. Consider this three-part framework:
1. Prevention
Structure work to respect cognitive limits. Apply the 90-minute rule: Focus for 90 minutes before taking a break. These 90-minute blocks allow you to concentrate deeply and work carefully on tasks before diminishing returns set in. I recommend combining this tool with meeting-free zones so individuals aren’t forced to choose between meetings and focused work.
2. Recovery
Build restoration periods into work. These cognitive recovery periods actually increase productivity because they help people think better. Build in short breaks between meetings as well as focused work blocks. Provide quiet spaces for individuals to recover, as well as encourage walks outdoors or visits to a gym.
For recovery to be effective, individuals need to switch brain networks and do something different. For example, physically move, especially if you’ve been concentrating in front of a computer or participating in a meeting. Passively watching screens or scrolling on devices, which generally use the same brain networks as your regular work, doesn’t help you restore your cognitive capacity.
3. Sustainability
Create ways to maintain cognitive capacity over time rather than deplete it. For instance, introduce technology, especially AI tools, that offload tasks that people find cognitively taxing. The objective is to free up space for people to think and perform more cognitively demanding work.
Also, adopt protocols for meetings, such as “no meetings on Friday” and shorter meeting times, such as 50, not 60, minutes (or 25, not 30). This allows people time for bio-breaks between meetings. And take walking meetings, especially if you’re close to walking paths or near parks.
Finally, provide education to help employees understand how their brains work, including how to understand the specific conditions in which their individual brain performs better. Two items are especially useful: The healthy mind platter and basic education about the brain. The former features seven activities that support optimal daily mental health and better well-being. Also, research shows that learning how your brain works helps individuals manage stress and increase resilience.
Whether you introduce these changes on your own as an individual or within an organization, work will become more manageable. You will dramatically reduce overwhelm and stress. That’s well-being in action!
Forbes Coaches Council is an invitation-only community for leading business and career coaches. Do I qualify?
