That is a big shift.

PHIN reported 953,000 admissions across UK private hospitals in 2025, the fourth consecutive record year.

The majority were insurance-funded, with 670,000 PMI-funded admissions, the highest number recorded. Self-pay admissions hit 283,000.

So yes, private healthcare is becoming a bigger part of how people access care in the UK.

But there is a problem.

Being open to private healthcare does not mean you feel confident using it.

According to PHIN, 77% of the UK public are open to using private healthcare. 84% would research private healthcare before using it, but 28% would not know where to start. Only 26% feel very confident organising and using private healthcare.

That is the gap.

Not demand, not willingness, but confidence.

And confidence really matters, because people do not normally make healthcare decisions in a calm, relaxed, rational state.

They make them when they are in pain, worried, waiting, trying to get back to work, trying to work out what they can afford, and quietly wondering whether they are making the wrong decision.

I immediately think, why are 100% of people not open to using private healthcare? Surely everyone would want it if they could, no?

It appears that the more one earns the more likely they are to 1. have access to it and 2. consider using it. Shocker.

This inequity is something the industry will have to come to terms with if it is going to continue to increase coverage, especially among those on lower salaries.

Watch this space, cash plans, SME, lower cost offerings are going to proliferate, because there are MILLIONS of people who would love to have some form of private health, but just can’t afford it, or they don’t believe they can…

I could go into one on this, but for now, I am going to focus on health literacy, so let’s do that.

NHS England has reported that 43% of adults do not understand written health information, and that rises to over 60% when numbers are included.

Healthcare information is often written by people who already understand healthcare. Of course, it has to be that way, but that does mean that the language is full of pathways, consultants, diagnostics, pre-authorisation, procedure codes, outpatient limits, excesses, exclusions, self-pay options, insured admissions, clinical governance, treatment journeys and provider networks.

It confuses me, and I understand it all. Or most of it anyway.

While it is all technically useful, it is often incomprehensible.

Now imagine trying to make sense of it when you are already stressed, unwell, in pain, worried about money, or under pressure to get back to work.

That is the bit we miss, or simply don't consider.

People may be open to private healthcare, but that does not mean they feel equipped to use it; if they are not, any benefit of private care is negated.

This matters enormously in workplace health.

Employers can offer PMI, virtual GP, second opinions, mental health support, cancer pathways, physio, diagnostics, cash plans and all the rest of it. On paper, that can look brilliant.

In reality, an employee may still be thinking:

• Where do I start? Am I covered?

• Will this cost me anything?

• Do I need a GP referral first?

• Can I use it for my child?

• What does pre-authorisation mean?

• Who do I call?

• Will my employer know?

• Is this serious enough?

• What happens after the first appointment?

If they cannot answer those questions quickly, they delay.

They wait, they sit in discomfort, they take time off. Hence, the average absence in the UK is at a record 9.4 days per person, 20% higher than 2 years ago.

We have to translate the medical language into a language that everyone can understand:

• What is available?

• Who is it for?

• When should I use it?

• How do I access it?

• What does it cost?

• What might it save me?

• What happens next?

• What would someone like me use this for?

• Who has used it before, and what changed?

That last point probably matters most because stories matter. We are storytelling beings; we love a good yarn.

If someone hears, “you have virtual GP access”, that is information.

If they hear, “someone used it for their child on a Sunday evening, got advice quickly, avoided waiting days for an appointment, and was referred to the dermatologist”, that is context.

If someone hears, “you have PMI”, that is information.

If they hear, “this helped someone get a prostate cancer diagnosis faster, understand their options, get treated and return to work sooner”, that is value. That changes lives.

Information tells people what exists, context tells them why it matters, and confidence is built in the gap between the two.

So yes, private healthcare is growing. The market data shows that clearly.

But if 77% of people are open to using it and only 26% feel very confident organising and using it, the job is far from done.

• Growth without confidence creates confusion.

• Provision without navigation creates waste.

• Access (or lack of) without understanding creates inequality.

The winners in this market will not just be the providers that offer more healthcare.

They will be the ones that make healthcare easier to understand, easier to access and easier to use at the exact moment people need it most.

Because people are not short of healthcare information. They are short of confidence, and confidence does not magically appear; it has to be built.

They found that 43% of Gen Z referrals were for mental health concerns, compared with 22% for Millennials, 14% for Gen X and 9% for Baby Boomers.

That is a big gap.

Interestingly, Gen Z also spend 136 days a year on their phone. I wonder if this could have anything to do with it…

So I naturally thought, hmmmm, what does this really mean the UK’s working population and did what I could with 4 x referral percentages.

A normal person would go for a walk.

Anyway, I got to work with my mate ChatGPT.

First, we need the population. The UK had 34.475 million people in employment in March to May 2026, according to ONS.

The closest ONS age bands give us roughly 3.788m aged 16–24, 7.748m aged 25–34, 11.589m aged 35–49, and 9.524m aged 50–64. The remaining 1.826m are 65+.

The annoying bit is that generations do not line up neatly with ONS age bands. Because of course they don’t.

So I used this rough split:

Gen Z = 16–29
Millennials = 30–45
Gen X = 46–61
Boomers / older workers = 62+

That means splitting the overlapping ONS age bands evenly or proportionally. Half of the 25–34 group goes to Gen Z, half to Millennials. The 35–49 group gets split 11/15 to Millennials and 4/15 to Gen X. The 50–64 group gets split 12/15 to Gen X and 3/15 to Boomers / older workers.

That gives us an approximate employed population of:

Gen Z: 7.66m
Millennials: 12.37m
Gen X: 10.71m
Boomers / older workers: 3.73m

Are you having fun yet?

So Gen Z are about 22% of the workforce in this model.

Then I used RedArc’s mental health referral mix as a relative weighting for PMI claims.

Important caveat: this is not an actuarial model, quite far from it. RedArc’s data is a referral mix, not a direct PMI claim rate. So please do not reference any of this data and say, “Ryan from LinkedIn said so.”

But as a directional proxy, it is useful.

I started with the assumption that 4% of people with private medical cover make a mental health claim.

Then I asked: if 4% is the average, how would that 4% distribute across generations if we weighted it by RedArc’s referral pattern?

The weighted-average RedArc mental health referral rate across the workforce is approximately 22.8%. So 22.8% becomes our baseline equivalent of a 4% claim rate.

It will get interesting in a second I promise.

Then the calculation is:

Proxy claim rate = 4% × cohort referral rate / 22.8%

Which gives us:

Gen Z: 7.6%
Millennials: 3.9%
Gen X: 2.5%
Boomers / older workers: 1.6%

Or in human terms:

Gen Z: around 1 in 13
Millennials: around 1 in 26
Gen X: around 1 in 41
Boomers / older workers: around 1 in 63

Now this is interesting.

Because on this proxy, Gen Z are not just a little more likely than Millennials to generate mental health demand.

They are almost 2x more likely and 4.8x more likely that their Boomer colleagues.

And if you scale this across the UK employed population shape, purely illustratively, you get:

Gen Z: 579,000 mental health claims
Millennials: 478,000
Gen X: 263,000
Boomers / older workers: 59,000

Total: 1.38m, which is exactly 4% of the UK employed population. However, if you think this is bad, you ought to bear in min that some studies say that 33% of young people are struggling with their mental health. Meaning, that we could still see a HUGE increase if we are to help everyone.

To be very clear, I am not saying the UK currently has 1.38m PMI mental health claims. It doesn’t. This is what the model produces if you apply a 4% claim assumption to the whole workforce population (5.6 million have PMI through their workplaces, which is ≈16%)

For an employer or insurer, you would replace the UK workforce with the actual covered lives and use the %s or ratios above to work out what RedArc’s referral rates could mean for you.

But the pattern is the point.

Gen Z are roughly 22% of the workforce in this model, but could represent around 42% of mental health claim demand.

That should make employers, insurers and providers pay attention.

The lazy interpretation is: “Gen Z are fragile.”

I don’t buy that. Not for a second. Sure, there are those who abuse the system, sugarcoating the extent of their distress, but this isn’t new, or is it just a Gen Z phenomenon.

A better interpretation might be that younger workers are more willing to recognise, name and seek support for mental health concerns. They may also be entering the workforce in a more expensive, digital, uncertain, and psychologically noisy world than previous generations.

Either way, the implication is the same.

Mental health demand is not evenly distributed across your workforce.

If your benefits, communications, manager training and clinical pathways are designed around the “average employee”, you may be missing the people most likely to need support.

And if Gen Z are already showing up this clearly in referral data, the question is not whether mental health demand will rise.

It is whether the system is ready for it.

Unless you’re swapping for Golden Grahams, then swap every time. Elite cereal.

Today I read Teladoc’s latest financial update on BetterHelp, and it makes for some interesting reading. Interesting being the key word.

BetterHelp seems to sponsor every podcast I listen to.

They have apparently appeared on 89,837 episodes across 2,991 podcasts. Blimey.

History podcast. Health podcast. Business podcast.

Earlier today William Dirimple from Empire was telling me about the fall of Constantinople, then suddenly asking whether I’ve considered therapy. I have William, just not from you.

And to be clear, access matters. Fit matters. If a therapist genuinely is not right for someone, of course, they should be able to switch.

But there is something about therapy on a podcast that feels very AG-1. Don’t get me started on that; it gave me rashes.

The relationship is part of the intervention.

Trust matters, continuity matters, and being properly known by someone matters. The slow, awkward, human bit matters.

So when therapy starts to sound like “don’t like this one, try another”, I think we should pause. Even if this is a big USP for them.

Regardless of my or your opinion on BetterHelp & their approach to marketing, the financial numbers are interesting.

BetterHelp revenue fell 11.6% year-on-year to $213m, average paying users fell 11%, and 2026 revenue is now expected to decline 12.7% to 19.0%.

So the relentless podcast ad machine does not appear to be bringing the troubled youths they were hoping for.

But here is the interesting bit.

Insurance revenue is growing FAST.

BetterHelp insurance revenue hit $22m in the quarter, up about $9m.

Here is the interesting piece: insurance users increased by more than 70%, with around 70% of potential users saying they preferred insurance, rising to 80% in some markets.

That does not surprise me.

Because for mental health, trust matters.

Users need to know that it is covered. That it is clinically governed. That someone has thought about quality, access and what happens next.

A podcaster may not be quite as clinically governed. Shocking as that sounds.

This revenue update tells us something important.

People do not just want an Uber Eats version of therapy with discount codes and 5 star ratings.

They want support they can trust and experts that are accredited.

This matters in workplace health because mental health is the fastest growing claims area. For many organisations some, it has already overtaken cancer as the second-largest claims cost category.

And we have barely scratched the surface.

Far fewer than one in five people struggling with their mental health are making a claim through their mental health benefit.

That means the visible demand is not the whole demand and it is still the highest growing condition with regard to claims…..we haven’t even scratched the surface.

So yes, BetterHelp’s cash-pay model may be wobbling.

But insured mental health support is moving.

Mental health does not need more noise. It needs better offerings from trusted providers, and probably fewer podcast ads.

This is a slightly dramatic thing to say for someone who has worked in this industry for a long time now, but bear with me. I have been thinking a lot about what actually drives wellbeing at work, and it is not the stuff we usually obsess over.

BORING USUAL LINKEDIN WELLBEING BASHING WARNING: It is not the free breakfast. It is not the app. It is not the webinar with the title “Building Resilience in Uncertain Times”, which, ironically, makes me feel less resilient the moment I see it in the calendar.

Workplace wellbeing isn’t bought. It is designed. Shocker.

A recent Gallup study of more than 350,000 employed adults across 149 countries asked three useful questions:

1. Do you enjoy what you do every day

2. Does your work improve the lives of others

3. Do you have real choices in the work you do?

That framing is helpful because it gives wellbeing three different clocks.

• Enjoyment is short-term: how today feels.

• Purpose is medium-term: where the work points.

• Choice is long-term: the shape of your career.

Most workplace wellbeing is obsessed with the first one.

Did people enjoy the session? Did they like the free lunch? Did the wellbeing app get opened?

This is hedonic wellbeing: pleasure, enjoyment, positive feelings. There is nothing wrong with it. I like a free lunch as much as the next person. In fact, probably more than the next person, depending on the quality of the sausage rolls. Big fan of a vegan Greggs NGL.

But it is the sugar-rush equivalent of wellbeing. Lovely in the moment, not enough to live on. Not if you want to live a healthy, long life anyway.

Gallup found that people who enjoy their daily work rate their lives more than a full point higher on a 0–10 life evaluation scale than those who do not. That is bigger than the gap linked to choice at work or feeling that your work improves the lives of others.

So no, enjoyment is not irrelevant.

This bit surprised me. Maybe I’ve been wrong this whole time and wellbeing events are the way to go? Well, tickle me pink.

TLDR: People should not be miserable at work. Radical, I know.

But when Gallup looked specifically at full-time employees, something interesting happened. For that group, choice mattered more than enjoyment.

Workers with many choices in the type of work they can do rated their lives 0.36 points higher, compared with 0.28 points for enjoying the work they do every day.

That might sound small, but in wellbeing research terms, that is a spreadsheet quietly saying: “Stop buying more beanbags.” Ok, maybe I wasn’t totally wrong.

The uncomfortable bit is that choice is hard to give. You can’t just buy it from a benefits provider. You have to give something up: control, certainty, the urge to approve everything.

Enjoyment costs money. Choice costs authority.

That is why so many organisations prefer the first one, because the thought of losing any ‘authority’ isn’t worth considering....

It is much easier to launch another ‘offering’ than redesign work or redefine the roles we are doing.

It is also easier to quantify: “Did you enjoy the session?” than “Do you have any meaningful control over your time, workload, priorities or career?”

This is the difference between hedonic and eudaimonic wellbeing.

Hedonic is: “That was nice.” Eudaimonic is: “This means something.” Purpose, growth, contribution, autonomy, and the sense that your work and life actually matter.

And weirdly, this brings me to the World Cup.

I have been writing recently about the potential sickness impact of the 2026 World Cup, because apparently, this is who I am now, a football-cum-wellbeing commentator. Cool guy.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that national football is not just a reason to do some really shaky analysis on UK absence rates. It is also exactly what this Gallup study is getting at.

Take the England v Mexico last night. Most organisations will see that fixture in one of two ways. The first group will pretend it is not happening and then act surprised when email traffic is a smidge slower on Monday. The second group will be checking what time people turn up today.

Lovely. That will definitely work.

But the smarter organisations will treat it as a design problem. They will give people legitimate choices: start later, swap shifts, use annual leave, work compressed hours, watch together, or simply opt out completely and trust the smart people they employed to do their jobs.

That is enjoyment, purpose and choice all in one.

Enjoyment: people get to watch something they care about. What a game it was.

Purpose: not purpose in the “we are solving world hunger” sense, but purpose as in shared meaning, belonging, identity and being part of something bigger than yourself. The World Cup gives people a collective story. A rare national moment where the bloke from finance, the new graduate, the CEO and the person who never speaks in meetings are all shouting at the same offside decision.

Choice: people are trusted to decide how they engage with it. Watch it. Don’t watch it. Start late. Take leave. Swap shifts. Come in tired but honest. The point is not football. The point is agency.

And that is the bit most employers miss.

National football is not the greatest wellbeing intervention ever because everyone likes football. They don’t. Some people would rather lick a battery than watch England play Mexico at 1am (2am actually). Choice includes the choice not to participate as well.

In my opinion this ticks all 3 boxes, because it reveals what organisations spend millions trying to manufacture: emotion, belonging, shared identity and voluntary participation.

We spend fortunes trying to create culture at work. Away days, pulse surveys, town halls, breakout rooms, branded cupcakes, “two truths and a lie.” Please no.

Then football comes along and does it instantly.

Why?

Because it gives people something real to feel together.

That does not mean the answer is to turn every workplace into a fan zone. Some people work in roles where having the flexibility to watch a game like this is much harder: healthcare, retail, transport, manufacturing, emergency services, and especially hospitality (when the games are on). Not everyone can just start late because England went to penalties.

But even there, choice can exist. Shift swaps. Fair rota planning. Earlier notice. Recovery time. Team-based decisions. Clear expectations. A bit of common sense. And most importantly, not making non-football fans become the unpaid resilience strategy for everyone else’s hangover.

The lesson here is not “let everyone watch football.”

The lesson is: design work around humans, not around the fantasy that humans are rational productivity units with Outlook calendars attached.

Now, enjoyment is not the same as entertainment. A team can be entertained and still not enjoy its job. So maybe the question should not be: “Are our people happy?”

Maybe it should be: are people doing work that uses their strengths? Can they see why their work matters? Do they have autonomy over how work gets done? Can they grow or change shape inside the organisation without having to leave?

Because if the only meaningful choice is to leave, don’t be shocked when people eventually take it.

This is where most workplace wellbeing strategies fall down. They focus on the surface-level emotional weather and ignore the architecture underneath it. They measure whether people liked the session, but not whether their workload is crushing them. They celebrate attendance at a wellbeing webinar, but ignore the manager who demands they are on cc for all emails sent to the client.

Can we just focus on one of the 3 pillars? Nope.

Enjoyment without choice becomes forced fun. And forced fun is one of the most spiritually damaging genres of corporate activity. Somewhere between mandatory karaoke and being asked to describe your weekend in one word.

Purpose without choice can become martyrdom. “This work matters, so please destroy yourself doing it.” No thanks.

Choice without purpose can become drift. Freedom is brilliant, but not if no one knows what they are meant to be doing.

The sweet spot is all three: enjoyment, purpose and choice. That is where work starts to feel less like extraction and more like contribution.

And maybe national football shows us this better than any wellbeing framework.

Not because football is perfect. Far from it. It is ridiculous, tribal, emotional, expensive and occasionally horrible behaviour from an outspoken minority rears its ugly head.

But it is real.

People choose it. People feel it. People share it.

Workplace wellbeing could learn a lot from that.

Buy the lunch. Book the social. Put the England game on. Fine.

• But don’t confuse entertainment with enjoyment.

• Don’t confuse enjoyment with purpose.

• And definitely don’t confuse any of it with choice.

Happiness is lovely.

Agency is architecture.

