Educating Organizations Out Of The Red Zone Of Stress

Call it stress, anxiety, or depression; there appears to be a sweeping fragility that’s rising in prevalence. According to a recent Deloitte study, 77% of respondents have experienced burnout in their current job, creating an indicator that where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Moreover, frustrations are no longer exclusive to the workplace. A shifting economy is now encouraging a departure from the clock-in and clock-out mentality for less traditional options that have pressures all their own.

Everything in life bleeds together. Whether our stressors lie in professional or personal matters, each informs the other as the line becomes more fluid by the day. As a result, workplace leaders are searching for the language and resources to support their team’s well-being. It starts with a collective effort that first recognizes the importance of mental and emotional well-being for the success of everyone involved.

Dr. Elizabeth Lombardo is a clinical psychologist, author, and coach working to change the language surrounding stress. She is affectionately referred to as Dr. E by her clients, having engaged individually or in workshops with high-performing entrepreneurs, Fortune 500 C-suite executives, and even NBA Hall of Famer Shaquille O’Neal. In addition, she has contributed to prominent media outlets, including The Today Show, Good Morning America, The New York Times, and she has appeared on the TEDx stage.

Lombardo often tackles personal topics by avoiding the stigma and pathology attached. She opens the door to a healthy and productive exploration for leadership and workers to flourish by distilling the latest neuroscience research into a tangible strategy. Her approach broaches the topic of mental health, depression, and anxiety without the weight of the subjects interfering in the process.

The Red Zone

Part of Lombardo’s practice resides in her book, Get Out of the Red Zone, providing steps and processes to change the negative headspace that develops when stress, anxiety, and worry take over. Tackling the inner critic is key as each individual develops a real sense of unconditional self-worth, a belief in oneself regardless of the surrounding conditions.

“We’re in the psychological Red Zone when we experience high levels of distress, distress being any emotion you don’t want,” Lombardo explains. “Distress exists on a continuum from zero to 10. The Red Zone happens when we are at a seven out of ten or higher.”

In Lombardo’s experience, there’s no way a person can be caught up in the Red Zone at work and return naturally back to baseline when they clock out for the day. “It’s going to come home,” she says, “and in the same way, It’s going to go back to work. Right now, people are at an all-time high level of stress.”

It’s easy to imagine why this is happening. Many top corporations are learning to do more with less, and employees are finding their responsibilities expanding. It has all been overshadowed by a few years of uncertainty and pivoting between home and office work environments. “Most leaders aren’t psychologists,” Lombardo says. “They don’t really know how to deal with their own Red Zone, much less what’s going on with their teams and organizations.”

According to Lombardo, workplaces, for generations, have operated stoically. Personal problems or mental challenges surrounding work were reserved for brief and sparse watercooler talk, while executives and leaders ignored the pandora’s box: the human brain. But, as Lombardo enlightens, this approach is costly for many of the country’s top corporations.

“We know from the research that these high stress levels cost US companies over $300 billion annually. It includes factors like absenteeism, presenteeism, turnover, and healthcare utilization.”

Lombardo adds how this number arrives from pre-pandemic research with even higher costs today. “Companies are learning that it’s not just that we want people to be happy because we’re nice people,” Lombardo says. “It’s that this is impacting bottom lines significantly.”

Cutting Corners

Dr. Lombardo wasn’t always a psychologist. She began her career as a physical therapist in acute care settings, often dealing with clients who had recently undergone amputations due to diabetes.

Lombardo explains how one client was so emotionally distressed that he refused help from her. He was coping with the immense loss of a leg and lashed out at anyone trying to serve his needs. When it came time for evening rounds, where nurses, doctors, and therapists discuss patients, a young Lombardo would find her life trajectory forever changed.

“The attending physician, who had amputated this patient’s leg, told us he would prescribe Prozac,” recalls Lombardo. “I thought, wow, don’t you think he might just need someone to talk to and process this drastic change in his life? I knew that I needed to get the training to help people like him. We don’t all experience surgical amputation, but we all deal with disappointment, stress, and surprises in life, and need the skills and support to work through the hardships.”

Like the medical field, where the solution to stress is often relegated to medication, Lombardo sees some in the corporate world looking for the easy way out when handling the Red Zone. The resources needed to properly hone in on the well-being of team members can be exhaustive. Doing it right means creating real, tangible initiatives to get people back into what Lombardo calls the Green Zone. If not, it remains empty talk that draws eye rolls when executives pay lip service to mental health concerns.

A Soft Landing

The question for companies becomes, how does leadership create that soft landing for people, employing the resources they need to get back to the center?

“It’s an investment of time. It’s an investment of energy. It’s an investment of costs,” Lombardo says. “But it’s important to remember the return on investment (ROI) when you can get people out of the Red Zone and into what I call the Green Zone. For example, Harvard research shows that happiness in the workplace raises productivity by 31% and sales by 37%. So there’s a huge return on investment when they provide the resources for their employees.”

According to Lombardo, the action comes from a skills-based understanding of how the mind works. The knowledge that there are specific action steps that leaders and all team members can take to better address their headspace allows everyone to execute their jobs and do what they’re ultimately paid to do.

“There are so many ways we can be helping people,” Lombardo says. “One of the ways that I focus on and am passionate about, and supported in the research, is skills building. We must understand how our mind works and how to make it work for us instead of against us. We think differently in the Red Zone than we do otherwise. If we can grasp that our thoughts are propelling the action or perpetuating these emotions, we can control them a lot better.”

Putting in the work yields tremendous results. “We’re starting to see people are staying,” Lombardo says. “Instead of showing up begrudgingly, they’re fully engaged. Those are the kinds of things that organizations start to see. And they see it quite soon.”

Lombardo has successfully built her brand over the past several years while facing a personal Red Zone of her own in caring for her husband on a ventilator with Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). But, as she says, “I noticed, as life goes on, how important it is to practice what I preach.” It’s been a challenge for her, but applying the stress skills in her own life is helping other people do the same.

In her work, Lombardo has seen organizations and executives more willing to open up to the topic of mental health in the post-pandemic workplace. For years, psychologists have been the only people reading the writing on the wall on the issue of mental stress. Now, companies are beginning to see the financial benefits of handling stress more effectively, as better emotional health equals more efficiency and boosted morale.

Work environments are well past their time in believing that ignoring the issue will magically make it disappear. Through it all, it’s comforting to know that people like Dr. Elizabeth Lombardo are helping point everyone to the Green Zone.

Interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity.