The cost of unmanaged stress, in numbers.

Picture three professionals you might know. A founder who has not slept properly in eleven nights and who has begun to speak about it the way other people speak about a passing flu. A senior associate at a law firm whose morning involves a third coffee before nine. A general manager whose evenings have been booked through with debriefs and weekend logistics for a month, and who has not had what would once have been called a clear evening for longer than that. None of them is unwell. All three are paying a cost that is measurable in the broader economy.

The headline numbers are by now familiar. The World Health Organization estimates that depression and anxiety cost the global economy roughly one trillion dollars every year in lost productivity.1 Gallup, in its 2025 State of the Global Workplace report, places the broader figure for disengagement-related lost productivity at ten trillion dollars worldwide, with employee engagement at its lowest level in five years.2 The American Institute of Stress reports that more than seventy-five percent of US workers experience symptoms of work-related stress, and estimates US employer costs from stress-related absenteeism, turnover, and underperformance at roughly three hundred billion dollars annually.3

The numbers from the upside are equally well documented. Shawn Achor, summarising the work of Sonja Lyubomirsky and others in Harvard Business Review, reported that workers in a state of higher subjective wellbeing are about thirty-one percent more productive, three times more creative, and produce thirty-seven percent higher sales than peers operating from a baseline of stress.4 The same body of work suggests that the cost of unmanaged stress is not primarily about the days people miss. The dominant cost is presenteeism: the long, slow attrition of capacity in people who are at work but operating below the level they are capable of.

“The cost of unmanaged stress is not the days people miss. It is people at work, operating below the level they are capable of.”

What this means in practical terms is that recovery is no longer a personal discipline. It is operating infrastructure. A founder who books a weekly hour of structured recovery is not indulging themselves; they are protecting the asset that the organisation depends on most heavily. A general manager who treats one morning a week as a non-negotiable practice is making a quietly serious decision about the long arc of their performance. The same logic that applies to maintenance on a piece of equipment, applies to maintenance on a nervous system that is the operating asset of a working life.

Why a held practice tends to beat the alternatives is structural. An app on the phone is a hope. A book on a bedside table is a good intention. A booked session, with a practitioner waiting, is a structure that holds when the day does not. The professionals who manage their stress most reliably are not the ones with the most discipline; they are the ones who have arranged the smallest number of well-placed kept appointments. The structure does the work that willpower, on a difficult Tuesday, does not.

Where this leaves the question of cost is interesting. The cost of an hour of practice, weekly or fortnightly, is small relative to the cost of the alternative. The cost of the alternative does not appear in invoices; it appears in the slow erosion of capacity, in worse decisions made under pressure, in a relationship at home that does not get the version of you that the day required. The numbers from the WHO and Gallup are real. The numbers in your own week are real too.

What we offer at Balans is not a perk and not a luxury. It is a piece of operating infrastructure for a working life that has, for most professionals, run beyond what unstructured recovery can support. An hour, kept regularly, is the kind of decision that pays back in the parts of life that are the hardest to measure and the easiest to lose.

For corporate wellness partnerships, write to us at [biz@balans-studio.rs](mailto:biz@balans-studio.rs).