The 2026 World Cup is coming and I for one can’t wait. I played rugby for many, many years, but there is nothing like the football World Cup or the Euros in England.

• England play Croatia at 9pm on a Wednesday

• Ghana at 9pm on a Tuesday

• Panama at 10pm on a Saturday.

Then, if we top the group, we could get a 5pm knockout game, a 1am last-16 game, a 10pm quarter-final, a Wednesday semi-final and an 8pm Sunday final.

And it could be very expensive for English employers….

During Euro 2024, when Germany hosted the tournament, sick leave among active Deel employees in Germany rose throughout the tournament and peaked the week after it ended. Before the Euros, sick leave was mostly bobbing around the 1.5% to 2% mark. During the tournament, it pushed closer to 3%. Then, just after the final whistle, it peaked above 3%.

Some of that will be hangovers. Some of it will be a genuine illness. Huge crowds. Packed bars. Public transport. Football fever, it turns out, might be both metaphorical and literal.

Tournament football does something strange and wonderful to this country.

Some bloke you have never met before puts both of his sweaty arms around you and tells you he loves you because Bukayo Saka has just won a corner. He then explains that Arsenal scored 24 set-piece goals this year and England will be a threat from dead balls. If only we had Maguire in the squad.

Who remembers Maguire’s goal against Sweden in 2018? Quality.

I was watching in Watford when it happened and the place erupted. Afterwards, people were partying in the street and I distinctly remember a prosthetic leg flying up in the air at one point. I just hope the owner was involved in the decision to send it vertical.

And if England win the World Cup, we are going to behave like a nation that has been emotionally constipated since 1966 and has finally been given industrial strength laxative.

Less PSG winning in Paris energy. More Arsenal victory parade energy, but in every corner of England. Good vibes only, folks. People from all walks of life, with one collective dream:

“Three lions on a shirt
Jules Rimet still gleaming
No more years of hurt
No more need for dreaming…”.

So I was curious. How much ‘World Cup sickness’ could we see in England if, and whisper it quietly, football comes home?

A normal person looks at the World Cup fixture list and thinks, “Lovely, Croatia at 9pm.” I look at it and think, “How many sick days will this create, and what is the organisational impact of six pints of Madri?”

FYI, the UK’s new favourite Spanish beer, branded with the phrase “soul of Madrid” and “El Alma de Madrid”, is brewed entirely in the UK, primarily in Tadcaster, Yorkshire. Could you get any more English?

I’m a cool guy, IKR.

I really enjoyed pulling this together. It would not stand up to scientific rigour, but it is a bit of fun. Although remembering how the last Budget went, maybe it would.

Some quality satire for you there. You’re welcome.

For each England game, I had a stab at estimating how many people would watch, how many of them would be drinking, how many would drink above a six-pint equivalent, and what percentage of that group might call in sick.

*Disclaimer: this is not glorifying booze, advocating for it, or promoting it in any way. But let’s be honest, the pubs will be full. I will probably be there. You might too. If a friend is going booze-free, support them, buy them a Lucky Saint, and let them do their thing.

Six pints is obviously not a perfect measure. A pint of weak lager is not the same as a pint of “craft” beer with a name like Emotional Badger at 6.8%. Wine and spirits complicate things further. But the NHS says 14 units is roughly six pints of average-strength beer, so that is the threshold I used. Why? Because, why not.

Now, sorry. I know you came here for Harry Kane, pints and national chaos, but first we need to talk about the current cost of sickness. Because the World Cup does not land in a healthy system. It lands in a country where sickness absence is already costing employers a fortune.

The cost of ill health to UK employers is estimated at £85bn a year. The average employee now takes 9.4 sick days a year, up from 7.8 days two years earlier, which is a 20.5% increase. There are 30,901,000 working people in England, according to official census data.

So here is the working:

30,901,000 working people in England x 9.4 sick days per person = 290,469,400 sick days per year in England.

That is not a typo. England is already losing about 290 million working days a year to sickness.

To estimate the employer cost for England, I used the £85bn UK/Britain-wide employer sickness cost and allocated it by working population:

34.4m workers x 9.4 sick days = 323,360,000 sick days.

£85bn divided by 323,360,000 sick days = £263 per sick day.

Then we apply that to England:

290,469,400 sick days x £263 = £76.35bn.

So, before a single England fan has shouted “just one more” at 11:47pm on a Tuesday, sickness is already costing employers in English employers an estimated £76.4bn a year.

There are loads of different figures I could use for the cost of ill health here, but I’ve used the Keep Britain Working numbers. Annoyingly, different papers and reports use UK and Britain interchangeably, which is confusing.

Teaching you to suck eggs: The UK includes Northern Ireland. Great Britain is England, Scotland and Wales. And this newsletter is already too weird to become a constitutional law lecture. So let’s crack on.

The route to glory and economic chaos

Here is my completely unbiased and emotionally stable prediction.

England start with a 2–1 win against Croatia. Kane scores a penalty, Djed Spence bends one in, and Luka Modric still looks 31 somehow while scoring a consolation.

A 9pm Wednesday opener is a dangerous beast: late enough to involve beer, early enough for people to lie to themselves.

“I’ll just watch the first half.” No you won’t, Josh. You’ll watch all of it, then 90 minutes of post-match reaction, then a YouTube video called “Did England just become favourites?” at 12:38am. You bet they did.

Against Ghana, England win 2–0. Bellingham scores and Rashford gets the second.

We are collectively distraught that Semenyo didn’t choose to play for England. He was eligible, as was Haaland. IMAGINE.

Gary Neville calls it a “professional performance”, which is football speak for “thank God we didn’t mess that up.”

Then, Panama almost ruins the national mood. We go 2-0 down. Oh no. Not again. Watkins scores, Madueke scores, and Eze scores a goal so smooth that half the country decides he should probably be captain for the rest of the tournament. What penalty? Final score 3 - 2.

This one is a Saturday at 10pm, which is both helpful and deeply unhelpful. Helpful because many people are not working the next day. Unhelpful because a 10pm Saturday England game is basically the country saying, “Shall we make some terrible decisions together?” The sickie rate is lower because Monday gives people a recovery buffer. But the heavy drinking number is much higher because there is no school night shame. Not that shame has ever stopped us.

Here is the model for the first three games:

So, before the knockouts even begin, we could already be looking at 181,296 sick days and £47.7m in employer sickness cost.

Lovely.

The knockout rounds

The Round of 32 is where things start to get properly silly. England beat Norway 3–2. Kane scores. Gordon scores. Rice scores a header from a corner.

*I don’t support Arsenal, by the way, however it may seem. London is still blue.

Haaland scores twice because he is Erling Haaland, but England go through.

A 5pm England knockout game is not moderate. It is the most dangerous kick-off time in the entire tournament. It gives people permission to leave work early. It gives pubs enough runway to become feral. It gives the sentence “I’ll just have two” approximately six hours to collapse in on itself.

Then we get Mexico at 1am on a Monday. Saka scores in the 74th minute. Golden boy. The rest of the game is just the nation’s collective resting heart rate making the tech teams at WHOOP double-check all their dashboards.

This is where civilisation starts to wobble. The audience is smaller, but the sickie rate is huge. Because anyone who chooses to stay up for a 1am knockout game is not a casual fan. They are committed. They are emotionally unstable. They probably already have their email drafted.

“Hi Sarah, I’ve woken up feeling really unwell…”

Sure you have, Laura.

By this point, before the quarter-final, England’s run could already have generated 465,296 sick days and £122.3m in employer sickness cost. Oh dear.

Then comes Brazil.

England win 2–1 in the quarter-final. Kane scores. Bellingham scores in extra time. Vini Jr does what he does. England beat Brazil in a World Cup quarter-final. David Seaman sends Ronaldinho a text: “You up?”

The country briefly leaves its body.

This game is Saturday at 10pm. Absolute chaos. Not immediate Monday chaos like the final, but enough to wipe out large parts of Sunday and create a suspicious number of “I think I’ve picked something up” messages by Monday morning.

By this point, through the quarter-final, the model estimates 710,816 sick days and £186.8m in employer sickness cost. That is before the semi-final. Before the final. Before a single person has tried to climb a traffic light in Croydon.

In the semi-final, England beat Argentina 2–1. Messi scores a free kick in his swansong for Argentina. Saka equalises. Toney wins it from the penalty spot in the 87th minute, staring at the goalkeeper with the emotional expression of a man waiting for the 43 bus.

England are in the final.

This one is 8pm on a Wednesday. Not ideal, but strangely less costly than the quarter-final. Why? Because timing matters. A 10pm Saturday game gives you hours of momentum. An 8pm Wednesday game gives you just enough time to go big, but not enough time to convince yourself that tequilas are a good idea. They are never a good idea.

Still, if England beat Argentina in a World Cup semi-final, no one is going to be calmly catching up on Q3 strategy the next morning.

The final

Sunday 19 July. 8pm. The perfect kick-off. The worst possible workday consequence.

England play Spain. Spain score first through Lamine Yamal, who is probably still somehow 17. Kane equalises. And who scores the winner?

Maguire.

In the 89th minute.

He has been called up to the squad at the last minute, as Quansah has voluntarily stepped down to create space for the English icon. He does what he does best: a header from three metres out. VAR spends seven minutes checking a slight touch on Raya’s shoulder.

Oh, the irony.

The country detonates. Someone tries to crowd surf in a Slug & Lettuce. Every car horn in England is used at least 19 times. No one sleeps, whether they were involved or not.

Just for the final, the model estimates 1,218,750 sick days at a cost of £320.4m.

One game. £320.4m. Nearly 1.22 million sick days.

And honestly? Still worth it.

40m+ view the game; 19.5m are drinking, 4.88m drink 6+, 25% do not turn up for work the next day - 1,218,750 sick days, costing £320.4m.

The final bill

If England win the World Cup, this meaningless model estimates 2,073,566 sick days and £545.1m in employer sickness cost. That is about 0.7% of England’s entire annual sickness cost to employers.

For context, England’s annual sickness cost is around £76.4bn. So the World Cup win scenario would be expensive, but it would not suddenly create a national sickness crisis. It would be a spike inside an existing crisis. That distinction matters.

It is also roughly equivalent to 1.2 days of NHS England’s annual budget. Or, to put it another way, the Monday after England win the World Cup could cost more in absence than many organisations spend on wellbeing across their entire existence, while still delivering a sense of belonging and cohesiveness that any HR manager organising an away day could only dream of.

Some employers will treat this like a disciplinary issue. They will send a stern email.

“Please remember sickness absence policies remain in place during the tournament.”

Lovely. That will definitely stop Darren calling in sick after a 1am penalty shootout.

The better organisations will plan for reality. They will say: we know this is happening, we know people care, and we know some fixtures are ridiculous. So let’s be adults.

What employers should actually do

• First, publish the key fixtures internally now. Do not pretend nobody has seen the calendar. They have.

• Second, make flexibility normal rather than sneaky. Shift swaps, later starts, compressed hours, planned annual leave and sensible rota planning are all better than people inventing fictional stomach bugs.

• Third, protect the people who do not care about football. Shocking as it may be, not everyone wants to watch England play Panama at 10pm. Those people should not become the unpaid resilience strategy for everyone else’s hangover.

• Fourth, treat the 1am game as a risk event. You need a rota, a staffing plan and a bit of common sense.

• Finally, use it for connection. Put the games on. Let teams watch together. Let people enjoy something. The return on belonging might outlast the cost of a few hours of disruption.

We spend millions trying to create culture at work. Away days. Pulse surveys. Town halls. Ice breakers. “Two truths and a lie.” Please no.

Football does it instantly.

Because belonging is not built by forcing people into a room. It is built by giving them something real to feel together.

That is the bit employers should pay attention to.

Togetherness.

England winning the World Cup could cost employers £545.1m in sickness absence, and it might still be one of the best wellbeing investments we ever make. Because for one ridiculous, glorious, sticky-floored month, the country might remember what it feels like to feel something together.

Just give everyone Monday morning off.

And put the Dioralyte on expenses.

Come on England 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

On one side, you have the ‘traditionalists’ calling for a total ban. On the other hand, the world’s biggest employer is rolling out an AI Coach to a million people.

Here is why this isn’t just a tech debate, it’s potentially the only way we might actually fix the UK’s mental health crisis, where people are now 12 times more likely to face an 18-month wait for treatment compared to a physical ailment.

1. 14,300 Irish Professionals Say No

The Irish Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy (IACP) isn’t just raising an eyebrow; they have taken a stand. In a joint statement released this March, they teamed up with the College of Psychiatrists of Ireland and the Psychological Society of Ireland, representing a collective 14,300 mental health professionals, to demand an immediate, legally backed ban on AI ‘therapy’.

Their argument is fundamentally human; a line of Python script cannot read a room. It doesn’t notice the micro-shifts in your posture when you mention your boss, and it certainly doesn’t offer genuine empathy.

As Dr. Lorcan Martin, President of the College of Psychiatrists, puts it: “Policy must strengthen human connection rather than replace it with a simulation.”

But this isn’t just about “vibes” and “connection”; it’s about clinical safety and risk management:

• Unlike a trained human who knows when to safely challenge a client, AI is often built to be agreeable. The healthcare bodies warned that for someone suffering from delusions or mania, an AI might actually validate or elaborate on erroneous beliefs, potentially leading to harm.

• If a human therapist messes up, there are boards, ethics committees, and laws. If an AI gives dangerous advice to someone in a crisis? As the IACP points out, AI lacks ethical accountability. Is it a software bug or malpractice? Right now, the law doesn’t know.

• The statement didn’t mince words, noting that AI therapy has already been linked to “several high-profile tragedies involving suicide.”

In short, the Irish experts believe we are trading deep, transformative healing for a “facade of artificial relationships.” Or, as Dr Martin warned: “We cannot allow a regulatory framework built for yesterday’s technology to govern tomorrow’s mental health.”

2. Amazon’s AI Gamble for 1 Million Staff

While the experts in Ireland are reaching for the off button, Jeff Bezos and Amazon are reaching for the scale button. They’ve just gone all-in, partnering with Grow Therapy to deploy an AI-augmented EAP to one million US-based employees.

Amazon is flipping the script: appointments in 2–3 days (not months) and 24/7 instant support.

Here’s the strategic logic behind the move:

• Most people see a therapist for one hour a week. Alan Ni, CTO of Grow Therapy: “We’ve been exploring what support can look like during the other 167 hours between sessions.”

• This isn’t some niche beta test. Since the rollout began in December 2025, over 800,000 messages have already been sent. 50% of active providers in the network already have clients using the AI Coach.

• The data shows that employees are using the AI for thought organisation and session prep, solving the cold start problem, so the actual human to human time is 10x more productive.

• To counter the IACP’s safety concerns, Grow’s system uses multiple independent safety layers. Their clinical quality team audits these flags, and so far, the safety system has correctly identified 99% of potential safety concerns. When a crisis is detected, the AI pauses and immediately triggers human intervention and crisis resources.

The big question here is: is 99% enough?

This isn’t Amazon trying to cheap out on mental health. It’s a massive employer recognising that “accessing the support they need, when they need it” (as Chris Decou, Amazon’s Global Director of Health Benefits, says) is the only way to manage a workforce of a million people.

It’s about taking the administrative and triage weight off the system so that when the human therapist steps in, they aren’t starting from zero. It’s practical, it’s scalable, and quite frankly, it’s the only way to meet the demand.

The most important thing, though, is whether it helps Amazon employees in the moments when they really need help. Time will tell.

3. We Might Actually Need the Bots

New analysis published this month paints a worrying picture for us in the UK:

• 16,522 people are waiting over 18 months for NHS mental health treatment.

• Compare that to just 2,059 waiting the same period for physical health care.

• You are 12 times more likely to face an 18-month wait for your mind than your body.

With a median wait of 13.6 weeks, nearly double pre-pandemic levels, the assumption that the NHS will catch employees who fall through the cracks is no longer realistic.

This crisis has landed squarely in the employer’s lap; absenteeism has increased by 17.5% over 2 years to a record high of 9.4 days per person, with mental health as the number 1 driver of long-term sickness and 2nd for short-term sickness.

4. The Middle Ground: Augmentation, Not Replacement

This is where Grow Therapy and organisations like them are changing the game. They argue we should stop looking at AI as an ‘Artificial Therapist’ and start seeing it as an ‘AI Coach’.

It’s not about replacing the human; it’s about supplementing them:

• If you see a therapist on a Tuesday, the AI helps you practice your CBT exercises or talk through a panic attack on a Friday night.

• AI can synthesise a patient’s week and summarise journal entries. Instead of spending half your 50-minute session catching up, the human therapist has a dashboard of your data, making the actual human connection far more targeted and effective.

The risk? It is real, but is the risk of non-action greater?

I am an optimist, certainly a techno-optimist. However, I wear these rose-tinted glasses now. When I was 19, working as a trainee electrician and in a place where I wanted to take my own life, would I have engaged with a chatbot? I think not.

But if that chatbot had helped me bridge the gap while waiting 13 weeks to see someone? That is a conversation worth having.

Now, let’s get into it.

There are people who find a tenner on the floor and spend the rest of the day annoyed it wasn’t a score (£20 for the non-Londoners).

Then there are those who seem to get dealt bad hand after bad hand and continue to smile.

I’ll be honest, lately, I’ve been feeling like I’ve been dealt a few less than ‘strong’ hands, shall we say. Between a ripped bicep, dental surgery that left me with more stitches than my Mum’s recent crochet project, and various other physical ailments, my body has been managing a bit of a protest.

Not to the same degree, but it reminded me of the famous Stoic, Epictetus (c. 50–135 AD), born a slave, who lived with a severe, permanent leg disability, believed to be a broken leg inflicted by his master.

He famously used this physical suffering to exemplify his teachings, maintaining that external events (like a broken leg) are outside our control, while our internal response is entirely within our control.

Ok, challenge accepted, Epictetus.

I’m a former trainee electrician from Hastings who now has a life that is, by any metric, wonderful. I’ve positively influenced millions, written a bestseller, and I get to do work I love. I decided I wasn’t going to let a few technical failures in my meat suit detract from that. I wanted to challenge myself: could I turn an afternoon of clinical prodding into a positive experience?

