How Society is Failing Young Professionals: Workplace Stress and the Mental Health Crisis

Aryan (name changed) was a 24-year-old engineer who worked in Gurgaon for some time. As of October 2024, he had been out of a job for the past 4–5 months but continued to stay there. More importantly, he hadn’t told his parents he had quit because he couldn’t cope with workplace stress. He wasn’t sure his parents would understand his reasons for quitting, and he wasn’t in a mental state to deal with their reactions. So he continued living off his savings instead of moving back home to recuperate.

When I heard this true story from Dr. Omi Singh, a child psychologist and psychotherapist, it broke my heart. Because if your parents don’t have your back, who will?

A few months ago, workplace stress was brought into sharp focus after the tragic death of Anna Sebastian, a 26-year-old Chartered Accountant who had recently joined Ernst & Young in Pune and was overworked to the point of collapse. Well, not after her death but after her mother’s letter addressed to the chairman of Ernst & Young, Rajiv Memani, was leaked. The letter described in detail her daughter’s grueling hours and the overwhelming demands placed on her so early in her career.

She worked tirelessly at EY, giving her all to meet the demands placed on her. However, the workload, new environment, and long hours took a toll on her physically, emotionally, and mentally. She began experiencing anxiety, sleeplessness, and stress soon after joining, but she kept pushing herself, believing that hard work and perseverance were the keys to success.

This is not an isolated case. Across companies and industries, young professionals are sacrificing their well-being, and sometimes life, to meet relentless demands. Overwork and unmanageable stress have become widespread, creating a mental health crisis among the newest generation of workers. According to a recent report, 64% of the surveyed young professionals claimed to be battling high stress levels.

However, responsibility for these pressures doesn’t lie solely with employers. It’s a failure on multiple fronts – starting at home, reinforced at schools and colleges, and culminating in the workplace.

In her letter, Anna’s mom says:

Anna was a young professional, just starting her career. Like many in her position, she did not have the experience or the agency to draw boundaries or push back against unreasonable demands. She did not know how to say no. She was trying to prove herself in a new environment, and in doing so, she pushed herself beyond her limits.

Which is exactly my point.

We need to ask ourselves why Anna kept pushing her physical limits if she was unable to cope. Why was Aryan not able to confide about his workplace stress with his parents? What beliefs guided led them to their fates? And how did they develop these belief systems that are clearly damaging and unhealthy?

Here is my take: I believe we haven’t taught our children that self-care and mental health should be a priority, above any job or dream.

Through this article, I wish to highlight how society as a whole, beginning at home and stretching into the workplace, is failing young professionals’ mental health. And why a collective effort is needed to redefine success in a way that protects their mental and physical well-being.

Conditioning Begins at Home in the Formative Years

The seeds of this crisis are often sown at home.

From an early age, many parents and family members impose high expectations on their kids. It might be unintentional, with a view to motivate the kids, but it conditions the children to equate personal worth with achievement.

Unfortunately, this conditioning is rarely balanced by open discussions about mental health or self-care. They are frequently sidelined in favor of success. And that is very much intentional because mental health never features in day-to-day conversations in most Indian households.

Dr. Omi sums it up well:

We haven’t taught our children that taking care of themselves should be the priority.

As children grow, this pressure often intensifies, fueled by peer comparisons, competition at every stage, and a desire to meet family expectations.

“The system has become such that everyone feels they must prove themselves,” says Dr. Omi. She feels that young people internalize this expectation at home and carry it into adulthood. They are trained to withstand high levels of stress and, ultimately, conditioned to sacrifice personal well-being in their pursuit of success.

Add to this the communication gap between parents and their young adult children, and you have a recipe for disaster. Parents, sometimes unaware of the immense pressures their children face, may dismiss or downplay their stress, unintentionally signaling that success must be achieved at any cost. This gap becomes an alarming oversight as young adults move out, navigate life independently, and face new stressors without the emotional safety net of home.

