Most organizations know stress is part of working life. What’s easier to miss is where it does damage. Long before stress shows up as a leave of absence or a claim, it shows up in smaller ways. A strong employee starts missing details. A thoughtful manager gets short with their team. Decisions that used to feel simple start to stall.
Those aren’t character flaws. They’re what a stressed brain looks like at work.
It’s also widespread. In the American Psychological Association’s 2025 Work in America survey, 54 percent of U.S. workers said job insecurity had significantly affected their stress at work.
Stress Isn’t the Problem. Too Much of It Is.
It’s tempting to treat stress as something to eliminate. Dr. Christopher Willard, Psy.D., a psychologist, author of 22 books, and lecturer at Harvard Medical School, sees it differently. Some stress is what gets people out of bed and motivates them to do their work well and on time. “I don’t want us to think stress is a dirty word,” he says.
The trouble starts when stress becomes chronic. The tipping point looks different for everyone, but past it, stress begins to wear on health and relationships alike.
What Stress Does to the Thinking Brain
The prefrontal cortex handles much of what makes someone effective at work. It’s where people solve complicated problems, stay focused, manage their emotions, and resist distractions.
Stress temporarily takes this region offline. According to Willard, people under heavy stress become more rigid and less creative. Everything starts to look black and white, and critical thinking suffers right when it’s needed most.
For a manager working through a hard decision, that shift matters. The work doesn’t get harder. The brain doing it gets less capable.
The Hidden Cost to Emotional Intelligence
Stress also affects the insular cortex, which Willard describes as a hub for emotional and social intelligence. This is where people read others’ emotions, take someone else’s perspective, and draw on the soft skills that make collaboration work.
In many workplaces, those skills matter as much as raw intelligence. When stress dulls them, teams feel it. Feedback lands harder, and small disagreements turn into real friction. Most people can recognize this in themselves. Think about how irritable you get when you’re stressed, or how a stressed colleague comes across in a meeting.
Where It Shows Up for Employers
Chronic stress rarely appears as its own line item. Instead, it surfaces in measures employers already track. Productivity dips as focus and problem-solving suffer. Working relationships strain, and missed days and late starts add up.
It shows up in healthcare costs too. Stress can make almost any existing health condition harder to manage, and it often sits underneath the physical complaints people bring to their doctor.
What This Means for Employers
The goal isn’t a stress-free workplace. As Willard puts it, good management comes down to recognizing when stress is helpful, noticing when it becomes a problem, and responding.
In practice, that means helping managers spot early signs like irritability or rigid thinking before they harden into burnout. It also means treating stress as a health issue with real business consequences, not a mood that will pass after the next deadline.
Support works best when it’s part of an employee’s everyday experience, available as stress starts to build rather than only after it becomes a crisis.