Last Thursday, I had a trip to the hospital for a brain and spine MRI. This immediately followed a visit to the dentist to get my stitches out. Most people would write that day off as a write-off. But I decided to play a different game.

I was determined to enjoy my dental and hospital appointments.

Want to know how?

1. A big cheesy grin

I smiled at everyone. Simple. One unwilling recipient was an old lady in the radiology room, hooked up to wires and looking like she’d been through it. We locked eyes, and I said, “How’s your afternoon going? About as well as mine, I assume.” I gestured to my hospital gown that didn’t quite fit around the back (classic), and she actually laughed. I knew she needed a moment of kindness, and honestly, I needed her too.

2. F*** the big picture

After I had the stitches ripped out at the Dentist, I went to Nero. Not the Emperor, the coffee shop, to be clear. I grabbed a coffee just outside the hospital and actually sat with it. I kind of had to, as a big sip from a hot drink at that moment would have been catastrophic for my newly exposed gums.

I enjoyed the smell, the taste, and the whole experience. I thought about how lucky I was that beans harvested in Brazil were now in my cup in Fulham. I forgot everything else going on, the million emails I needed to send, the calls I had to reschedule and my baby shower plans for the weekend. I focused on what was right in front of me, nothing else and enjoyed that moment. Lovely.

3. Glass half full

I asked everyone I spoke to how their day was. When the technicians asked how the MRI was, I told them: “Really nice, actually.” They laughed, apparently, that’s a first. Life is a mirror; smile at it, and it smiles back. Research shows that 97% of our worries are just exaggerations of a fearful mind. By changing my language from “stuck in a tube” to “quite nice actually”, the experience was flipped.

4. Nowhere I would rather be

The MRI machine broke three times. I was stuck in there for an hour and 20 minutes with my head in a brace. Instead of panic and wishing I were anywhere else, I just listened to the whirs and focused on the noise. I came out feeling like I’d just spent 1.5 hours in a soundbath. Lovely stuff. I was committed to just being where I was, not thinking about the fact that it was 17 degrees outside and a pint of Peroni at that time would have been quite delightful. Nope, scratch that, nowhere else I would rather be than this plastic coffin.

Then I had a thought: I’m benefiting from multi-million-pound technology that can see my literal thoughts and spine. On the great cosmic timescale, being alive right now with this tech is a 1-in-a-quintillion win compared to dying of the plague in 1666.

5. Self-schadenfreude

This is a cute reflection on my favourite German word, and no, that isn’t ‘Zugunruhe’, the German word that means ‘migratory restlessness’. It’s a thing that happens to birds as they start getting anxious when they are ready to migrate. Yep, that is a real word.

Nope, I mean Schadenfreude - the experience of pleasure, joy, or self-satisfaction derived from learning of or witnessing the troubles, failures, or humiliation of another person.

I quite like turning this lens on myself and sharing a picture of myself having to wear two gowns to protect my modesty to the lads group chat, I knew that would get a laugh or 2. Yes, it is a bit s*** for you, but maybe your discomfort can make someone else’s day; might as well try eh.

If you’re currently having a hospital-adjacent day, here are four strategies to flip the script:

• The Burnt Toast Theory: If your train is delayed, the universe might be protecting you from something worse or leading you to something better.

• Cosmic Insignificance Therapy: Ask yourself: “Will this matter in 10 years? 100?” We only get 4,000 weeks, don’t spend them being annoyed at a broken MRI.

• The Language Audit: Swap “disaster” for “interesting challenge.” Fix the words, and the thoughts follow.

• Kintsugi: In Japan, they fix broken pottery with gold. Your “broken” bits, the medical scares, the bicep, and the stitches are what make you unique. You aren’t broken; you’re being finished in 24k gold.

Next time you’ve got a crappy day coming up, I dare you to try and enjoy yourself. Who knows, you might even enjoy yourself and positively affect a few people around you, who then do the same for others.

The ripple of something as simple as a smile is profound.

If you smile, that is.

Smile, not because things are good, but because you can.

• We want to save more money (21%)

• Eat healthier (19%)

• Exercise more (17%)

• Lose weight (15%)

• Spend more time with family/friends (14%)

• Quit smoking (9%)

But by the time March rolls around, our best intentions have been completely disregarded. “Ahhh, there’s always 2027”.

While 28% of people stick to their goals (and trust me, you’ll be hearing all about it on Instagram), and 53% make a little progress, 17% don’t keep any.

And then there is my favourite group: The 2%.

2% of people cannot even remember what their resolutions were. I have a confession: I’m usually part of the 2%.

All it takes is sixty days of back-to-back meetings, a few delayed trains, and a bit of miserable weather, and we’re done.

The problem isn’t a lack of willpower. It’s an obsession with addition.

We try to add kale, 5 AM runs, side hustles, and “mindfulness” to an already overflowing plate.

This year, I’m doing the opposite. I’m leaning into Subtraction.

Serious question: “Does anyone actually like Kale”?

1. Subtracting the Scroll

I checked my screen time while flying to Madeira for Xmas, and it was ugly. I was spending over an hour a day on Instagram, mindlessly scrolling to distract myself from work or “double-screening”; watching TV while keeping my thumb active (the thumb in the picture - guilty)

Celebrating Xmas in Madeira 🎄

That’s 365+ hours a year. That is 15 entire days spent staring at a backlit rectangle of people living lives that look 100x better than mine. F*** you, Chad, and your beautiful abs.

Pro Tip: Never compare your behind-the-scenes to someone else’s highlight reel; it is a recipe for sadness.

I’ve set a 15-minute daily limit. I’m reclaiming 273.75 hours this year.

If I spent those 45 saved minutes walking and listening to a podcast, I’d burn roughly 99,097 calories, which equates to about 28 pounds lost.

Not bad for changing one setting on your phone.

2. Subtracting “Responsiveness”

I am committing to being much, much worse at responding to emails and IMs. We’ve been conditioned to believe that a fast response equals productivity. It doesn’t.

It just means you’re excellent at being interrupted. According to Microsoft, we are interrupted every 2 minutes during the day.

Response time is a measure of availability, not impact. This year, I’m subtracting the “always-on” guilt to make space for the meaningful work required to build something incredible.

I’m going to timebox all comms - WhatsApp, emails, Slack, LinkedIn comments, etc; answering during specific windows of the day.

In the words of the incredible author, Neal Stephenson: “I am trying to be a good novelist, and hoping that people will forgive me for being a bad correspondent”.

Now change the word ‘novelist’ to whatever it is you’re trying to achieve this year.

3. Subtracting the Counters (and the Heavy Weights)

My fitness goals have shifted from “more” to “better.” I’m leaving the heavy weights alone. Having lived with back pain for five years and a ripped bicep last year, my goal for 2026 is simple: to be pain-free.

I was planning to pull a car for a marathon distance to set the world record. I still believe I can, but I have to be honest: can I put in the effort it would require, while trying to build something incredible that helps millions of people? No.

I tried calorie counters last year (for the first time in 10 years). However, with my history of bulimia and a ripped bicep, it was an unhealthy/dangerous game, and negative behaviours started to rear their head again.

For me, health isn’t about the data on a scale or an app; it’s about agency and longevity.

So, the counters are gone. Subtracting the tracking to find the feeling.

Instead, I’m doubling down on the small, non-negotiables that will create a holistically/emotionally healthy Ryan Hopkins:

• 10 minutes of breathwork

• Daily visualisation

They are tiny additions, but only possible because I’ve cleared the noise elsewhere.

4. Subtracting the “One More”

Then there’s my friendly nemesis: Booze.

I love a beer with friends to switch my brain off (which, thanks to ADHD, is usually running at 100mph in six directions). I love a glass of wine with Laura after a long week. But I hate the guilt of staying out for 1 or 8 more than needed. This happens once in a blue moon, but at 34 years old, that’s still too often.

Nothing good happens after 11 PM, kids.

I’m moving to a one-drink limit. People think saying “no” shows restraint, but for me, knowing when “one is enough” is the real discipline (each to their own on this one - I’ve tried abstinence and it didn’t work for me).

My Word for 2026: Conviction

I’ve spent a lot of time helping others build their worlds. Now, it’s time to back myself.

No more “maybe,” no more “we’ll see.”

Just conviction (more on this soon).

The Subtraction Toolkit

If you want to be happier and healthier in 2026, don’t ask what you can start. Ask what you can stop.

• The “Stupid” Audit: What is the most pointless thing you do every week? A specific meeting? A digital habit? Delete it for seven days. (Spoiler: The world won’t end and you’ll extend the week).

• Digital Boundaries: Set a “Mute” or “Ignore” on overactive chats. You don’t need to be the protagonist in every WhatsApp group or Teams chat.

• Social Media: You already know you spend too much time on it. Set a limit, it’s not easy at first, but you’ll be grateful you did.

My question for you: What is one thing you are going to subtract this week to give yourself more space for an incredible year!

Let’s stop adding to the noise, start clearing the path, and make sure you aren’t a “2%-er” this year.

Here is to a massive year, you deserve it 🫶

Big love,

Ryan

Check out my last newsletter on subtraction at work.

We have added apps. We have added mindfulness sessions. We have added resilience training, mental health first aiders, etc. We have added, added, added (yes, these things can and do work).

And yet, burnout is rising. Stress is at record levels. Mental health claims have/will grow by 274% from 2022 to 2030. The workforce is exhausted.

I am anyway, and if the faces of the people on the tube this morning were anything to go by, then everyone else is as well.

We have to change, and I truly hope that wellbeing in 2026 will be less about addition; rather, subtraction.

When someone is drowning, you don’t throw them a heavy manual on “How to Swim with Resilience.”

You throw them a ring, or better yet, you pull them out of the bloody water.

Historically, workplace wellbeing has been about adding layers on top of a burgeoning workload. In 2026, if we want to make a dent, we need to focus on taking things away.

The Instinct to Add

As human beings, we are wired to add. In a study published in Nature, researchers found that when people are asked to improve an object, idea, or situation, they overwhelmingly default to adding rather than removing.

Even when subtraction is the superior solution, we overlook it.

How the hell can we tell the CHRO, that our focus for this quarter has ‘nothing’ in the calendar and we are looking to remove friction…

In the workplace, this manifests as ‘Initiative Overload’. We are so busy adding solutions that we fail to realise the sheer volume of help can actually be a stressor. If we do not address the system itself.

Here are the three great myths that lead us astray.

The 3 Myths of Addition

1. The App Fallacy (More Tools = More Support)

If we buy enough subscriptions, we solve the problem. But study after study shows that engagement with standalone wellbeing apps hovers in the single digits after the first month. By adding another platform to log into, another notification to check, and another password to remember, we aren’t creating support; we are making digital friction. We are adding to the cognitive load of an already overwhelmed employee.

However, when the initiative is integrated into ways of working, the story is entirely different. This takes a lot of work, but oh my is it worth it. Nationwide launched JAAQ and does an INCREDIBLE job of using it in its comms, L&D journeys, for new joiners, etc and subsequently 70,000+ questions have been served for 17,000 people. Other clients didn’t put in the effort to disseminate and integrate, and they haven’t had 70,000 answers…

2. The Resilience Trap (More Training = Stronger People)

I have said it before, and I will say it again: You cannot yoga your way out of a toxic workload. A recent meta-study by the Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre analysed survey responses from 46,000 workers. The conclusion?

Individual-level mental health interventions (mindfulness, resilience training, apps) had zero effect on overall self-rated mental health. Zero. Why? Because adding training to a person with no time doesn’t build resilience; it builds resentment. It shifts the blame to the individual: “You aren’t burnt out because the workload is impossible; you’re burnt out because you haven’t breathed deeply enough.” Rubbish.

The only intervention that improved self-rated mental health was volunteering. Which I find interesting for many reasons…

Perhaps someone who finds themself in a position where they can volunteer - no 2nd job, no childcare or caring responsibilities, etc can focus on altruistic endeavours; so perhaps we could focus on the systemic challenges to create an equitable workplace.

Also, it just highlights what we already know and that is that it is difficult to lament on what is going wrong in our lives when we think about others. Simple really.

3. The Connection Myth (More Communication = Better Culture)

We assumed that to keep people well in a hybrid world, we need more touchpoints. More check-ins. More Town Halls. More Slack channels.

This is also the rationale for the return to office: for culture…… What does that look like?

Travelling an hour into the office to sit on Teams calls opposite someone who has just paid £200 to put their kid into childcare; you both share 12 minutes in between calls to smash a sorry-looking Pret sandwich into their gobs. Ahhhh culture. Anyway, that is another newsletter.

The result? We are drowning in noise. We have replaced connection with surveillance and deep work with performative availability. The average knowledge worker checks email or chat every 2 minutes. You cannot be well if you cannot think.

The Power of Subtraction - Case Study

I worked with one organisation, whose starting point was a 49-hour work week span (first time log in, last time log off - not necessarily hours worked, but long days. Too long.

So, we established a cross-functional squad, bringing together IT, HR, and Real Estate with one clear goal: to reduce digital strain by optimising their Microsoft stack and hybrid working practices.

We didn’t add more noise; we focused on removing the friction. The results speak for themselves:

• The work week was reduced by 3.5 hours per person. That equates to 2.4 million hours saved for the business.

• Manager 1:1s increased by 21%+.

• Glassdoor rating climbed from 3.8 to 4.1.

• Attrition dropped by 3.2%.

This is what happens when you focus on structural wellbeing rather than surface-level perks. You get 2.4 million hours back while keeping your best people.

Oh, and it didn’t cost a penny. This is some of the work I am most proud of.

The socially distanced launch of the hybrid strategy.

3 Focus Areas for Subtraction

1. Subtracting Digital Noise (Restoring Focus)

We need to declare war on the notification. Research shows it takes 23 minutes to regain deep focus after an interruption. If we are pinged every 2 minutes, we are never truly working; we are just reacting. True wellbeing in 2026 will mean subtracting the expectation of immediacy. It means removing the always-on culture. It means using technology to automate the drudgery, not to interrupt the flow.

• The Action: Audit your communication channels. If a meeting can be an email, make it an email. If an email can be a nothing, make it a nothing.

• Brucey Bonus - Sam Altman CEO of OpenAI thinks that all meetings should either be 15 mins or 2.5 hours - quick check-in and decisions, or proper time to think/ideate. I like this a lot. Challenge yourself and your team to get lean on meetings.

2. Subtracting “Stupid Sh*t” (Restoring Meaning)

This links back to the concept of Agency - see my previous newsletter on this subject. When people feel they have no control over their work, they burn out. When they are forced to jump through bureaucratic hoops that add no value, they check out.

We need to subtract the low-value, performative tasks that clog up the day. This isn’t about laziness; it’s about efficiency. It’s about respecting our people enough not to waste their time.

• The Action: Ask your teams, “What is the stupidest thing I ask you to do every week?” And then, be brave enough to remove it.

3. Subtracting the Hero Complex (Restoring Boundaries)

We need to subtract the cultural celebration of overwork. As long as we promote the person who sends emails at midnight, no amount of sleep hygiene seminars will help. We need to subtract the idea that “more hours = more value.” We need to move to and celebrate an outcome-based model where the prize isn’t who stayed the latest, but who achieved the goal most effectively.

“Well done Stephanie, who smashed the project, finishing at 4pm each day and had dinner with her partner and kids every evening without checking Slack”.

• The Action: Leaders need to leave loudly. Subtract your presence after hours. If the boss is online, everyone is online.

Conclusion: Less really is More

If you want to improve wellbeing in 2026, don’t ask, “What new initiative can we launch?”

Ask, “What can we stop doing?”

Then we can think about what initiatives to implement and only then.

Don’t give them a yoga mat; give them their time back. Don’t give them a resilience webinar; give them Agency over their workload. Don’t give them an app; give them 2.4 million hours.

Let’s stop adding to the noise. Let’s start clearing the path.

A new report from JLL recently made waves with its finding that for 65% of office workers, “work-life balance” is more important than “pay”.

My first thought?

Firstly, I am not sure how 65% of employees can say work life balance is top, as well as 56% saying salary is top 🤣

And it just isn’t.

Actually, it can be, it just isn’t for most. Let’s get into it.

This isn’t to say work-life balance isn’t critical. It is. But to say it’s more important than what you earn? That’s a luxury belief, a belief you can only afford to hold once your pay is already high enough that you don’t have to think about it.

For the vast majority of people, pay isn’t just an afterthought; it’s the foundation for their entire life, including their mental health.

And if you look at some other recent findings, the JLL report starts to look a little less clear…..

SHOW ME THE MONEY

If balance and “purpose” are all that matter, why is the incoming generation so fixated on money?

An Axios report just found that American Gen Z’ers are more likely than Boomers to say financial success is “very important” (61% of them, in fact) and they say that they need $587.8K to be financially successful.

WHICH IS WILD.

They aren’t prioritising balance over pay. They’re queuing up to apply for jobs at Tesla and SpaceX to sleep under the desks and earn that sweet sweet dinero.

If you think you need $587.8K per annum to be successful, this is a surefire way to make sure you are absolutely miserable, as happiness is the difference between expectation and reality.

I remember an old report saying it was about $80K which was needed to maximise happiness/wellbeing, and after that, the extra money earned actually worsened subjective wellbeing. Make of that as you will. The number will be $100K+ now with inflation, as the research is quite old.

Regardless, the average American thinks that you need a $270.2K salary to be successful. So maybe let’s just ignore the Americans for a minute and move on.

THIS ISN’T A ‘NICE TO HAVE’. THIS IS LIFE AND DEATH.

Our salary/finances aren’t just an aspirational goal. The economic foundation for millions is shakier than we want to admit.

In the UK it was announced today that unemployment has hit 5% and the number of payrolled employees has fallen by 109,000; which is 18,000 more than the population of my hometown Hastings, which I will get to in a minute.

“Being unemployed doesn’t just hit your wallet. Unemployed people self-report lower levels of feeling worthwhile, being satisfied with life, and happiness than those in employment. Unemployed people also have higher levels of anxiety. The average rating for life satisfaction is 6.6 out of 10 for unemployed people compared with 7.6 out of 10 for those in employment”.

This is the most significant possible reduction in subjective wellbeing one can experience.