A common refrain from parents is this – it is not like we have not faced hardships in our times; we never gave up. I am a parent too, of a teen and a tween, and I am guilty of this behavior at times too. What we need to acknowledge as parents is that times are changing at a very very fast pace. We cannot equate the challenges we faced to those faced by our children. Unfortunately, we tend to do exactly that.

Schools and Colleges Happily Reinforce the “Push-Through” Mindset

As young people transition from home to school and then to college, the pressure to achieve intensifies. Our education system rewards perseverance, resilience, and pushing limits, often with little regard for the mental or physical well-being of the students.

This mindset is normalized, even celebrated, by society. Hard work at the cost of mental health is constantly glorified. Stressful study condition is often seen as a badge of honor, rather than a harbinger of something undesirable in the long run.

Generations of Indians have followed the examples of Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar and Srinivasa Ramanujan, often totally twisted out of context, to emphasize that stressful study conditions are a precursor to success.

Parents are trying to motivate the kids but young people absorb the message that enduring discomfort is a rite of passage, a requirement for success. As a result, many students develop a deeply ingrained belief that sacrificing personal health is necessary to meet expectations thrust upon them by their families, teachers, and society at large. Which doesn’t serve them well in the long run.

Dr. Omi says that the children are taught early on, right from class 11th or 12th, that they need to bear a load of studies and success as if their worth is tied to how much they can endure. This mentality gets deeply embedded by the time they reach adulthood, leading them to undervalue their own boundaries and prioritize achievement above everything.

As they graduate from college to professional life, this belief becomes a foundation that drives their behavior. By then, the cost of success is already internalized, and the pressures of the workplace merely reinforce what they’ve been taught to accept.

Overwork Seems to be the Norm in Modern Workplaces

Upon entering the workplace, young professionals encounter environments where overwork is not just normalized but often celebrated. Long hours, tight deadlines, and a culture of relentless productivity set a high bar from the outset. The 70-hour week proposed by Mr. Narayana Murthy is a case in point. To him, this is what I have to say: what applied in the 1980s and 90s cannot hold true in the 2010s and 20s.

For new hires like Anna, expectations are immediately sky-high, and support can be minimal. She was overworked to the point of collapse, and that too within just four months at Ernst & Young. I found it really difficult to believe. So I asked Dr. Omi to explain how someone can die due to exhaustion. Here is what she said:

Being overworked continuously drains us emotionally. Being emotionally drained means continuous secretion of hormones and neurotransmitters such as cortisol, adrenaline and noradrenaline. If this secretion is happening continuously then the body is in fight or flight mode.If the child is of a very competitive nature, then she will fight with everyone. It will also put them under stress and make them regret [their actions and decisions].If she is [in flight mode and] going to be silent and withdraws herself, then she will over-thinking and be anxious.In both situations, more stress hormones are being released and in different areas of the body, it is having a negative impact.

I had heard of cortisol and adrenaline, but noradrenaline was new to me. I thought transcription had messed with the technical word. But it seems the transcription was spot on. A quick Google search revealed that noraderaline constricts the blood vessels, increases heart rate, affects the sleep cycle, induces mood swings, and spikes blood sugar levels. I also found this neat little image on the physiological effects of stress:

The pressure to “tough it out” stems largely from the prevailing organizational culture. Big firms often promote a culture where pushing limits is considered a measure of commitment and capability. The coveted high-paying jobs offer great opportunities but also chew up these young professionals, squeezing them for all they can give. And often they give up their lives.

While some companies offer mental health resources, employees often avoid them. They fear that reaching out could be perceived as a sign of weakness and may impact their career prospects. This reluctance, coupled with a lack of structured support for managing workloads, results in young professionals taking on more than they can handle, often with dire consequences.

Workplaces need to recognize that “toughing it out” is a dangerous norm and start treating mental health as a serious corporate responsibility. Otherwise, this culture of overwork and high expectations will continue to drive young professionals to physical and emotional exhaustion.

