For National Stress Awareness Day on 2nd November, we spoke with Richard Abrahams, a mental health speaker, about how event profs can help combat stressors in an industry where stress is a huge factor.
Recent research from The Culture Creators Report 2023 found that 79% of event professionals find their roles more stressful than ever before. From managing tight deadlines and coordinating multiple suppliers to handling last-minute changes and ensuring client satisfaction, event profs face a unique set of pressures that can lead to chronic stress or burnout that can impact both physical and mental wellbeing.
In 2018, Managing Director of a Leeds based business Elmhurst, Richard Abrahams, suffered from mental health issues that were a product of the pressures of running his business and the stressors of everyday life. After overcoming his problems, Richard is now passionate about spreading awareness about mental health and encouraging people experiencing stress to speak up before it’s too late.
Richard tells us about his personal journey with stress, and how it affected him: “I knew there was something wrong because there was a lot going on within myself, both physically and mentally. I told myself that there must be something wrong with me physically, which in hindsight was probably me masking it but I never even thought about it being stress related. I saw the doctor and described my symptoms, and they told me that it was anxiety, depression, and general stress. Initially, I said that can’t be the case – I was in definitely in denial.”
Stress is inevitable and unfortunately unavoidable in everyday life, particularly in the events industry with the constant juggling of tasks combined with the need for perfection from clients: “The analogy I was given when I was unwell was that everyone has a so-called stress bucket, we all live with a percentage of stress that’s day-to-day worries such as family issues, paying the bills, and work-related problems. These can be relatively easy to handle so the bucket isn’t always full. However, if you don’t try to destress and deal with these things, the stress bucket is at the point of overload and you feel choked, by which time it’s too late.”
“What we don’t realise is that the relationship between mental and physical is so intertwined, mental illness is a culmination of both physical and mental issues.”
Warning signs that stress is getting unmanageable can take many different forms, whether it’s emotional, physical, cognitive, or behavioural, and a lot of people don’t realise how closely linked they all are: “In my case, things came on quicker than I anticipated. The anxiety was spiralling out of control quicker than the medication could keep up, it was unmanageable.
The physical symptoms of headaches and weird sensations all through my body – that I still can’t explain – were so prominent, I googled them and convinced myself it was a neurological disease. I developed insomnia, that was when I knew something