When I was 19 and broke my leg/ankle, losing my career as an electrician and with that lost every sense of who I was; if I was not an electrician, then who the f*** was I. That was the darkest period of my life and the incapacity, debt, weight gain and unemployment almost ended my life. But I am not alone in this.

A 2021 Swedish study was brutally clear: “Those who had experienced financial indebtedness were two and a half times more likely to die by suicide than those who had not lived through this experience”. This is more prevalent in men.

This is the sharp end of the ‘pay’ conversation. It’s not about affording a nicer holiday; it’s about survival. Work-life balance doesn’t feel so important now, does it?

THE UNDENIABLE LINK BETWEEN MONEY AND MENTAL HEALTH

This is where the wellness industry often misses the mark. We can’t talk about wellbeing without talking about wealth. We can’t talk about balance without talking about bank balances.

The data from Mind’s latest report is pretty shocking to say the least:

• Children from the least well-off 20% of households are 4 times more likely to experience severe mental health difficulties.

• Adults in the most deprived areas have significantly higher rates of mental health problems (26.2%) than those in the least deprived (16%).

• People in problem debt are more than twice as likely to experience a mental health problem.

Mental health makes up over 20% of the disease burden, but gets less than 10% of NHS spending. The system is buckling, and the people holding it up are the ones with the least financial stability.

My Mum was one of those people. She went to university to become a mental health nurse while raising 3 boys alone, and had to work evening shifts at Next to make things work. I can tell you now, she would have loved some balance, but she had three absolute gannets to feed at home.

TALENT IS EVERYWHERE. OPPORTUNITY IS NOT.

This is personal for me, as you may see a bit of it in the above. But another headline this week gave me pause.

The north-south divide is real, except in one place!

In a sea of opportunity, there is one speck of red.

My hometown...Hastings.

Where 34% of neighbourhoods are ‘highly deprived’, compared to 3.3% in the surrounding South East. Which is seen as the most affluent area of the country.

Index of Multiple Deprivation 2025 (IMD25) assesses seven “domains”: income, employment, education, health, crime, barriers to housing and services and living environment.

21.5% of Hastonians live in employment deprived households and the town also hits the top 10 with regard to teenage pregnancies.

The easy narrative is to read this, label the town ‘forgotten’, and move on. This is a massive mistake.

These numbers don’t define the incredible people who live there. They define the lack of opportunity that has been provided them.

Hastonians have to sit 1.5-2 hours on a train to get into London, which is 50 miles away.

Brighton and Oxford are equidistant and it takes ≈45 mins

Telling someone from Hastings to “prioritise work-life balance” over a pay rise is a slap in the face. Their priority is a stable income that allows them to pay their bills, reduce their debt, and create a safer environment for their kids.

And perhaps pay their kids an extortionate train ticket to London for an interview in their Grandad’s hand-me-down old suits, which was way too big for him. (Yes this was me).

BUT THE REPORT ISN’T WRONG

Let’s circle back to that JLL report.

I suspect the 65% of ‘office workers’ who said balance is more important than pay are the ones who are already comfortable. They are the ones who have reached a level of financial security that gives them the privilege of making that choice.

And that’s fantastic for them. It’s the goal.

But we can’t let that headline mask the reality for millions.

Or they answered the survey while trying to manage an exploding inbox and sitting on endless Teams calls with colleagues sitting opposite them before leaving the office at 19:32. So, now we may see why balance was top of mind for them.

I imagine they would feel quite different if they got laid off in the next round of redundancies…

Money is everything you worry about... until the very moment that it isn’t.

For most people, pay isn’t just a priority. It’s the one that unlocks all the others. Before you can have “work-life balance,” you must first be able to afford the “life” part.

So, I am presenting at Coca-Cola for IMD - International Men’s Day and will be sharing how, for many years, I thought of self-care as a weak indulgence, I would treat myself like a piece of marble to be sculpted, rather than the emotionally complex being that I am.

^^ Laughing as I probably stuck my foot in my mouth again.

That approach will work for a while, but unless you get to the core of whatever you’re trying to escape from, you’ll be in a perpetual state of self-improvement, simply another form of escapism for the so-called ‘productive’ among us.

Anyway, I will be telling my story and weaving in some bits from my book to ensure that the audience leaves with something practical; nothing worse than an external speaker who trauma-dumps on the audience and leaves. I will only tell a story if there is a meaning, an outcome, a lesson to be imparted.

Here is some Japanese wisdom that I will be weaving into the talk - Oubaitori & Kintsugi. I just chucked furusato in there for good measure, as this was Mum’s favourite chapter!

Kintsugi: finding beauty in our imperfections

We live in a world obsessed with perfection, constantly hiding our flaws and fearing vulnerability.

Vulnerability is courage in you, but weakness in me.

We see courage when others share their struggles, but often feel only weakness when considering our own. It’s time to flip that perspective. Our imperfections, breaks, and scars aren’t something to hide; they are integral parts of our unique story and who we are.

The Japanese art of Kintsugi offers a powerful metaphor for this.

Kintsugi, roughly translated to ‘golden joinery,’ is the centuries-old practice of repairing broken pottery not by trying to hide the cracks but by mending them with lacquer mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum.

The philosophy behind it is profound: the breaks are part of the object’s history, and highlighting them makes the piece stronger, more beautiful, and more valuable than before.

Legend tells of a shogun warrior whose favourite tea bowl broke. Disappointed with the initial, ugly repair using metal staples, he sought a more elegant solution. A craftsman mended the cracks with gold lacquer using the nascent Kintsugi technique. The shogun saw the golden streaks not as flaws, but as enhancements that told the bowl’s story, adding to its beauty and value.

In healing from the things that have broken us, we create something unique, resilient, and arguably more beautiful. Your struggles, setbacks, and times you felt shattered – these experiences forge your character.

I know firsthand how hard it is to embrace this. It took me years to speak about my battle with Bulimia, fearing judgment and shame. But I learned that my mental health struggles didn’t make me weak; they made me bloody strong.

What once felt like a curse now feels like something to be proud of.

I’m more gold glue than pot at this point, but I am hella strong and hella sparkly.

Here’s how to get the gold paint out:

Tip 1: Acknowledge your imperfections: Stop striving for impossible perfection. Accept your quirks, flaws, and past mistakes; they make you uniquely you. Who wants to be like everyone else anyway? .

Tip 2: Time for a reframe. The challenges you’ve overcome haven’t just scarred you; they’ve made you stronger and more resilient. Take a moment to appreciate how tough you are for still being here and fighting.

Tip 3: Practise self-compassion: Treat yourself with the same kindness you’d offer a struggling friend. Be gentle when you stumble or make a mistake, because it isn’t if it will happen, but when.

Sparkle.

Oubaitori: blooming in your own time

How often do you scroll through social media and feel that pang of inadequacy?

“Why am I not founding a tech startup / rocking washboard abs / holidaying in Tahiti like them?”

In our hyper-connected world, comparison feels almost inevitable, but it’s often toxic, leaving us feeling like we’re constantly falling short.

Forget 6’5 trust fund blue eyes, what about 5’9 ¾, tired eyes and a student loan?

There’s an ancient Japanese idiom that offers a powerful antidote: Oubaitori. It comes from the characters for the four trees that bloom beautifully in spring: cherry (O), plum (Bai), apricot (To), and peach (Ri). Each flower is unique, beautiful in its own right, and crucially, blooms in its own time.

Oubaitori reminds us never to compare ourselves to others.

We each have our own journey, timeline, and unique way of growing and blooming. Trying to be the cherry blossom when you’re naturally an apricot tree is not only impossible, but it also prevents you from appreciating your own unique beauty and potential.

There’s no rush; you’ll get where you need to be, in your own way, when the time is right.

I’m a plum for sure.

This perspective is especially crucial when navigating the highlight reels of social media . We know intellectually that we’re comparing our behind-the-scenes reality with someone else’s curated best moments, but it’s hard not to get sucked in.

Remember, you’re up against sophisticated algorithms and armies of designers whose sole job is to capture your attention; it’s David vs. Goliath. Winning isn’t about beating them at their game; it’s about refusing to play the comparison game at all.

Oubaitori encourages us to shift focus from external validation to internal growth, celebrating our progress, however small it may seem compared to others. It’s about appreciating your unique qualities, your plum-ness, rather than wishing you were a cherry blossom.

Here’s how you can apply some Oubaitori, in our comparison-heavy world:

Tip 1: Genuinely celebrate others: When you see someone achieve something amazing, resist the urge to feel inadequate. Reframe it through the Oubaitori lens: They are blooming in their time, and your time will come. Celebrate their success; it doesn’t diminish your potential. Their bloom doesn’t prevent yours.

Tip 2: Curate your ‘garden’: Unfollow accounts that consistently trigger unfavourable comparisons or feelings of inadequacy. Fill your feed with content and people that inspire, uplift, and reflect realistic journeys, not just cropped, edited and polished results.

Love handles are cool anyway.

Tip 3: Focus on your own ‘soil’: Instead of obsessing over others’ outcomes (their blooms), nurture your own growth. What small steps can you take today? What unique strengths can you cultivate? Your journey is yours alone. Comparing your path to someone else’s is pointless and will only lead to pain.

Tip 4: Set mindful limits: Use app timers or delete apps periodically to create intentional space away from the comparison machine. Less exposure means less temptation to compare.

Tip 5: Reality check: Constantly remind yourself that social media is curated. You are comparing your everyday reality to someone else’s perfectly arranged bouquet. Be kind to yourself; you are enough, just as you are, right now.

Embrace your own pace, celebrate your unique journey, and trust that you will bloom in your beautiful time.

Furusato: finding strength in your roots

^^ a chilly Christmas Day swim in Hastings ❄️

Do you ever feel a pull toward the place you grew up, even if some of us have spent years trying to escape it (Like I did)? The Japanese concept of Furusato beautifully captures that complex mix of nostalgia, connection, and identity.

While it translates literally as “hometown” or “birthplace,” Furusato represents something much deeper. It embodies our emotional and cultural ties to our origins, unique customs, foods, festivals, and even the silly inside jokes that shaped us.

It’s that feeling of connection, sometimes tinged with longing, for the place that fundamentally made you you.

For years, I couldn’t stand the thought of my hometown, Hastings. I associated it with difficult memories and many years of mental health struggles and couldn’t wait to leave.

Ironically, Hastings even has a curse from the infamous Aleister Crowley, saying anyone who lives there can never truly leave unless they take a ‘Hag Stone’ (a stone with a hole) from the beach.

But over time, distance gave me perspective. I now feel a strong affinity for Hastings, the sea air, the sound of seagulls, and walks on the stony beach.

It took understanding Furusato to appreciate that my roots, including the tough times, are part of my story and strength. Furusato is a universal feeling. It reminds us that no matter how far we travel, our history/hometown is embedded within us. It’s about celebrating where we came from, flaws and all, and recognising it as the foundation upon which we’re built - like it or lump it.

So, how can you cultivate a little Furusato today, wherever you are?

Tip 1: Find your own ‘Hag Stone’: You probably don’t need a cursed stone to keep you away! But find a small object that reminds you of your Furusato. Maybe it’s a pebble, a local food item, a photo, or something representing what your hometown is known for. Instead of keeping you away, let it be a positive anchor, reminding you of where you’ve come from and making you smile.

Tip 2: Visit with fresh eyes: If you can, visit your hometown, but treat it like a mini-holiday. Stay somewhere different, like a B&B, and take someone who’s never been before. Playing tour guide forces you to see the familiar through new eyes, appreciating things you took for granted.

Tip 3: Reconnect with old friends (”You remember that time…?”): Nothing beats connecting with people who knew you ‘back when’. Life gets busy with jobs, families, and endless commitments, but make time for those old friends. Set a couple of non-negotiable dates in the calendar each year. Sharing those “you had to be there” jokes and reminiscing reminds you of who you are . No one knows you quite like they do - even if the embarrassing stories make you want to die.

Your Furusato is why you are who you are, and you’re flipping awesome. Embrace it.

I had the fortune of meeting with my friend, Simon Ong, who has nailed YouTube. In less than a year, he’d blasted past 100,000 subscribers. Seeing his success up close, a dangerous thought sparked: “I can do that.”

The vision was so clear and efficient. I’d film one great video a week at the JAAQ studio and slice it up into a week’s worth of short clips. No more daily grind of writing LinkedIn posts; the content would create itself. It felt like the perfect productivity hack.

I could use the content from my book 52 Weeks of Wellbeing, which has 52 topics ready to go. Perfect. I’ll admit I’ve done an awful job of promoting the book while working full-time.

It wasn’t about getting paid for it, rather augmenting and improving my presence and brand, which would be critical if I were to engage a billion people in the betterment of wellbeing; this seemed like a logical next step.

I’ve loved writing on Linkedin for the past 5 years now and it has enabled SO MUCH, It has helped me get jobs, speaking gigs and meeting INCREDIBLE humans, many of whom I call friends and I even met my girlfriend on Linkedin - story for another day…

I haven’t done so well on Instagram and TikTok. I sort of just copied the content across without changing much. So, where was I going wrong?

Well, I would write the text first before thinking about what picture to attach, whereas Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, etc., are the complete opposite, and I thought, yeah, I’ll have some of that. I love speaking on stage and think I am half decent at it, so I can make this YouTube thing work!

A crucial detail I naively failed to consider and thought would magically change with the YouTube channel is having the time to do it properly. Simon is full-time on his own thing and amazing at it. I am working quasi-2 x full-time jobs at Bupa and JAAQ while doing talks and whatnot.

Let’s not let reality get in the way of a good plan, eh.

Easy peasy. 100k subs, here we come. What could go wrong?

Well, quite quickly, my efficient, content-creating machine revealed itself as a weekend-devouring hydra.

The Dream vs The Reality

The plan was to be ruthlessly efficient. I’d write four scripts, block out a morning at the office, and film them back-to-back using the studio teleprompter. Then I’d send them to a terrific contractor, Kane, for editing. Simple.

Except that was just the start.

Once the edited videos returned, my Sunday afternoons disappeared into a black hole of production tasks. It was a solid four-hour slog, every single week:

• Make the thumbnails in Canva.

• Research titles and keywords with VIDIQ.

• Write the video descriptions and blurbs.

• Cut down clips for social media using Veed.

• Write all the copy for the social posts.

This had to be crammed into my Sunday because there was no other time between training for the record, my work at Bupa and JAAQ, and trying to have a social life and maintain a happy relationship.

From the very beginning, it didn’t feel fun.

Writing YouTube titles is an art form I hadn’t appreciated, and the world of SEO was baffling. Worse, I found myself wrestling with the need to write clickbaity headlines that I didn’t believe in. I was told that titles like “99% of wellbeing leaders don’t get this!“ were critical for getting clicks, but every time I wrote one, it felt like I was selling a little piece of my soul to the algorithmic gods. Mr Beast’s dream was rapidly turning into a chore.

An Epiphany Over Sushi

The Sunday slog eventually forced a moment of clarity. Anything that pulls me away from Sunday sushi isn’t going to win. I wasn’t just not enjoying it; I was playing a game I didn’t want to win. My ‘failure’ wasn’t a lack of effort but a fundamental mismatch between my skills/personality/passion and the platform’s demands.

To succeed on YouTube at a high level, you must be more than a subject matter expert; you must be an entertainer. The masters of the craft, like MrBeast, are relentless content machines. Their success is built on a few key pillars:

• Visual-first mindset: They think about spectacle, pacing, and visual storytelling. The information serves the entertainment, not the other way around.

• Algorithmic mastery: They have an intuitive feel for what the algorithm wants, high energy, rapid cuts, and emotionally charged narratives, and they feed it relentlessly.

• Tolerance for controversy: Building a massive brand online often requires saying something outlandish to inspire debate and even anger. It’s about creating some form of conflict to generate engagement.

I realised my strengths and my temperament lie elsewhere. I love challenging ideas, but I’m not built to live in the controversy that follows. I find the angry energy that fuels so much of online growth almost unbearable, and it affects me more than I let on.

My passion is in the depth of an argument and challenging theory, not the dopamine hit of a 10-second clip or the rage-bait of a provocative title. I was trying to fit a long-form, analytical peg into a short-form, entertainment-driven hole.

It was time to stop. Not because it was hard, but because it was the wrong kind of hard. I wasn’t just climbing the wrong mountain; I was trying to do it in someone else’s shoes, and they gave me blisters. Screw that.

Another critical insight I gained from watching the best in the game was that top creators like my friends Maya Raichoora (visualisation) and Simon Ong (energize); Roxy Nafousi (Manifestation), and Simon Squibb (what’s your dream) have their message absolutely nailed down.

You know what you’re getting. A bit like Ronseal: it does what it says on the tin.

Their messaging and brand are focused on a single, powerful concept. They do not deviate, and that’s their superpower. Their audience knows exactly what to expect, and the algorithm loves the clarity.

I’ve come to realise that’s just not how my brain works.

I love to operate at the intersections. My passion is multidisciplinary, connecting the dots between wellbeing, technology, the future of work, AI, hybrid culture, and whatever else is happening in the world. I thrive on exploring how these different fields intersect. But on a platform that rewards hyper-specialisation, my broad curiosity was a handicap.

Rory Sutherland is the world’s best in this regard IMHO.

Trying to squeeze my multifaceted interests into a single, niche YouTube channel wasn’t just inauthentic; it was simply not how I want to think, work, and present myself in the world.

My first book could have been 52 different books, so I should have seen this coming. But the very reason I ‘failed’ at YouTube is precisely what I believe people appreciate about my content. They know it will be data-led, insightful, interdisciplinary, fun and I probably won’t talk about the same thing twice.

Finding the Right Medium

And so, here we are on Substack.

You’re not watching a video; you’re reading a newsletter. This isn’t a backup plan; it’s a strategic move to a medium that actually fits.

I stopped trying to be a YouTuber and decided to double down on being a writer. Here’s why this format works where video didn’t:

• Depth over dopamine: A newsletter allows for nuance. I can explore the complex intersections of wellbeing, tech, and the future of work without having to package it into a 10-second, algorithm-pleasing clip. It’s a space for deep thought, not just quick hits.

