A person-centred take on stress.
I wrote this article for a carer’s publication in November 2025. Here I explore wellbeing at work through my own journey.
Our SAM is stressed.
Stress is positioned as a primal, natural reaction in our minds and bodies. Our blood pressure and heart rates rise, our pupils dilate, our blood sugars increase and our focus narrows; all to keep us alive in the wilderness from which our civilisation evolved. We now, however, live in an entirely different wilderness.
Try telling that to your Sympathetic-Adrenal-Medullary system (SAM)! It still works as it evolved to, even though modern threats rarely need a ‘fight, flight, freeze or flop’ response. We perceive the upcoming big presentation at work as a wild animal stalking us for days in the jungle. We feel the incessant noise of the office as battle-cries of a neighbouring pack coming to steal our territory. Our SAM prepares us for a type of battle that never comes. Over time, chronic stress, a heightened-state from which we may rarely, if ever, “come down” from, leaves our cardiovascular system at risk, our immune system in an overdriven inflammatory state, and our minds in varying states of anxiety, depression and burn-out.
I myself am a parent carer of a disabled child. Stress, depression and anxiety accounted for 46% of work-related ill health in 2024 (HSE 2024), and 79% of carers in the UK reported feeling stressed or anxious, with 27% of carers reporting bad or very bad mental health (Carers UK 2023). If our work isn’t directly making us sick, it’s definitely being impacted by our sickness; we are a civilisation suffering serious effects from the world we have created.
Being human.
Whilst society and culture are difficult things to change on a macro scale, there is some hope in micro or personal changes through which we can at least begin to positively impact our stress levels. In 2020, just before lockdown happened in the UK due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I reached a point where I burnt-out and broke-down. I was signed off work for two weeks, during which time I sought out counselling for the third time. I decided I would see a private therapist, as I was fortunate enough to be able to afford the £50 session fee, and I wasn’t willing to wait for the NHS to help.
My therapist practiced in a person-centred way, something I understood nothing about at first. But as I began to feel heard, seen and understood in a way that I had never experienced before, I experienced growth. Growth in my self-acceptance, growth in my understanding of the Person Centred Approach (PCA) and growth in my curiosity about my relationships, including my career. Within six months of starting therapy, I took a leap of faith and decided to train in a new career; I’d identified that I had never been happy or fulfilled in my career, and it just so happened that counselling had begun to resonate with me in a way nothing ever had before. I recognised that a significant contributor to my own work-related mental ill health was because I just wasn’t happy. That needed to change.
The wounded healer.
Going to therapy was great. I was able to express and explore my vulnerabilities in a judgement-free environment that I’d never experienced before. However, training to be a counsellor was transformational. Understanding the theoretical concepts within the PCA allowed me to understand myself on a level I would never have achieved through attending therapy alone. As I learned about the concepts of incongruence, empathy, conditions of worth, I was able to apply my learning to myself. Admittedly, I took an aggressive approach to this, which made the process painful at times, but allowed me to develop my passion for counselling and, sounding rather grandiose and dramatic, tear my perception of myself apart and rebuild it in a way that made sense to me. My old wounds became my source of inspiration for wanting to help other people.
Person-Centred Wellbeing.
As I was halfway through my four years of training, I was made redundant in a stressful and unfair process. I was stressed beyond anything I’d experienced before, experiencing the threat of my family being homeless, or having to take “any old job” to pay the bills or, most terrifyingly at the time, impeding my ability to finish my training and change my career – resolving into “not having the chance at happiness in my work”.
However, I landed a role within three days of my previous contract ending. I was super lucky. And in my current role as a Project Manager within an HR department in a top 10 UK university, I was able to shape and mould a role that has given me plenty of opportunity to not only be happier than I was, but to develop and deliver wellbeing to my colleagues.
My Person-Centred Wellbeing workshop was born. I whittled down months and years of learning into bite-sized discussions and activities that have provided my colleagues with an opportunity to know just enough about the – in my view – revolutionary concepts within the Person Centred Approach to be able to apply them to their relationships with their friends, families, colleagues and, most importantly, themselves.
After a brief check-in with ourselves, we look at Rogers’ “Core Conditions”; empathy, congruence and unconditional positive regard (UPR). Small groups discuss each of the topics, followed by a short task. The richness of conversation and exchange of experiences always astounds me. We then move on to fundamental listening skills (not Rogerian in origin, but anchored in the framework), where individuals get the chance to practice speaking and listening whilst holding the core conditions and observing what they experience. A person’s relationship with silence is also light-heartedly explored, perhaps with deeper reflections in private, before we move on to the final topic – phenomenology. Exploring what it truly means to be the only person that sees the world the way you do invites your mind to openly question everything you assume about your world.
These are big concepts, and this workshop is ambitious in attempting to give grounding in how and why these concepts can be helpful in reducing stress and improving our emotional wellbeing. Being able to understand how you experience yourself and the world you inhabit is, in my experience, critical to being able to find some level of harmony in your existence.
And, with harmony, comes an opportunity for lowering some of our stress levels.
Wellbeing at work.
I’ve now been delivering this workshop for over a year. Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, with most people requesting longer sessions to discuss and explore the concepts more fully. To me, this demonstrates a longing for a different perspective and tangible methods by which people can exert some control over managing their stress levels at work. Of course, it would be ignorant to believe that learning about congruence can remove the unmanageable targets set by an overbearing manager, or that the concept of UPR means you are no longer impacted by the DWP denying entitled financial support to you or your dependent. Those problems, unfortunately, are present and can be the source of immense stress and hardship. But perhaps understanding ourselves and the world we live in from a new angle might help us manage our workplaces better, even if only a little.
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