As part of IFA Magazine’s World Mental Health Day coverage, author, speaker and workplace culture expert Jenny Segal explores the growing issue of resilience fatigue — and when the pressure to “stay strong” can harm our wellbeing. In a profession where advisers juggle clients’ emotions, market turbulence and constant change, Jenny argues that true resilience isn’t about endless endurance, but about making space to process, recover and grow. Her insights remind us that protecting mental health isn’t just a human right — it’s vital to maintaining the empathy, judgement and clarity that good financial advice depends on.
Brits take a ‘keep calm and carry on,’ approach to both our professional and personal lives. The past few years in particular have asked us to “bounce-back and be resilient.” To But as World Mental Health Day reminds us, sometimes the pressure to be strong becomes the very thing that breaks us.
In financial services, the language of resilience is everywhere—from managing volatile markets to supporting anxious clients. Advisers are expected to stay composed, empathic, and endlessly available, even as they absorb others’ stress. Over time, this can create what I call resilience fatigue: the cumulative exhaustion that comes from always having to cope.
The truth is that resilience isn’t about gritting your teeth and pushing through. My latest research for On Motivation: Personal & Professional Resilience found that resilience follows a five-phase cycle: Stress → React → Process → Assimilate → Grow. Yet most workplaces, especially high-performance ones, expect employees to skip straight from stress to growth, without allowing time for the middle stages. We celebrate the “bounce back” but ignore the processing that makes it possible.
That’s a problem—because when people don’t get the space to process adversity, the stress doesn’t vanish; it embeds. It reappears as burnout, disengagement, or anxiety. And ironically, it depletes the very resilience we’re trying to build.
Financial advisers often face this double bind. They’re responsible for clients whose livelihoods and emotions are tied to market fluctuations, while juggling their own performance pressures, regulatory changes and personal lives. It’s no wonder so many report chronic fatigue, sleep disruption, and emotional numbness. These are not signs of weakness—they’re signals that the resilience muscle has been overtrained.
So how do we recover? First, by redefining resilience itself. It’s not a fixed trait; it’s a dynamic capacity that grows through exposure, reflection and support. Just as muscles need recovery days, minds need psychological recovery time. That might mean encouraging advisers to debrief after difficult conversations, take micro-breaks between client meetings, or share challenges in peer-support groups rather than bottling them up.
Secondly, leaders must model this behaviour. Admitting that you’re struggling is not a failure of professionalism—it’s a mark of emotional intelligence. When managers acknowledge their own limits, they give permission for others to do the same. This creates a culture of psychological safety, where people feel safe to be human. And that, in turn, is the foundation for sustainable performance.
World Mental Health Day applies as much to workplaces as to society at large. The right to a healthy mind includes the right to rest, to reflect, and to recover. Resilience shouldn’t be a relentless demand; it should be a shared responsibility.
Because the truth is, no one can “bounce back” forever. But with the right systems, support, and compassion, we can build workplaces where people don’t just survive pressure—they grow through it.