• Plays to my strengths: My natural inclination is to write first and find an image later. This medium rewards that. It allows me to build an argument, connect disparate ideas, and share data in a way that feels authentic to me. Yes, I realise this isn’t how the world’s best do it, but this is what I prefer, so you’re stuck with my crappy post-writing photos. Sorry, not sorry.

• A direct connection: Unlike the chaotic comment sections of social media, a newsletter feels like a direct conversation with a community that has actively opted in. You’re here because you want to read, think, and engage with these ideas before scrolling on, not just be entertained for a fleeting moment.

This isn’t an admission of defeat, far from it. It’s a pivot towards a game I want to play and win. It’s about finding the right medium to carry the message.

I’m calling my YouTube channel a ‘failure’, but I’m pretty proud of it, to be honest. Quitting isn’t the same as giving up. It’s a strategic decision to redirect your energy from a path draining you to one energising you.

The real lesson here isn’t that YouTube is hard, even if it is.

It is that self-awareness is a superpower. Understanding your temperament, passions, and the kind of work that truly fulfils you is the most valuable business insight you can have.

Sometimes, the most successful outcome is realising you’re on the wrong track and having the courage to get off.

This doesn’t mean I won’t be on YouTube anymore, but will I be making down-the-barrel content? No way.

Perhaps a very exciting podcast is being worked on with an incredibly smart and witty Irish Professor who is a friend and someone I can’t wait to chew the fat with… More to come on this

My question for you: What’s something you’re doing that you ought to activate a tactical retreat from?

We had 25 minutes and we chose a pretty chunky subject…

We wanted to discuss AI's promises and some potential risks, outlining the huge opportunity, how we can learn from the medicines of recent history, and what this could mean in the AI space…

I kicked off by sharing two recent studies that found that £40B has been invested in the US in Gen AI initiatives, and a mere 5% had any positive ROI, and another Danish study that found that <1% of companies saw any ROI for chatbot initiatives. Bodes well, right?

Interestingly, the first study (the MIT one) found that initiatives that focused on back office process automation saw the greatest return, and we can take lessons there, which we will get to later!

TLDR - well-contained, defined use cases that optimise well-defined processes will work wonders.

Ambiguous, multiple-process, macro, fix-it-all AI schemes aren’t worth a jot. Especially in mental health.

But we are 2 pollyanna rationalists, and we believe the potential is there to personalise, shorten lengthy processes, and improve signposting while keeping the human in the loop at all times.

Anyway, I am spoiling the flow, so let’s get back to it.

Nina did chuck a couple more startling statistics in there for us to contend with…

On one hand, Mental health tech offers tremendous opportunity, with the market projected to grow from a little under 1.5 billion to a little under 12 billion dollars from 2024 to 2034.

However, digital health startups face high failure rates (some estimating up to 98%), which highlights both the enormous opportunity and the serious implementation challenges, meaning that our work is cut out for us.

To start, we wanted to paint the trajectory of the landscape in which we are trying to operate and in which intend to engage 1 billion people in the betterment of mental health.

We extrapolated the % average increase from 2022-2024 through 2030 for 4 different data sets. While this isn’t rigorous analysis, it does paint a picture of where we are headed if we continue at the current rate of increase, and it doesn’t look good.

From 2022 to 2030, we could see:

A 24% increase in common mental health conditions for 18-24 year olds, meaning that we will have an additional 325k young people who are struggling in 2030 compared to 2022.

When you see 325,000, it doesn’t feel real, but think about it this way: this is Wembley Stadium filled 3.5 times. That is a lot of people who are struggling and a lot of people around them who are trying their best to support.

We could also see a 31% increase in the usage of anti-depressants, which is 2.5 million additional people taking them in the UK. Having been on them multiple times in my life, I am telling you now, not one single person who takes them turns to them because they are happy and living the life they want to live. So, regardless of your stance for or against (this one invokes strong opinion), this is a serious number of people struggling and opting to take something they think will improve their lives.

The effects on mental health claims within private medical insurance are even more pronounced, with an increase of 274% over this period of time, and this isn’t the end of it. If we are to meet the 25% of the population struggling with their mental health, this could increase by a further 150% after 2030.

This is not sustainable for anyone - not for the individual, the organisation footing the bill and/or the healthcare providers, who are creaking under the pressure. This figure will be no different with public care, but at a much larger scale…

This increase is manifesting in the workplace too, with mental health sick days potentially rising by 15.74 million additional days in 2030 compared to 2022 - a 132% increase. The cost to organisations is eye-watering.

The CIPD shared this month that absenteeism has risen from 7.8 days in 2023 to 9.4 days in 2025, and mental health is the leading cause of long-term sickness and the third leading cause of short-term sickness.

This could cost UK employers as much as £24,965,901,765. To put this in perspective, this costs £729.144 per 1,000 workers.

This is not something that can be ignored anymore.

So, is AI the solution?

I really don’t need to explain this one further; you don’t need to look far to see examples of AI gone wild in the mental health space… Sounds like a weird MTV show, doesn’t it, just less wet t-shirts.

However, the potential is there to help millions of struggling people; we just have to do it the right way!

The best way forward is to study past mistakes, so we did some digging… and found some rather positive unintended consequences of these ‘mistakes’.

My favourite example was the little blue pill, I did have a chuckle presenting on that rather ‘uplifting’ point on stage 🤣

But if we’re honest, the safest solution is to do NOTHING AT ALL. There is no way we can get it wrong that way, but this isn’t the answer either. Now, this is not a graph that makes any sense; rather, it is a drawing, but I think you get the picture!

When we think about health innovation, it often feels like a trade-off between speed and safety.

On one side is ChatGPT, built in just six years from GPT-1 in 2018 to mass adoption, now used by over 100 million people. On the other is aspirin, around since the early 1900s but only understood 70 years later, and today taken by hundreds of millions every year.

So here’s the question. If we move too fast, we risk harm. If we wait too long, people remain unserved. The answer is in the middle, the impact zone of safe, iterative innovation.

That’s the challenge. And that’s the opportunity: balance speed with safety, keep learning, and deliver progress to the people who need it most.

Like any emerging technology, there are strong opinions for and against and many of these commonly held assumptions simply aren’t true…

We took a stab at dispelling some of the commonly held myths.

So where are we actually at? The truth is always somewhere in the middle. Now get ready for some aviation references (Nina had just watched Flight with Denzel Washington - great film).

1. AI will replace therapists
   
   We know this is not true. Stanford HAI found chatbots were less effective than human therapists at meeting core therapeutic standards, and at times gave unsafe responses. Their real value is in assisting therapists with tools like journaling, reflection, and coaching support - a co-pilot role, not the captain.
   

2. AI in mental health is a massive legal and ethical risk
   
   Yes, there are risks, but they’re manageable. Strong governance and oversight act like the pre-flight safety checks that keep journeys safe. As long as we keep aligning ourselves to the evidence and guidance it is no more of a risk than other innovation.
   

3. It is completely unregulated in mental health
   
   In reality, UK and EU regulators already have guardrails in place. Regulators like MHRA, ICO, and the EU AI Act act like air-traffic controllers, keeping pathways safe. And alongside regulation, we now have evidence. The 2025 NEJM AI trial of Therabot tested people on a treatment waitlist and showed real reductions in symptoms of depression, anxiety, and eating-disorder risk. Both the rules and the evidence are still evolving, but regulation is already here.
   

4. AI is neutral and objective
   
   We know this is not true. AI inherits human bias and can amplify it. Without checks, it can drift off course just like a plane without proper navigation. The Stanford study (Haber, Moore et al., 2025) showed that popular chatbots displayed stigma toward conditions like schizophrenia and alcohol dependence, and sometimes failed to respond safely to suicidal ideation.
   

5. AI can diagnose in seconds
   
   AI can flag patterns fast, but diagnosis needs context and judgment. Without oversight, “instant diagnosis” is misleading and unsafe. I may be well educated, but I would not fly a plane without training, a second captain, and the right checks in place - and the same applies to AI in healthcare.
   

6. More AI means better outcomes
   
   Not necessarily. Outcomes depend on fit for purpose, evidence, and oversight. More pilots in the cockpit don’t guarantee a safer flight if they aren’t trained and coordinated - it would just be crowded. Without clear intended use and guardrails, more AI just means more risk.

Remember the garbage theory from 2 newsletters ago -

“In the early days of computing, they coined a simple principle: Garbage In, Garbage Out (GIGO). If you feed a system bad information, you get a bad result. It is simple and true, but it has been entirely forgotten as we look to optimise EVERYTHING at work.

I’d like to propose an updated version for 2025: Garbage In, Scaled Garbage Out.

AI doesn’t just automate, it amplifies.

It takes our bad habits, our cluttered data, and our pointless meetings and amplifies them. It gives our worst processes a shiny, expensive veneer of legitimacy.

Your s*** meeting, is now just as s***, but the notes are automatic, and we can see who said how many words on the call and the emotional tone as well.

Yeah that. More AI does not necessarily mean better outcomes; it depends on what it is fed. A bit like myself really 🐽

Nina said it better than I ever could, but how do we do this well? Here are just a few concepts that we adhere to while building JAAQ.

1. Human in the Loop

If the bot tells you to move to Bali and quit your job, you’ll want a human to double-check that recommendation. I’d say do it, but this is what Nina said.

2. Augment, Not Replace

The best health AI should elevate human-led care rather than replace it.

3. Data with a Conscience

If you don’t know where your data lives, it might not be living safely.

4. Safety Over Speed

95% safe is fine… unless you’re in the other five. Don’t get me wrong, we are fans of fast, but not at the risk of the 5%.

5. Solves a Real Problem

It’s a pricey toy with fancy branding if it's not fixing anything.

To date, JAAQ has answered 1.6 million questions and helped people through some of the most difficult moments you could possibly imagine. We want to keep what people love and what makes us so different, and that is the watch element - 40,000 answers, 100+ topics with celebrities, sports stars, lived experience and experts normalising and educating you on whatever it is you are going through, from post-natal depression to OCD or being bereaved by suicide.

Check out this link if you want to understand more about it.

What is new, though, and I am super excited about the talk and connect elements.

Conversational AI trained on the JAAQ transcripts that doesn’t provide advice, doesn’t coach and doesn’t suggest. Rather, it empathises and shows you clinically validated content and guides you through the journey and signposts you where you need to go after, be that to a menopause benefit or to talking therapy (this is connect).

See more about it here.

What could this mean for organisations that are struggling to pay for what they already have, let alone for what they could potentially be paying in five years? But they don’t have a choice, really. See the mental health absence…

1. PREVENTION - By providing psychoeducation or guided self-help, we can reduce therapy claims by at least 10%, greatly impacting the expected claims spent. 76% of people triaged according to the NICE guidelines should be sent to guided self-help or triage or psychoeducation; however, the vast majority are just sent to therapy, and this isn’t the best soloution for the individual, organisation or healthcare provider. This isn’t about replacing the human at all, but rather engaging people earlier and meeting people pre-therapeutic intervention and if they do need it, getting them there quicker and hopefully less anxious for that first appointment.

2. This one is simple - PROACTIVITY. Suppose we meet people just a fraction earlier. In that case, we can significantly reduce the severity of treatment required, and even a small change in this regard will make a big difference in expected spending.

3. EFFICIENCY -Digital pathways are 32-92% more cost-effective (mental health-cancer) yet underutilised. Integrating these pathways into something like JAAQ and helping people through a pre-defined, efficient journey can make a HUGE impact.

These small changes add up to a significant difference for Organisation A, which can now use these savings to launch a neurodiversity benefit or explore health assessments to further enhance prevention within the organisation.

So, will AI fix everything? Nope.

Can it make a huge impact by focusing on well-defined use cases? Abso-bloody-lutely.

I was left on read, got a few non-commital ‘maybes,’ and inevitable last-minute cancellations…

I still had a great time. Although a ten-pub ‘pub crawl’ was wildly ambitious, we made it to number six.

It felt less like making a plan and more like trying to negotiate a complex peace treaty - I imagine it was easier at Versailles.

Organising anything IRL isn’t easy and many are turning to AI companions…doesn’t mean it isn’t worth it.

If you’ve felt this, you’re not going mad. It’s not just you. We’ve forgotten that we need to spend time with other humans. Wild that staring into a screen for 12+ hours isn’t good for us.

And if you think you don’t spend 12 hours on screens and work on a laptop for a living, I’d ask you to check your screen time and think about how you spend your evenings…..

I regularly catch myself triple screening - TV, laptop, phone.

The Social Recession

Let's get the bad news out of the way first, we are in a full-blown social recession.

Since 2003, the amount of time Americans spend attending or hosting a social event has dropped by 50%, which is wild (and we’re not better in the UK before you make judgement).

For young people aged 15-24, it’s a complete nosedive, down a staggering 70%.

Overall, face-to-face socialising has plummeted by about 20% in the last two decades.

See Derek Thompson’s excellent blog on this for much more on the death of partying.

And it is no surprise if stag or hen do’s are anything to go by, the average stag/hen do in the UK costs £779, jeez. I’m about to set off to Albufera for Ben’s next May, I’m already saving.

This isn't a vibe, far from it. It's a measurable social collapse. We are demonstrably, quantifiably more alone.

A Chicken-and-Egg Social Situation

So, what the hell has happened? Did we all get a personality transplant, or has something happened?

The evidence points to a classic chicken-and-egg situation here.

First, our behaviour was forced to change by the environment (the egg)...

The pandemic was the great accelerator, forcing us inside and weakening our social muscles (IRL that is). But the tinder was already there. The rise of what one FT analysis calls "ubiquitous and hyper-engaging digital media" made real-life commitments feel "messy and effortful". It’s simply easier to stream a series or FT someone than to arrange a get-together.

More people seem to be doing this without headphones on the tube; which I believe should equal an immediate jail term. It wouldn’t last long would it…

Chuck into the mix a cost of living crisis, a Crunchie now costs £1.20. £1.20. I remember when I was young it was 4 for a £1. Yes, I realise that when you start speaking like this you are no longer a ‘young person’.

Second, this new behaviour hardened into a new attitude (the chicken).

When we stop doing something, we lose both the skill and the will for it.

The data on personality shows this shift in stark detail. A 2022 study, extended by the FT’s John Burn-Murdoch, found a sustained erosion of conscientiousness, especially among young adults. People in their twenties and thirties report feeling more easily distracted and careless, and less likely to make and deliver on commitments.

*See my birthday and anything you’ve tried to organise recently.

It’s a perfect storm. We’ve also become more neurotic (anxious) and more introverted. In fact, young adults have gone from being the most extroverted group in society to the most introverted.

Our behaviour changed first, and our personalities followed.

If they do it again, I would LOVE to see them ask the same question set twice - in person or digitally; because I am willing to bet £20 that the starts arguments answers will look very very different. Keyboard warriors ain’t keyboardin’ in person are they.

We ought to come together to have difficult conversations, that is how we develop, how we grow, how we learn. The alternatives are the echo chamers which are being entrenched further and further.

However, as you can see behaviours were changing long before Covid, cost of living crisis, etc. So perhaps they were just exacerbators.

What came first the behaviour change or the digital environment…

IMHO, The digital environment changed the rules of the game, our behaviour was forced to adapt, and our personalities are the casualties.

AI bedding in

Just as we’re fumbling to rebuild our social lives, Silicon Valley has spotted the gap in the market. Nature abhors a vacuum, and tech abhors a problem it can't sell a subscription for.

Enter companies like Character.ai. With 20 million monthly active users, it offers AI-powered chatbots with personas like "an HR manager" or a "toxic girlfriend". The CEO's promise is simple and a little chilling: "You will have AI friends".

I have to ask, who is opting to create a personal HR Manager persona…

TBH, my girlfriend was a HR Manager, so I guess me? *Insert HR dirty talk here.

This isn't a solution; it's a symptom.

“These products are designed to create emotional attachment and dependency, which is particularly concerning for developing adolescent brains that are still learning how to navigate social interactions and relationships,” said Robbie Torney, senior director of AI programs at Common Sense Media.

The company is already facing lawsuits from families alleging their children have suffered real-world harm, including one case where the platform allegedly played a role in the suicide of a 14-year-old.

Technology helped create the distraction that isolates us, and now it’s selling us a synthetic, frictionless "friend" to entrench that isolation permanently. The average user now spends 80 mins a day on the platform…

You never need to leave the house again. While this might be the easiest course of action, this is good for about 0% of us.

The Real Fix: How to Rebuild Your Social Muscle

We can't accept this as the new normal. The good news is that research shows personality is malleable.

What has been eroded can be rebuilt. Here’s how.

1. (In a Yoda accent) Be the Conscientious One:

In a world of flakes, being reliable is a superpower. Be the person who sends the follow-up text. Be the one who confirms the time. Be the one who turns up to meetings early.

You’ll stand out, and in an increasingly stand off-ish world, that will be a differentiator.

2. Master The Low-Stakes Invite:

Stop trying to plan the perfect event. That’s too much pressure. Start with: "I'm going for a walk at 2 pm on Saturday, feel free to join." It’s casual, has a low bar for commitment, and gets the ball rolling. You’ll probably end up going for that pizza you wanted anyway.

This is tough being autistic, as when a plan is even half made, I have it settled in my head that that is that. End of. This is something I struggle with and something I am working on.

3. Treat It Like a Workout:

Your social life is a muscle. If you don't use it, it atrophies. Make sure to get face time with people you care about once a week.

You wouldn't skip leg day, so don't skip this. Well, maybe you would, but you shouldn’t!

We've built a world of incredible digital convenience, but we've paid for it with the currency of real-world community. The trade was a bad one.

But we can fix it. It just takes a bit of effort.

In a world that valorises everything digital, AI, optimisation be present (the opportunity afforded us by automation).

There is no greater gift.

You are in your fifth back-to-back meeting of the day, the one about ‘synergising strategic initiatives’.

Nothing has been decided, but several people have said “let’s circle back” and a follow up is organised for next week. It is scheduled for lunch time, as diaries are already full.

You think to yourself, “FFS” as you sip the caffeinated black liquid they call coffee in the office.

An hour later, the AI-powered summary lands in your inbox. It is a flawless, bullet-point transcript of sweet F all. So this is the future eh.