Young Professionals Themselves Often Ignore the Signals

The body continuously gives signs – exhaustion, irritability, anxiety, and more – when it is stressed out. But young professionals routinely neglect them due to belief systems such as pushing through pain with willpower paving the path to success. It’s a dangerous belief system that can often have fatal consequences if not addressed early on.

They refuse to acknowledge that these symptoms are indicators of a deeper problem. They continue to push through, as they have been doing since their school days, at the cost of severe physical and mental health consequences, including burnout, anxiety, and, in some cases, tragic outcomes like Anna’s.

There is a critical point that is these professionals often miss when faced with workplace stress. They feel that they have just been working for a couple of months or years and their body can take it. What they forget is, whatever the reason, the body has been under stress for years, much before they started working. And it needs self-care to heal the negative effects of stress.

And without intervention, this prolonged exposure to stress can spiral into life-threatening health crises.

How Family, Friends, and Society Can Identify the Warning Signs and Intervene

Early signs of stress are always there, but they’re often dismissed or ignored. All of us, as friends, family, or managers, need to be vigilant if someone around us shows these symptoms.

Behavioral changes like irritability, withdrawal, or a lack of interest in previously enjoyed activities often signal distress. Before you dismiss them as temporary mood swings or the unavoidable pressure of “adult life,” look deeper.

Family support is essential, especially for young adults who live far from home and lack immediate social support. When a young professional comes home from a 12- or 16-hour workday, they need someone to talk to, a place to release the stress. Instead, most return to empty homes or solitary PG accommodations. The absence of an outlet leaves them isolated from their stress, which only compounds their anxiety.

Parents and/or siblings can set up a daily routine of a video call at the end of the day or frequent daily check-ins via messaging, which can go a long way in noticing if something is off.

For friends and peers, providing support means looking out for each other and validating each other’s struggles without brushing them aside as normal or trivial. When individuals feel their struggles are understood, they’re more likely to seek help, whether from loved ones, professionals, or even their workplaces.

Creating a Mental Health Conscious Workplace

In addition to support from family and friends, young professionals need workplaces to prioritize mental health. Large firms may offer access to mental health resources, yet the stigma around using these services remains high, discouraging employees, especially new hires, from seeking help.

When Dr. Omi suggested some of her patients, who happened to be working for Fortune 500 companies, seek mental health support at the workplace, they resisted. They all had come to her with underlying health conditions. Someone had lost sleep. Someone’s mood was irritated. Someone had a lot of fear. Someone was scared.

But still, here is (in a nutshell) how they all responded to her suggestion:

That’s not possible because we need time for that. Plus, this is a new/first job. If anything get mentioned in our profile/resume that will be a blot for life. It’s just a matter of few months when the probation/internship period ends and then it will get better.

We need massive cultural shifts in how society perceives mental health for mental services at the workplace to become something critical and not token gestures.

We can start with a comprehensive set of policies that set healthy boundaries for workload and work hours. Policies that make regular mental health check-ups just as routine as physical exams. Policies that enable employees who seek help to do so without fear of judgment or job insecurity.

The next step can be to integrate mental well-being into corporate culture by encouraging conversations about stress and boundaries. Recognizing the value of sustainable productivity, rather than maximizing output at any cost, would shift the focus from short-term gains to long-term well-being.

Managers need to tell young professionals that a company should not be their entire life, nor should a career be their whole identity. They need to take a balanced approach to professional life right from the start.

Legal frameworks that hold companies accountable for employees’ mental health would be welcome, especially in sectors notorious for high stress. But from where I see it, that’s a long time in coming. Till then we need to do what we can as a society. In fact, societal change can enable such conversations to start shaping up.

What Next?

The mental health crisis facing young professionals is not an individual issue but a social one too, rooted in the values and pressures we’ve cultivated across generations. If we are to prevent further tragedies, we must redefine success and the associated values we are teaching our kids. We need to place mental health, personal boundaries, and self-care at the center of children’s existence, not some warped definition of success.