When the Story About Work No Longer Matches Reality: Rethinking Mental Health at Work

• You are asked to deliver high-quality work, yet there is never enough time to do it well.
• You are encouraged to take initiative, while every important decision is closely monitored.
• You are expected to collaborate with colleagues, yet your performance is assessed primarily as an individual.

If these situations sound familiar, you are not alone. 

They are often described as contradictory demands. They can be frustrating, exhausting and, over time, deeply discouraging.

It may seem obvious to conclude that these contradictions are the problem. But what if they are not?

Contradictions Are Part of Human Work

Every workplace involves competing priorities, multiple constraints and different responsibilities. Quality, efficiency, safety, innovation, budgets and deadlines do not always point in the same direction. In that sense, contradictions are not unusual. They are part of human work.

The real question is therefore not whether contradictions exist. It is what happens when they cannot be recognised, discussed and worked through collectively.

When Organisational Narratives No Longer Match Reality

Many of the contradictions people experience do not arise from the work itself. They emerge from a gap between the way work is imagined, described and organised, and the reality in which it has to be carried out.

Organizations often promote quality, autonomy, collaboration and innovation. These aspirations are meaningful and important. However, they are not always supported by the conditions required to make them possible.

People may be encouraged to protect their mental health while being expected to remain constantly available and fully committed. They may be asked to cooperate with colleagues while navigating strong internal competition. They may be expected to be innovative and take risks while being held accountable for avoiding mistakes.

These are not simply isolated management mistakes or communication failures. They reflect a deeper disconnect between the narrative surrounding work and the reality of work itself.

When Organizational Tensions Become Personal Burdens

When this gap remains invisible, people are often left to deal with it on their own.

Instead of recognizing that they are facing competing demands that cannot all be met simultaneously, they may conclude that they are not organized enough, not competent enough or simply not resilient enough.

A tension that belongs to the organisation gradually becomes an individual burden.

Over time, this internalisation can lead to frustration, guilt, exhaustion and a persistent feeling of never doing enough.

Why Is It So Difficult to Talk About Work?

Why is this gap so rarely discussed?

One reason is that many workplaces leave little room to discuss work itself. There is often an expectation to remain positive, demonstrate competence, deliver results and move quickly from one task to the next.

In such environments, acknowledging that two legitimate demands cannot both be fully satisfied may easily be interpreted as resistance, negativity or a lack of commitment.

Yet recognising a contradiction is not a sign of weakness. On the contrary, it is often the first step towards understanding what the work actually requires.

Contradictions do not necessarily threaten mental health.

They become harmful when they cannot be acknowledged, discussed and managed collectively. When there is no safe space — protected, trusting and confidential environments where people can speak openly — to make sense of them together, people are left to carry them alone.

The tension does not disappear. It simply moves from the organisation into the individual.

Yet discussing work collectively is far from straightforward. It requires time to step back from immediate demands, relationships built on trust, and stable work collectives where people feel safe enough to speak honestly about the difficulties they encounter. These conditions are becoming increasingly fragile. Accelerating workloads, organizational instability and constant pressure to deliver often leave little opportunity to reflect together on the work itself.

Making Work Discussable Again

Creating spaces where work can be discussed does not eliminate contradictions. Human work will always involve tensions, trade-offs and competing priorities. What these spaces make possible is something different. They allow people to understand these tensions together rather than carrying them individually.

When competing demands can be named, explored and worked through collectively, they stop being interpreted as individual failures. They become questions about the organisation of work itself. This shift is essential because mental health at work depends not only on reducing individual stress, but also on creating the collective conditions that allow people to make sense of the reality of their work together.

Perhaps the problem is not that work has become more contradictory than before. Perhaps the problem is that the stories organisations tell about work are becoming increasingly disconnected from the conditions in which work is actually carried out. Reconnecting these two realities may be one of the most important challenges for protecting mental health at work.