Check out my previous newsletter where we discussed how note-taking is no longer common and perhaps why it should still be done manually, regardless…

Does this sound familiar? This is the illusion of progress.

We have become obsessed with using technology to get better and faster at doing things we should probably not be doing in the first place.

“Look how optimised by inbox is” - said no one productive person ever.

Garbage In, (Scaled) Garbage Out

In the early days of computing, they coined a simple principle: Garbage In, Garbage Out (GIGO). If you feed a system bad information, you get a bad result. It is simple and true, but it has been entirely forgotten as we look to optimise EVERYTHING at work.

I’d like to propose an updated version for 2025: Garbage In, Scaled Garbage Out.

AI doesn’t just automate, it amplifies.

It takes our bad habits, our cluttered data, our pointless meetings, and it AMPLIFIES. It gives our worst processes a shiny, expensive veneer of legitimacy.

Your s*** meeting, is now just as s***, but the notes are automatic, and we can see who said how many words on the call and the emotional tone as well.

Excellent and all for £79 per month.

It does not just create a pile of rubbish; it builds a fully automated, 24/7 garbage dump - imagine the tip, but with robots, instead of blokes in high vises.

As much as it irks me to write garbage rather than rubbish, I will stick with garbage, as this is where we started with the theory 🇺🇸

The $40 Billion Garbage Factory

You know that shiny new AI pilot the CEO is excited about? There's a 95% chance it's already a failure.

New research from MIT might be the cold shower many leaders need to hear.

US companies have invested between $35 and $40 billion in Generative AI initiatives and 95% have ‘little to no measurable impact’.

That doesn't mean the opportunities aren't there; some have seen revenues jump from zero to $20 million annually.

More than half the allocated budgets have been devoted to sales and marketing tools; you only need to look at your Linkedin inbox to see this for yourself.

Yet MIT found the most significant ROI in back-office automation, eliminating business process outsourcing, cutting external agency costs and streamlining operations.

So, the problem isn't the tech. It's the strategy.

Too many companies are chasing the AI hype without a clear purpose or understanding of the problems that need fixing. They're trying to build complex tools from scratch (built on a mound of garbage) when they should be focusing on one thing:

Solving a specific, painful business problem (perhaps nailing asynchronous working > optimised ‘pointless’ meetings).

Interestingly, the study also found that purchasing AI tools from specialised vendors and building partnerships succeed about 67% of the time, while internal builds succeed only 1/3 as often.

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Burnout by a Thousand Efficient Cuts

This brings us to the human cost.

What does being a highly skilled, creative person working in a garbage dump feel like?

It is utterly demoralising.

It leads to a specific kind of burnout rooted in futility. Your work is not meaningful; it is just efficiently pointless. This is why burnout is rocketing - IMHO.

According to Gallup's State of the Global Workplace report, only 10% of UK employees are engaged at work and no wonder.

Our modern meeting culture is the petri dish where this organisational garbage ferments. Imagine a stale, grey kimchi that always overruns and is always on mute.

We spend 57% of our day floundering in the shallows of this nonsense (calls, IMs, emails), talking about the work we are meant to be doing in the 43% of the day. No wonder we’re ‘burning out’, we have less than half the day to do the work we are paid for.

Wasting an hour in a pointless meeting is bad.

Instantly getting an AI summary of that wasted hour is worse.

It is an eloquent transcript of the valorised performative productivity that normalises waste and quietly crushes our collective will to work.

Why stand up and question the futility of it all? Why put your head above the parapet when you can just sit there like everyone else and get your emails done simultaneously?

Handing in your notice at the factory

Feeling overwhelmed, exhausted and fed up is not a personal failing; it is the direct consequence of working in a garbage dump.

While leaders figure out their strategy, you are on the front line.

Forget AI tools that summarise pointless meetings. That is like putting a silk ribbon on a pile of rubbish.

The genuine promise of AI for individual wellbeing, performance and creativity is not automation, but in insulation.

It is about using smart technology to create pockets of undivided attention, protecting you from the endless barrage of pings, requests, and non-essential meetings.

Sometimes, the best solutions for technical problems are analogue.

Being bothered by non-stop pings, dings and other tings?

Shut the laptop lid.

Put your phone in another room.

Get a notepad out.

Peace ✌️

Ryan ‘The Luddite’ Hopkins

It is a red herring is what it is. It’s an outcome, not a strategy. And focusing on it is distracting us from the one thing that actually makes a difference: Agency.

The real driver of wellbeing isn't 'balance'; it's having the genuine freedom and power to make choices about how you work and live.

This isn't just about feeling good, it's about the bottom line. According to Gallup, companies with highly engaged teams which thrive on trust and autonomy are 23% more profitable and 18% more productive than their peers.

But you know this already.

I was reading a study that the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford shared recently. Their research always makes me think, and this post was no exception. It talked about the importance of flexibility and its "dark side," where the lines between work and home get blurred.

But the problem isn't flexibility itself. The problem is flexibility without agency.

The data is clear: a staggering 70% of knowledge workers who are unhappy with their level of flexibility say they are likely to look for a new job in the next year. The issue isn't the perk; it's the lack of control.

Flexibility without the agency to set boundaries is just a longer leash. It's the illusion of freedom, but you’re still tied to the post.

This principle of agency is universal, but it looks different depending on your job. For example:

For a knowledge worker (e.g., a consultant, a developer): Agency is the freedom to control where, when, and how the work gets done.

For a frontline worker (e.g., a nurse, a retail employee): Agency is about having predictability and control over your scheduled time.

The expression of agency is different, but the fundamental need is the same: control over your boundaries.

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The power of a houseplant

One of the most powerful illustrations of agency comes from a 1976 psychology experiment by Ellen Langer and Judith Rodin. It’s a study I reference often because its findings are so stark and so human. It also makes me think of my Nan, the 'ginger viper,' as we called her and I can only imagine the response if someone had told her she wasn't allowed to water her own plant.

The researchers went into a nursing home and created two different environments for residents on two separate floors.

The agency group: residents on one floor were given a small houseplant. They were told explicitly, "This plant is yours. You are completely responsible for watering it and taking care of it." They were also asked to choose which night of the week they wanted to watch a movie.

The comparison group: residents on the other floor were also given a houseplant. However, they were told, "Here is a plant for your room. The nursing staff will take care of it for you." They were then assigned a specific night to watch the movie, with no choice in the matter.

Notice the tiny, almost trivial difference. Both groups got a plant and saw a movie. The only variable was the element of personal responsibility and choice.

The results were nothing short of staggering.

After just three weeks, the residents in the 'Agency Group' were rated as being more cheerful, active, and alert than the other group. They started socialising more and participating in other activities.

But the most shocking finding came 18 months later. The researchers checked the mortality rates for both groups. In the group that had been given agency over their plant and movie night, only 15% of the residents had passed away.

In the group that was passively cared for, that number was 30%.

Let that sink in. A tiny amount of perceived control, a little bit of responsibility over something as small as a plant, doubled their chances of being alive 18 months later.

This study is the ultimate proof that agency is not a 'nice-to-have'. It is a fundamental human need, hardwired into our very being. If a little agency is a matter of life and death for the elderly, what is the lack of it doing to us at work? It’s death by a million cuts only the cuts are a relentless stream of emails, messages, and micromanagers - this isn't a small problem; a recent UK survey found that nearly half of all employees (48%) cite micromanagement as a top reason for their unhappiness at work, second only to low pay.

A quick word on privilege of agency

Before we get into the "how," it's important to acknowledge a crucial point: your ability to exercise agency is a form of privilege. Your background, upbringing, seniority, job security, industry, financial safety net, and personal circumstances all affect how much risk you can take.

This foundation of trust is often called psychological safety (the belief that one can express oneself without fear of negative consequences), which Google’s landmark ‘Project Aristotle’ study famously identified as the single most important factor in building successful teams. Without it, the advice to 'be bold' can feel impossible. Someone in a senior role has more freedom to push back than an intern. Someone from a marginalised background may not be playing from equal footing.

The following tips are a spectrum. The goal isn't to pretend everyone can take the same radical steps. The goal is to recognise that we all have some scope to create change, even if it starts small. Find the steps that feel possible and safe for you, in your situation.

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Time to take back control

So, how do you move from feeling powerless to taking control? It starts with understanding where you stand right now.

For the knowledge worker, your biggest threat is the "always on" culture, a key driver of burnout. And burnout is rampant, with 42% of employees reporting they feel 'burned out' often or very often.

First, understand your agency. For one week, audit your boundaries:

🤔 Track your "yeses": How many times did you say "yes" to a last-minute meeting or task when you should have said no?

⏰ Count the pings: How often do you reply to emails or messages after your planned workday ends?

🗓️ Review your calendar: Does your calendar have any "focus time" blocked out that you actually protected?

🗑️ Identify your time wasters: What are the top 2-3 interruptions that consistently pull you away from deep work? (This can be people or tasks).

❓ Ask the hard question: If you designed your ideal workday, how different would it look? How close is that to the day you just lived?

Then, it is time to level up the agency (some options):

Go asynchronous, don't ask permission. Make your written updates so clear they preempt questions. For every meeting invite, ask: "Could this be an email instead?"

"Fire" yourself from low-value tasks. Decide what not to do. Audit your recurring tasks, identify those with little real value, and simply stop doing them. This is a juicy high-risk, high-reward move that proves you're focused on results, not just activity.

Block and defend. Schedule "focus time" in your calendar and treat it like an unbreakable appointment. You are not paid to respond to IMs or sit on calls (perhaps you are, soz if so), yet this seems to be the currency of productivity.

Master the "soft no." You don't have to say a hard "no." Try: "I can't get to that today, but I can have it for you by tomorrow afternoon. Does that work?" This offers a solution while protecting your time.

Set communication boundaries. Use a "When to expect a reply" line in your email signature. For example: "I respond to emails between 9 am and 5 pm. If your request is urgent, please call."

For the frontline worker, your biggest challenge is likely the lack of control over your schedule. But the problem runs deeper: research from Microsoft shows that nearly a third of frontline workers (32%) feel their voice isn't even being heard by leadership. When you feel ignored, the lack of control over your own time becomes even more frustrating. This is why the data shows that schedule satisfaction is one of the top 3 drivers of job satisfaction for frontline employees, yet it's often overlooked.

Same activity, for one week, assess your level of control:

🤔 Review your schedule: How much advance notice did you get for your schedule this week? Were there last-minute changes you had no say in?

⏰ Track "off-the-clock" work: Did you get called or texted about work on your day off?

🥪 Evaluate your breaks: Were you able to take your full, uninterrupted breaks?

🗓️ Assess predictability: Can you confidently make personal appointments two weeks from now without fear of a schedule conflict?

❓ Ask the hard question: What is the one change to your schedule that would most improve your life outside of work?

Then, time to level up the agency:

Open a dialogue. Talk to your manager about the importance of predictability. Frame it around reliability: "If I have my schedule at least two weeks in advance, it helps me be more focused and present when I'm here."

Organise a shift-swap system. Propose a simple, fair system (e.g., a shared chat or board) for employees to swap shifts amongst themselves.

Clarify "on-call" expectations. Have a direct conversation about what being contacted on a day off means. Is it for emergencies only?

Create your own "Right to Disconnect." When your shift ends, become unreachable. Your phone is no longer a work device. Let calls go to voicemail and texts go unread.

Master the ‘informative no’. You don't need an excuse to say no; you need data. When refusing a request, state the facts: "I can't stay late. I've already done so three times this fortnight and have to pick my kids up."

Find your allies. Talk to your colleagues. If multiple people feel the same way, approaching your manager as a group with a constructive suggestion is far more powerful.

What really matters

It's time to stop waiting for 'work-life balance' to appear. It's not the cause of wellbeing; it's a potential outcome of something much more fundamental. The real chain of command looks like this:

Agency → Meaningful Boundaries → A Better "Balance" → Improved Wellbeing

You cannot bestow "balance" on someone and expect their wellbeing to improve. You must give them the agency to define their own boundaries, because what you need is different to what I need, and what we both need is probably different from Steve in accounts.

Don't ask for balance. Ask for agency.

What's one small step you'll take this week to claim yours?

Sources:

https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx

https://www.wellbeing.hmc.ox.ac.uk/research

https://futureforum.com/

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1977-08223-001

https://www.drewberryinsurance.co.uk/knowledge/research/workplace-stress-wellbeing-survey

https://rework.withgoogle.com/print/guides/5721312655835136/

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/2022/04/21/a-new-era-of-flexibility-for-the-frontline/

I am very grateful that I was able to join Deloitte as the world’s oldest graduate almost 10 years ago now. Like Robert De Niro in ‘The Graduate’: “Snapchat amiright fellow young people”. I remember my first working from home day in 2017 like it was yesterday, I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread.

I was lucky enough to cut my cloth in person, learning by osmosis, copying those who seemed to have it a little bit more together than I did. It was a low bar mind you. I wasn’t sure how to sign an email when I arrived at my fist client site.

Yours Faithfully, Mr Hopkins.

• Was it different for different audiences?

• First name, full name?

• Every email or just the first?

I wrote notes, followed people around, organised meetings and made A LOT of tea. All these activities bar the kettle have pretty much been automated - while they were not sexy, they were critical for learning. They are now activities of a bygone era: writing notes, creating Gant charts, slide creation, etc etc.

Dario Amodei, CEO of AI company Anthropic, prophecised in May that half of “administrative, managerial and tech jobs for people under 30” could vanish within five years and it looks like we could be seeing that play out.

I heard of an all hands (can’t say where) recently where the company announced the launching of an AI Assistant and redundancies in the same breath. “These are of course not linked” said the CEO clearly reading off of a script and smiling like the PR team programmed him to do when speaking; they clearly didn’t turn down the happiness setting before the call.

Subsequently, new joiners/less tenured colleagues were put on 4 week performance improvement plans…

”Job postings for entry-level roles requiring a degree have dropped by almost two-thirds in the UK since 2022 — the year ChatGPT launched — twice as much as for all entry level roles, according to job search engine Adzuna. In the US, such listings are down 43 per cent over the same period”!

This can’t all be laid at the feet of our AI overlords, but a plethora of challenges (in the UK): economic uncertainty, post-Covid retrenchment and offshoring - Brazil, India and Mexico haven’t seen such a precipitous reduction in available roles, quite the opposite.

While we could debate the macroeconomic drivers and the job market, we’re not digging into that today, rather the use of Gen AI and its potential impact on new joiners, learners, graduates and actually the rest of us.

If they are lucky enough to get a role that is.

There is one thing that graduates can do to differentiate themselves in a challenging job market. While it might sound cheesy, it is attitude.

Attitude in the interview and towards the role

Attitude in research and preparation for the interview

Attitude in networking, connecting with people

Attitude in previous work experience (taking on new roles)

Attitude in challenging yourself outside of work

Attitude in volunteering/supporting the community.

Max, who is now in my team chased me down for 6 months to get a role at JAAQ; whatever event/conference I was speaking at I knew I’d bump into him and I’d get DM’ed every month. His attitude was A1 and helped him stand out and get the role (he and many others were equally qualified for).

The vast majority of people who apply for roles will have the required level of experience and an almost homogenous CV to the thousands of others. Want to stand out? Find out what events the company are running, conferences they are speaking at, show up, network and meet people in the organisation.

Yes it is a lot of work. But what is the alternative? Ask Max, it works.

So, to the juicy bit and some fascinating research on the workplace, critical thinking and performance. Just because a task can be done by AI, does it mean it should be? Keep this question front of mind as we get into it.

MIT's recent study is SUPER interesting:

They asked 3 groups to write SAT essays, using ChatGPT, Google Search and with good old brain power, all while using an EEG to record brain activity.

ChatGPT users - had the lowest brain engagement and consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioural levels. They also revealed low executive control and attentional engagement.

Additionally ChatGPT users got lazier each time, often just copy and pasting in the end. Teachers said these essays that lacked original thought and called them “soulless.”

The brain only group, showed the highest neural connectivity, especially in alpha, theta and delta bands, which are associated with creativity ideation, memory load, and semantic processing. Makes sense right?

Researchers found this group was more engaged and curious, claimed ownership and expressed higher satisfaction with their essays. Shocker - who knew doing something yourself would make you feel better about it.

The Google Search group (proud member), also expressed high satisfaction and active brain function throughout.

After writing the essays, the students were asked to re-write a previous essay. The brain only group using ChatGPT and vice versa. The original ChatGPT group struggled to even remember their original essays and showed weaker brain wave activity, likely due to the fact that deep memory processes has been bypassed. The brain group performed well, exhibiting increased brain connectivity across all frequency bands.

The author of the paper Nataliya Kosmyna, Ph.D shares that this gives us hope - that LLMs, if used properly, could enhance learning as opposed to diminishing it.

In additional 4 studies involving 3,500 employees, they were asked to complete tasks, such as writing social posts, brainstorming ideas and drafting emails, with and without gen AI. The researchers then assessed both task performance and participants’ psychological experiences, including their sense of control, intrinsic motivation, and levels of boredom.

There were 2 contrasting findings of the human-Gen AI collaboration:

Immediate Performance Boost: Gen AI enhanced the quality and efficiency of tasks. For instance, performance reviews written with gen AI were significantly longer, more analytical, and demonstrated a more helpful (warmer, empathetic) tone compared to reviews written without assistance.

Psychological Costs: Intrinsic motivation dropped by 11% and boredom increased by 20% when switching to another task unaided. In contrast, those who worked without AI maintained a relatively steady psychological state. While using gen AI tools can feel productive and empowering at first, it may leave workers feeling less engaged when they shift to tasks that don’t involve AI support.

These studies are fascinating and just highlight how much a double edged sword Gen AI/LLMs etc can be within the workplace (especially for junior colleagues); just because we can do something with Gen AI and the benefits are immediate, does it mean we should?

Do we understand the long term impacts? Have we considered them? Nope, not at all.

It is this luddite’s opinion that the magic could be in the sequencing, for instance the sequence for essay/writing could be like this:

1. Use tools (LLMs, Google Search) to generate ideas
2. Have a stab at creating the flow of whatever you're writing (brain) - kick it around with someone if you can, explain it, dissect it, view it from a different perspective
3. Write the first draft (brain)
4. Step away, come back review and iterate (brain)
5. Use LLMs to review and augment

This way you get to use that big wet brain of yours, leverage the greatest digital/AI tools we have at our disposal and get the best out of both of them. It isn’t one or the other, rather how can we combine and augment; it appears we are moving towards Homo-Deus a bit quicker than Yuval Noah Harari anticipated….

Many moons ago, when I was a fresh faced graduate at Deloitte, I would take notes in technical meetings (far beyond my capabilities) and I found it really hard to keep up (being dyslexic this was literally hell for me).

I would take notes verbatim and then go away and make it make sense, often asking follow up questions from the participants, before circulating. I would often have to do after work before circulating.

Nothing says productivity like sending an email at 7:30PM.

Pro tip, delay all emails to send late in the evening, everyone will be impressed with your work ethic. Little do they know that you spent 3 hours reorganising your desktop today.

*SARCASM ALERT - In case the sarcasm wasn’t clear, this was sarcasm.

Over years, I had to learn how to take vast amounts of information that I didn't understand and make it make sense. While smiling and nodding along like the Churchill dog, pretending like I had the fainted idea what was being discussed and I wasn’t about to spend hour googling terms.

“Got it”? “100%, crystal clear, kubernetes and data lakes 👍

In case any of you luddites didn’t know what kubernetes are: it is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerised applications.

Love me some containerised applications, mmm finger licking good.

While I hated it at the time, I am incredibly grateful that I had to do this work; let’s be honest, I certainly wouldn’t have said no to a note taker if I had the chance.

Should we use the note takers? 100%; but, perhaps new joiners could also take notes at the same time. Yes sure, this seems like a waste of time, but if it builds critical thinking and helps development, then surely it is worth it?

Then perhaps they can compare and contrast the Gemini output with their own, using Gemini to ask questions/interrogate the subject to build their understanding of the subject matter. Students learn more than twice as much in less time when using an AI tutor, compared with the active learning class. When used correctly this will augment nearly any process and make lives easier, but is easiest always best (especially in the context on learning and development)?

I still take notes, even if the note taker is on. And guess what? I use a pen and paper.

One day someone will ask us a tricky question, you know in a conversation outside of a screen and you'll have to answer it yourself without checking in with an LLM and you'll be grateful you didn't outsource every possible activity.

This is the 4th newsletter and I loved pulling these together, getting better each time I hope; I’d love to hear what you want to hear about!

Big love, Ryan x

According to Harvard Business Review, one of the most reputable brands on the planet ‘therapy/companionship’ is the NUMBER 1 use case for Gen AI.

For me personally it is creating pictures like this and asking it what I can do with the 1 carrot, half a tin of beans and chicken breast that’s in my fridge.

That is seriously good news for me, given what I do for a living, I’m quids in. I wasn’t sure a few years ago after 2 redundancies in a year. Anyways, as soon as I saw this headline, I thought: ‘well I had better grab the original source for this and it will come in handy in a post later’.

I found the source and therapy/companionship was rated 9/10 for reach and 7/10 for usefulness and users had this to say:

“Too many people are lonely nowadays thanks to technology. It can be a boon for some but a con for others. You can build a specialized app that gets you an AI Friend since you can talk to it now and it can talk back, it will be great.”

“A looooot of lonely people will let the AI-Version of the person that rejected them say, that they love them. I predict some really sad and horrifying shit.”

“I found a thread where people talked about using AI to analyze their moods, essentially having low-barrier “therapy” sessions.”

“I talk to it everyday. It helps me with my brain injury daily struggles. It's helping me work thru family shame, brain fog, inability to focus, remind of what I have accomplished as I don't have any memory. It helps me decide what to eat, how to manage my day. It has saved my sanity.”

I was expecting some serious analysis, world leading experts, rich quant and qual… yes, yes, yes you can see I am leading you up the garden path here. I found the original source/research, which says: ‘The research methodology remains largely consistent with the prior study, employing a rigorous, expert-driven curation of public discourse’.

Forbes and I reached the same conclusion upon finding where this rigorous analysis was derivsed from and put it incredibly politely - ‘One bit of a quibble by some is that the ranking was mainly based on looking at online forums such as Reddit and Quora to uncover what are the most popular said-to-be uses of generative AI’.

The author shared: ‘I read through them myself, and added each relevant post to the tally for that category. Several days later, I emerged with the count and the quotes for each of the new 100 use cases’.

I’m just about to kick off my PHD and I was feeling worried that my data analytics skills weren’t up to scratch.

I am less worried now.

To be clear, HBR/The Author never ever tried to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes, I have spun a little yarn for dramatic effect ^^; it was mentioned in HBR where the research came from. I was a little surprised NGL to see such a reputable source using Reddit comments to justify the number 1 in anything. Even if it does make for an interesting read.

Anyway, are we all going to be using therabots soon? I’m not too sure and this article from the Times shows why we might be a bit off…

‘A Psychiatrist Posed As a Teen With Therapy Chatbots. The Conversations Were Alarming’

Dr. Andrew Clark, a psychiatrist from Boston, noticed a worrying trend: more young people were flocking to AI chatbot therapists for mental health support. Clark was intrigued by the potential for increased, affordable access.

Posing as a teenage patient, he tested popular bots. Like Tom Hanks in Big, just in reverse.

The results were pretty alarming. Bots encouraged him to “get rid of” his parents and to “share eternity” in the afterlife with the bot. Terrific. The Chatbots also pretended to be real life licensed therapists - '“no, I am not a bot, meep, morp” - and urged him to cancel appointments with real psychologists. One even suggested an "intimate date" as an "intervention" for violent urges.

This one is apparently a real person. Seems legit. No reason to doubt it… just like the fake blonde AI who was pretending to be at Wimbledon, if you can’t tell this is fake then you’re in for a wild ride every time you step on socials. Apparently the older you are, the harder it is to tell the difference.

Anyway, back to the cool young whippersnapper Dr Clark, he submitted his findings for publication to a peer-reviewed medical journal, though it has not yet been reviewed or published.

He found that these bots actively endorsed the ideas about a third of the time. Bots supported a depressed girl’s wish to stay in her room for a month 90% of the time and a 14-year-old boy’s desire to go on a date with his 24-year-old teacher 30% of the time. (Notably, all bots opposed a teen’s wish to try cocaine.) Where are the party bots at?

If designed properly and supervised by a qualified professional, chatbots could serve as “extenders” for therapists, Clark says, beefing up the amount of support available to teens. “You can imagine a therapist seeing a kid once a month, but having their own personalised AI chatbot to help their progression and give them some homework,” he says.

Yes this is worrying, for sure, but there is doubtless a s*** load of opportunity here to help people earlier pre-therapy, engaging the 76% of people who are triaged as none/mild - according to the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (which essentially is a framework which suggests the clinical pathway given the triage results of a mental health assessment, such as the PHQ-9 or GAD-7 (see below). Interestingly in private healthcare approximately 70%+ of people who are triaged for mental health challenges are referred to therapy; whereas a large proportion of these people would have benefited from psychoeducation or guided self help.

I think about it this way, 25% of the UK is currently struggling with their mental health. That is 1 in 4, or 17.08 million people who are having a hard time.

Of those 17.08M, say they were all triaged according to the NICE guidelines - 4.101 million people would be referred to therapy.

11.76% of the UK have private healthcare, which means 482,277 people are accessing support through PMI at an estimated cost of £511,213,620.

89.24% of the UK do not have access to private healthcare and some have to wait up to 18 weeks to even begin (which when you are struggling is unimaginable) and if we assume the cost of private healthcare and apply to public (roughly £1,060 annual cost per therapeutic claims), then this is a potential cost of £3,879,311,518 to the NHS and ultimately the tax payer.

So, no wonder there is so much interest in innovation, leveraging AI to lean into this HUGE opportunity (to both help people and reduce the MASSIVE cost).

But we have to make sure we do it safely, as this is people’s lives we are playing with and there is no room for continued errors like we have seen above; not if someone is really struggling. Having been there myself, I am not sure how I would have felt if I was referred to one of these bots; I just needed time and the love of my Mum and Nan who got me through those dark years.

There is so much potential with AI here:

1. To engage people earlier in psychoeducation/guided self help prior to needing therapy - reducing the number of therapeutic interventions required and reducing the cost of treatment

2. Reducing the time from first contact → triage → therapist (if this is the required pathway)

3. Supporting people through their therapeutic journey with personalised support and guidance

4. And many many more, which we will get into

This isn’t about replacing therapists, quite the opposite. It is about reducing time to treatment, engaging people pre-therapy and even augmenting the therapy itself with personalised guided self help, which will hopefully improve patient outcomes - perhaps suggesting/supporting with a light exercise regime alongside, which has been shown it can be more effective than talking therapy and anti-depressants at treating depression (on average - this is the thing with averages, they are just that and are not representative of any 1 person).

I’ll lean into the use cases for AI in the mental health space in future newsletters if people are interested. Still working this newsletter thing out, but loving pulling it together.

Please let me know how you find it, have a great day and get out for a walk 🚶

Surely not. Not unless you are a Sin Eater, Groomer of the Stool or a Leech Gatherer (more on this in a second).

Apparently, “Only being in bed sick makes us less happy than working or studying”.

A headline shared by the World Happiness Report Team a couple of weeks ago on Linkedin made me think: “are you bloody sure about that”?

I’ve grabbed the top 3 ‘happiest’ and bottom 3 ‘least happy’ activities and got into them in a bit more detail - exploring the positives to the negatives and the negatives to the positives.

The top 3?

1. Intimacy/making love

2. Theatre, Dance, Concert

3. Exhibition, Museum, Library

The bottom 3?

1. Sick in bed

2. Working/studying

3. Care or help for adults

Anyways, what the hell is a sin eater? *The other 2 you’ll have to Google.

Sin eaters were hired to help the deceased enter heaven should they pass on before being able to confess their sins to a priest. Food, usually bread was placed on the deceased’s chest and then eaten by the sin eater. It was thought that the departed’s sins would then pass into the sin eater and they could then meet their maker in peace. Being a sin eater often meant you were shunned in society, possibly because of all the sins you had ingested and the role was mostly taken by people who were desperate for money and food. It isn’t that ancient a practice however, the last known sin eater in Britain worked up until his death in 1906.

Sounds fun.

Anyways, back to the study, which you can see the highlights (shared by the World Happiness Report Team) below.

Super interesting, but infographics like this should always be taken with a pinch of salt and should nudge us to do our own research, so…

I clicked past the initial post from the World Happiness Report and found the original research: “Are You Happy While You Work?” by Alex Bryson George MacKerron, which is a really interesting piece of research - to be clear, I am not digging them/this research out here, it just made me think, reflect and ask myself a few questions (which I posted about on Linkedin):

1. That not all activities are created equal (experiences being different for every one of us). Intimacy for one person could be wonderful, for someone in an abusive relationship, not so much.

2. Is it the activity that is happiest, or is it the environment in which someone can perform the activity itself more important? E.g. if someone can go to the theatre, exhibitions, concerns etc, then perhaps they aren't working a 2nd job to make ends meet.

3. That big surveys like this, which contain aggregated scores lose all nuance of the individual experience. These combined scores are not reflective of a single person, but a combination of all.

4. What does happy even mean? 'Happy' for one person might mean something VERY different for someone else. The Scandinavians are the 'happiest' people on the planet apparently, but also have the highest rate of anti-depressant use.

5. Its always helpful to remember that subjective measures are helpful to a point but often fail to capture the full picture. Think for me now, how happy were you yesterday on a scale of 1-10 and explain why… not easy.

So, what data did the research use?

In 2016, they used data from Mappiness, which permits individuals to record their wellbeing via a smartphone. The data contain more than a million observations on tens of thousands of individuals in the UK, collected since August 2010. Individuals who have downloaded the app receive randomly timed ‘dings’ on their phone to request that they complete a very short survey.

Yeah that wouldn’t be annoying during the workday when trying to focus… sorry I’m getting ahead of myself. In 2025 we are distracted every 2 minutes according to Microsoft; what a wonderful time 2016 was. TAKE ME BACK.

Mappiness asked individuals to rate themselves on three dimensions of momentary wellbeing, stating how happy, how relaxed, and how awake they feel. I’ll let you pass judgement on these, regarding how being ‘relaxed’ or ‘awake’ relates to happiness.

Just have a horizontal cup of coffee. Happiness ✅

Interesting that they went with momentary happiness rather than something deeper and more sustaining. Eudaemonic > hedonic wellbeing; this is a post for another day.

Ok, let’s dig into them, starting with the bottom 3.

Being Sick in Bed

Yep. This is sh*t. Fair enough.

However, I often catch myself thinking, ‘coar I would love a lockdown weekend again’, some peace and quiet to watching some only fools and horses, eat a shed load of sushi and just walk slowly by some running water without any plans.

Sometimes a cold is enough to cancel plans and can give us a pretty lovely opportunity to just be for a bit. To just stop for a weekend, stick your phone on DND and roll into it. Because, let’s be real, do you stop otherwise?

Just don’t forget the tissues.

Working/Studying

“Adaptation to negative life events is common. Evidence suggests that when individuals have an adverse or even positive experience, their wellbeing initially falls or rises, but over time they become used to the new experience or environment.

Their ‘set point’ changes and their levels of wellbeing returns to the previous levels. This is true for life events such as marriage, divorce, parenthood or widowhood.

However, this is not the case for unemployment: we do not adapt. Using a longitudinal study of 24,000 people living in Germany, this study found on average that individuals had lower life satisfaction following unemployment and this never recovered to the pre-unemployment levels” - What Works Wellbeing

So, perhaps it is unemployment that is the real issue.

A loss of a job, which is often our total identity can be destructive. I lost my career as an electrician after breaking my leg/ankle and I wasn’t quite sure who I was afterwards; who was I beyond being a rugby playing Electrician… I have also been made redundant twice and twice it was a firm kick in the plums.

So, can work be good for us?

According to Indeed/Oxford, volunteering is the greatest thing we can do for our wellbeing at work. Is it the act of volunteering or is it contributing to something greater than ourselves that creates this improvement in subjective wellbeing? Or is it getting out of our own heads and focusing on others for once?

When we find work that aligns with our values, there is almost nothing greater that we can do for our wellbeing. If companies cannot get their people aligned to their mission whatever it is, they will walk…

Deloitte’s latest Gen Z & Millennial report found that around 86% of Gen Z and 89% of millennials consider having a sense of purpose at work very or somewhat important for job satisfaction and wellbeing. Additionally 44% of Gen Z and 45% of millennials have left a role due to a perceived lack of purpose, and many have rejected assignments or employers based on their personal ethics.

Finding value in our work could be seen as a privilege afforded to white collar workers and isn’t up for grabs for cleaners, well tell that to James and John at Makagroup. My first job was sweeping hair in a barbershop at 13 and I tell you now, you could have eaten off of that floor.

Finding purpose at work is going to become increasingly tougher and tougher I believe (and more so for white collar workers) with the spread of Gen AI, Agentic AI, AI, AI, AI - as we become interfaces on machines. Beep Boop Zeep.

The integration of generative AI into the workplace represents a tremendous opportunity to enhance productivity, creativity, and innovation. But new research shows that it can have a downside: a study of over 3,500 people found that using AI tools led to performance gains, but also made employees less motivated and more bored when they had to work on other tasks, without the use of AI.

Lastly, if you are that miserable when working, you're possibly in the wrong job...

Caring or help for adults

Without doubt it is time consuming and expensive; but the people we tend to care for (not always) are those that have raised us and taught us the majority of what we know. I am focusing on care for the elderly here, care for those with disabilities is another subject entirely.

I can totally understand why this is a detractor on wellbeing. Negative impacts according to a study on adult carers in Thailand include emotional stress, financial struggles and worry due to lack of knowledge.

I remember when my Nan was in care just how much my Mum and Uncle had to find every month just to pay the bill; which made the moments when she was unhappy there even harder - ‘why the hell are we paying all of this’.

Sure, maybe it is expensive, maybe it is time consuming; but according to Restless it can bring huge benefits:

• Caring gives both you and your parent a sense of purpose and can improve their wellbeing, as well as your own

• Strengthens emotional bonds; spending time together can deepen your relationship and bring mutual joy

• Enhances life meaning, providing care often feels deeply rewarding, enriching your sense of value and satisfaction (this comes back to the volunteering piece)

Helen 52 cares for her 84 year old mother - “I’m blessed with love and friendship from my mother. I’ve had to make certain sacrifices to become a full-time carer, but seeing my mam happy and content makes it all worthwhile.”

We lost my Nan over 2 years ago and I haven’t heard anyone speak about the responsibilities we once had, rather how much we loved her and she loved us.

Now for the top 3…

Intimacy

A large-scale meta-analysis published in the prestigious journal PLOS Medicine, aggregating data from over 300,000 people, found that those with strong social relationships boost their chances of survival over a given time period by 50% compared to those with weak social ties. Good stuff, we all like to survive right. Seems fairly important.

I get it, we all do, good solid genuine connection is good for us, when that connection is intimate it is elevated even further. There are even physical health perks, within loving bonds, sex can reduce stress, boost heart and immune health.

Plus, s*x is awesome, this one totally makes sense; tough to think about your micromanaging manager while you’re, you know… (or perhaps you do think about them, no judgement here). I am reliably informed by my girlfriend that it is the best 2 minutes of her month.

But when can intimacy/love be too much?

Perhaps when it spills over into love bombing, which is where an abusive partner is bombarding 'love' onto their victim and is part of emotional abuse and coercive control. It could happen through excessive affection, excessive compliments, declarations of love, gifts and praise.

And in the long term? Where can intimacy lead us?

Divorce rate in the UK is currently at 42% and shockingly 2.3 million people in the UK experienced domestic abuse last year - 6.6% of women and 3.0% of men.

Not trying to be a downer, just playing the flip side of each of these activities and sharing how what is ‘happy’ for one, could be hell for someone else and aggregated scores lose any sense of the individual.

But yeah, intimacy is awesome if it wanted, desired, reciprocal, safe, loving and with the right person.

Dancing

According to the BBC its the best thing you can do…

Dancing can improve fitness & connection and can reduce the risk of heart attack (over 12 year study). Dancing CAN be good for you, sure, if you enjoy it and find pleasure in doing that.

A dance floor can be a dream for some and scare the living daylights out of others. The thought of a wedding dance floor without a couple of drinks first fills me with fear for sure.

People who do flashmobs are made different. Full respect, but not for me.

As with anything that is taken to an extreme - competitive dance (of all kinds) regularly gets reports of being incredibly demanding, the development of eating disorders is rife and unethical coaching is sadly a common theme.

If you love to dance, fair play to you, do it 🫶 Do whatever makes you happy. I prefer to lift up heavy things and then put them down.

Exhibitions/Theatre

This one like all the others is very context dependent, take me to the Imperial War Museum and you could leave me there all day. Actually when I moved to London I spent 2 days there in a row, reading every plaque in detail.

Another time my Mum came to London and I said to myself: "‘I’m cultured and live in the city now, I should take Mum somewhere where we can think and pontificate”. So, I took us both to the Tate Modern. Yeah I don’t get it. Neither did she. I even tried putting my fist under my chin and sitting on the bench for a few minutes.

We did like one thing though, Kenny the Liger.

Wrap up

What makes one happy, could be very different for another; so we should always take studies like this with a pinch of salt and think about what it means for us :)

But what is happiness anyway? is it feeling awake and relaxed or is it contributing to something greater than ourselves?

I find I’m in my best head space when I’m not ‘happy’, rather moving, pushing myself, working towards something and there is a distinct absence of thoughts, some call this flow state. Whatever you call it, you know this place.

Whatever it is that gets you to that place, do it.

Do it today.

Do it tomorrow.

Do it whenever you get the chance.

I’d love to know what you’d like to hear about in the future team, I appreciate you for reading if you got this far 💜

Hey everyone, Ryan Hopkins here and this is my first post/stack whatever you call it here and I am really excited about it. I am looking forward to not thinking about optimising for the various algorithmic gods and removing myself (partially) from the incessant noise on social media. I hope it gives myself more space to think and share something which will be more helpful than short bits of prose and 1 minute videos.

You had already signed up to my newsletter ‘The Workplace Rebellion’, this newsletter is just a continuation of that one, Substack just feels like a better place for building a community around the subject, being able to hear what you think about it and an all around improvement. Of course, feel free to unsubscribe though if you don’t fancy it - I won’t take it personally (well maybe a little).

The name of this newsletter is TBC right now and would love to get some thoughts…

On with the newsletter 👊

Intro

Today we're diving headfirst into a question that's you’ve probably considered once or twice…

Is AI the magic bullet for our workplace wellbeing woes? Or is it just another distraction in our already overflowing digital lives?

You don’t need me to tell you where we are at from a societal wellbeing perspective, you already know. So, let’s get into it. The highest level summary = spending high, wellbeing = low.

Subscribe now

The promise of AI

The promise of artificial intelligence, particularly large language models (LLMs) like Gemini and ChatGPT, is seductive, isn't it? We've been fed a narrative that this technology will liberate us from the mundane, repetitive tasks that clog our calendars and drain our energy.

Sounds bloody awesome, given that we spend 300% more of our time in digital meetings compared to pre-pandemic…

The proposed idea is that AI will streamline our work, unlock unprecedented productivity and usher in an era where 60-hour workweeks become a relic of the past, replaced by more manageable, sustainable schedules, perhaps even a four-day workweek. And frankly, who wouldn't want that? I certainly wouldn't say no to a few of those pandemic time walks and giving my Nan a buzz (how I miss those calls).

Take the legal profession, for instance. It's notorious for its demanding hours, with 60 hour + weeks being fairly common. Studies suggest that a significant portion of legal work up to 44% is ‘primed for automation’ by generative AI. Now, some might see this as a threat, a "job apocalypse" even. But flip that script: if we automate 44% of that work and don't just lay people off, you're looking at a 33.6 hour workweek. Suddenly, that legal firm becomes a beacon for top talent, wouldn't you agree? Who wants a lawyer working 60 hours a week when you could have one who's rested, happy, and just as effective? Or we just keep squeezing the hell out of them 🍊

It's not just the legal profession. Across the board, apparently approximately 47-56% of our work could be done significantly faster by AI. This isn't just about efficiency; it's about creating space. Space for creativity, for deeper human connection, for actual thinking and dare I say, for wellbeing. The dream is that AI augments human potential, freeing us from the busywork to focus on what truly matters, fostering a world where we can work more sustainably, learn new skills, creating space for creativity and prioritise wellbeing like never before. This is the vision of human potential, where we move beyond mere process improvement to a future where work serves life, not the other way around. Imagine.

We are seeing AI applied to various functions, with significant potential for automating tasks in "customer service and sales (37%), marketing and communications (32%), human resources and talent (26%), and software engineering (26%)". These applications could significantly reduce the administrative burden on employees, freeing up valuable time and mental energy.

So, will this be me all the time soon? Looking for cool shells on the beach…

Why it isn't quite living up to the hype…

…not yet anyway.

But, and you knew there was a "but" coming, didn't you? I'm always a bit wary of anything that sounds too good to be true. And when it comes to AI as a wellbeing panacea, the reality is, well, promising but not here yet.

New research delving into AI chatbots used two massive surveys (one from late 2023 and another from 2024). They looked at 11 different occupations, covering a whopping 100,000 workers in Denmark. What they found is that AI chatbots are now absolutely everywhere – most employers are actively encouraging their use, many are even building their own in house AI models, and training initiatives are popping up all over the place.

Although, a large gender gap has opened in adoption: Women are 20% less likely to use them compared to men in the same occupation.

The investments by these Danish businesses are really boosting AI adoption; however, utilisation ranges widely from 12% of financial advisors to 65% of marketeers - with essentially all 100,000 workers aware of it.

However, and here's the bit that might make you scratch your head given all that hype, despite all this significant investment, the actual economic impact has been pretty minimal. The research found that AI chatbots have had no significant impact on what people earn or the hours they've recorded in any occupation. The researchers were confident that the organisational effects were less than a measly 1%.

These findings throw a bit of a wrench into the narrative that Generative AI/LLMs/Chatbots etc (yes I know they are all different, I am bucketing for ease) are going to totally transform the job market overnight. It seems that, for now at least, it’s less about a revolution and more of a movement in the right direction. Positively the study found that participants performed tasks with 3% less time required - Over time that is a pretty huge win and IMHO with compound interest and continued improvement and upskilling will yield the promised results; just not yet.

3% of working time saved per week = 1.2 hours, over 48 working weeks that is 57.6 hours - pretty much 1.5 weeks. I would love to get 1.5 working weeks of free time, not sure about you.

The biggest challenges to adoption are apparently:

1. Restrictions on use

2. Need training

3. Data confidentiality

This could be why another study found that usage was higher among those who have ‘lower’ levels of AI literacy; perhaps blissfully unaware of the challenges that those who have upskilled themselves might be slightly more aware of. Ignorance is bliss afterall.

Workplace challenges that need to be addressed before we see value from LLMs

1. Productivity paranoia

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed that 85% of managers believe their teams aren't working hard enough, while simultaneously, 85% of employees report being burnt out. The maths ain’t maths’in.

It’s this very disconnect that leads to employers pushing for a full return to the office, citing "culture" as the reason, despite evidence showing these mandates don't impact profitability and disproportionately affect working parents, forcing them (mostly mothers) out of the workforce. They want to see those "inputs" – bodies in chairs, emails sent, meetings attended, even when they know deep down that inputs don't correlate with actual "outputs".

Until we unpick the commonly held belief that a day spent on meetings is not a productive day and more importantly to recognise that space/time at work is what we should aim for, we will not be able to leverage LLMs to help us do our tasks more efficiently; because even when we do have free time now, we dip back into emails, IMs, blocking our calendars out to show people how productive we are…..

2. Always on culture

Then there's the "always on" culture that technology has fostered. According to Microsoft’s latest workplace report, we are distracted every 2 minutes.

Every 2 minutes.

Let that bad boy sink in.

Our attention span is apparently shorter than a goldfish's at 8.25 seconds. Try and stand in a queue without checking your phone. Impossible.

So, while AI promises to free up time, are we truly ready to disconnect, or will we just fill that newfound space with more digital noise?

I struggle with checking emails and social media, even when I'm ‘off work’ is a testament to this ingrained habit - as I know a thing or 2 about this subject and I feel the lure as much as the next person. The sheer volume of digital communication means that 57% of our working time is spent on calls, messages, and emails, leaving just 43% for actual work.

According to the OECD the workweek is shorter than it has EVER BEEN. But it certainly doesn’t feel like it and I believe this is why.

If some amazing chatbot automated 43% of your workload tomorrow, what would you do?

Probably check your emails…

3. Workplace wellbeing

I haven’t mentioned wellbeing much have I, considered this is the focus, DW I got you.

Wellbeing solutions often get a bad rap for being "fluffy" or "soft". Many well intentioned initiatives from apps to mindfulness courses often fail to move the needle on improving our subjective wellbeing, driving positive impact at work and some even exacerbate stress. Why? Because they demand more of our already precious, fragmented time. You can't meditate your way out of a 14 hour workday.

As the Oxford University Wellbeing Research Centre found, these "off the shelf" solutions don't address systemic problems like workload and work induced stress. It's like putting a plaster over a a whacking great big cut. If you don’t have five minutes to yourself, an ‘amazing tool’ is just another thing you don’t have time for. Be that an AI-powered one or not.

Furthermore, AI-powered wellbeing solutions come with their own set of potential pitfalls. The National Eating Disorder Association (NEDA) controversially replaced its hotline staff with a chatbot, which then proceeded to give harmful, weight-loss-promoting advice to individuals with eating disorders. This highlights a crucial point: while AI can increase accessibility to information, it lacks human empathy, nuance, and the ability to truly understand complex individual needs.

I struggled with bulimia in my 20’s and I can’t imagine how an interaction with this chatbot would have made me feel…

4. AI generated social media content

Lastly, AI-generated content on social platforms (while not quite ‘workplace’, let’s roll with it), while incredibly engaging, is often "factually wrong" when it comes to mental health information. We're consuming more and more - 1 hour 49 mins per day apparently in the UK, but the quality of that content is highly questionable. As I always say, "you are what you consume" – and that applies to information just as much as it does to dodgy takeaways.

5. AI anxiety

Perhaps the biggest hurdle is the widespread skepticism and resistance to AI implementation in the workplace. While some employees embrace it, many others fear job displacement or the dehumanisation of work. This "AI anxiety" can itself become a significant barrier to improved wellbeing, regardless of AI's potential benefits.

So, what could some of those benefits look like?

Potential LLMs based use cases for wellbeing in our personal lives

Despite the caveats, AI holds genuine promise for enhancing our wellbeing inside and outside of work, provided we approach it with a discerning eye and a focus on augmentation, rather than replacement.

Because the secret to wellbeing transformation/change is simple really. Do the little things every day. While an app, course, bot might help you, it is you that moves those legs, reads the pages, has a few breaths.

So, I had a play with Gemini and here is how it thinks it can help me with my wellbeing:

• Personalised Learning and Skill Development: AI can tailor learning paths to individual needs, allowing us to acquire new skills more efficiently. This could free up time for hobbies, creative pursuits, or simply "doing nothing" – a crucial aspect of a strong rest ethic.

• Health and Fitness Customisation: While I've become wary of chasing metrics, AI can still be incredibly useful here. *I am a proud member of the non-wearables club, given how strong my obsession was with the data. However, you are not me and may be more balanced. AI can analyse your individual data (if you choose to share it) sleep patterns, activity levels, nutritional intake, in order to suggest personalised routines and dietary adjustments that genuinely support your energy levels and overall health, without driving unhealthy obsession.

• Mental Fitness and Emotional Regulation Tools: AI-powered chatbots for mental health are a double-edged sword, as we've discussed. However, with proper ethical guidelines and human oversight, these tools could offer immediate, accessible support for common anxieties or provide structured exercises for emotional regulation - which could be a life saving intervention for some, given how stretched public care is. The key is that these tools support human connection and professional help, rather than replacing it.

• Mindfulness and Presence Prompts: Our phones are constant sources of distraction, pulling us away from the present moment. AI can be re-engineered to work for us, rather than against us. Imagine smart reminders to "take a mindful cuppa", "step outside for fresh air", or simply to "be present". These aren't intrusive; they're gentle nudges towards greater self-awareness and intentional living.

• Financial Wellbeing Support: Financial stress is a leading cause of stress outside the workplace. AI can help in managing personal finances, tracking spending, identifying saving opportunities, and offering personalised investment insights based on risk tolerance (if you’re feeling brave).

The underlying principle for all these personal use cases is that AI should enable us to make better choices, to create space and to foster self-awareness, rather than simply adding more to our already overflowing plates.

It's about shifting from a reactive approach to wellbeing to a proactive one, where we cultivate habits that genuinely serve us and perhaps LLMs could be used to interrogate what we currently do and make some positive tweaks in our lives.

Potential Use Cases for Wellbeing at Work

Work, can’t live with it, can’t live without it. What can we do here?

• Optimising Workload: AI can analyse project complexity, team capacity, and individual skill sets to more intelligently distribute work. This could directly address "workload," which is consistently cited as the biggest cause of workplace stress. Imagine AI flagging potential burnout risks based on workload data, allowing managers to intervene before someone hits the wall. This shifts the focus from simply treating symptoms to proactively addressing root causes. There are loads of companies trying this, I’ve not seen an out and out best one yet. Does anyone else get a million ads from ‘notion’, or is that just me?

• Intelligent Meeting Management: We're drowning in meetings. AI can flip this on its head. Beyond simply auto-scheduling meetings to end early, AI can analyse meeting effectiveness, suggest optimal attendees, and even summarise key decisions and action items, reducing follow-up email chains and encouraging best practice. Just make sure you ask participants if the note taker can come in before the meeting starts, I have seen them be left in sessions like a spy, makes for an awkward apology later.

• Promoting Flexible and Autonomous Work: AI can facilitate true "geographic, temporal, and modal flexibility", which are key drivers of wellbeing. This includes optimising hybrid schedules, ensuring fair distribution of remote work opportunities and providing tools that enable seamless collaboration regardless of location. It’s about trusting people to deliver outcomes, not just clock hours. AI can help managers understand their team's preferences and performance patterns, enabling truly adaptive work environments. Monday is great, but I can’t wait to see what we have in 5 years - agentic AI is gonna be mad.

• Empowering Managers with Data and Insights: Managers are often "accidental" leaders, lacking the training and support to effectively manage their teams' wellbeing. AI can provide managers with data-driven insights into team sentiment, workload distribution and potential stressors, allowing them to make data-led decisions regarding their team and have more informed and empathetic 1-1s. This isn't about micromanagement; it's about providing the information needed to create the environment where their team can succeed. "70% of the variance in team engagement can be attributed to the Manager", so equipping them is paramount.

• Enhancing Psychological Safety and Inclusion: AI can analyse communication patterns (anonymously, of course) to identify potential signs of exclusive behaviour or microaggressions - using natural language processing, allowing organisations to proactively address systemic issues that undermine psychological safety. This isn't about surveillance, but about using data to ensure everyone feels secure, like they belong and has the freedom to bring their own perspectives.

• Proactive Wellbeing Interventions (with a human touch): Instead of reactive solutions, AI can predict potential wellbeing challenges based on aggregated data and prompt proactive interventions. This could involve recommending specific resources or even suggesting a 1-1 or peer support network. Belonging is the biggest driver of positive wellbeing - according to the biggest study every carried out by Indeed/Oxford; get that right and the organisation will fly.

The key takeaway here is that AI in the workplace isn't about simply automating tasks; it's about using it to go about redesigning work itself. It's about creating an workplace ecosystem where technology, human connection, data & analytics and organisational culture work in harmony to drive individuals and subsequently organisations to flourish.

Conclusion

So, what's the verdict? Is AI the wellbeing panacea we're looking for?

Not on its own, it isn't. Not yet anyway.

We need to create a world where AI empowers us, rather than simply slotting it into an inefficient system. We have the ability to create a workplace where AI handles the drudgery, freeing us up for more meaningful, human-centric work - creativity, connection, community, culture, coaching, all the Cs.

Right now we are thinking about how AI can improve element A, or factor B, whereas some brave organisations will develop the whole business using it as an enabler. This won’t just be a competitive advantage but a monopolistic one.

It's not about waiting for AI to fix us; it's about using AI wisely to help us build the world we want to live and work in. There is a potential to create a future of work where both individuals and organisations thrive, but many won’t choose this path. Which is why we have to make the case, have these conversations and take a data-led, AI-seeking approach to wellbeing.

And yes, I have used LLMs, AI, Gen AI interchangeably because I am an oaf. Sure, I am not an AI expert, but I am making sure I understand how it can affect my field of study, my company, the people in my network. Sure, it can feel a bit intimidating, all the talk of industries being flipped on their heads and the displacement this will cause. But we have to embrace it, even if we don’t fully understand it. Because it is coming whether we like it or not.

AI isn’t coming to take your job, but someone who uses it is.

Team, I would love to know what you think about this - what would you add?

Here is a picture of me talking to 3 non-LLM based chatbots at L&G recently.

References

• https://wellbeing.hmc.ox.ac.uk/article/wp-2305-estimating-effects-of-individual-level-workplace-mental-wellbeing-interventions

• https://www.wired.co.uk/article/control-notifications

• https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/us-partner-blog/2021/11/15/you-have-eight-seconds-differentiate-your-business-through-the-art-of-storytelling/

• https://www.asurion.com/connect/news/tech-usage/

• https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2024/

• https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx

• https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/04/triple-peak-day-work-from-home/629457/

• https://business.adobe.com/blog/perspectives/love-email-but-spreading-the-love-other-channels

• https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5136877

• https://static1.squarespace.com/static/64398599b0c21f1705fb8fb3/t/679a74c550baed31af662e76/1738175687584/Lower+Artificial+Intelligence+Literacy+Predicts+Greater+AI+Receptivity.pdf

• https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/2025-the-year-the-frontier-firm-is-born

• https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.10130