About This Episode
In this episode, we’re joined by digital marketing and user behavior strategist Kayley Dempsey. She is currently the digital marketing operations lead at Manifesto Digital (previously and now part of TPXimpact) and is responsible for the delivery of all retained programs of work in the digital marketing studio.
Kayley specializes in complete journey analysis, from identifying organizational objectives and challenges, down to research with end users and beneficiaries, incorporating website data and analytics to put together a complete picture of how people interact with an organization and how to improve it. She is primarily focused on charity, non-profit, and pro-social organizations. Kayley is also a mental health first-aider with a particular interest in enhancing well-being at work.
There’s no easy fix for a workplace to be less sort of poor mental health, whether that’s triggering anxiety or stress or whatever, however, we talk about it, the change really needs to come from the top – Kayley Dempsey
This episode is for you if you’re curious about the following:
- How to know if your work is triggering your anxiety.
- Workplace best practices to overcome stress and anxiety.
- What triggers anxiety and stress at work.
- How to effectively lead and support people with anxiety.
- The soft skills and coping techniques to manage your anxiety.
- When to know if you need professional help for your anxiety.
Connect With Kayley
- Learn about Manifesto Digital
- Learn about TPXimpact
- Connect on LinkedIn
- Follow on Twitter
- Kayley’s BrightonSEO deck: Managing Anxiety in You and Your Team
Resources
- (Video) Box Breathing | 5 Minutes Breathwork Practice for Focus & Anxiety (2022)
- How Do I Tone My Vagus Nerve?
- Mind Wellness at Work
- Long COVID
- Mast Cell Activation Syndrome
- Apollo Neuro
Check out all of the resources mentioned across our other episodes.
Other episodes you’ll enjoy:
- S2E07: Exploring Resilience and Community Building with Lloyed Lobo
- S1E17: How to Advance Your SEO Career – Morgan Petrov
- S1E20: Emotional Intelligence and Its Role in Digital Marketing Success: An Interview with Jo Juliana Turnbull
Loved this episode?
Leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Tweet and tag us @dmvictories and @kwatier!
Episode Transcript
➡️ [Download episode transcript]
[00:00:00] Katherine Watier Ong: Welcome to the Digital Marketing Victories podcast, a monthly show where we celebrate and learn from the changemakers in digital marketing. Great digital marketers understand that people are the most challenging part of doing their jobs. And this show focuses on the people part of digital marketing wins what tactics or skills the guests use to align people with their marketing strategy.
I’m your host, Katherine Watier Ong, who owns WO Strategies, LLC. We focus on increasing organic discovery for enterprise-sized, science-focused clients. Thank you for joining me. Let’s get into it and celebrate our victories.
Today, we’re joined by Kayley Dempsey. Kayley is the digital marketing operations lead for Manifesto.
She’s responsible for delivering all the retained work programs in the digital marketing studio. She specializes in complete journey analysis from identifying organizational objectives and challenges. To research with end users and beneficiaries, she incorporates website data and analytics to put together this full picture of how people interact with an organization and how to improve that interaction.
She’s primarily focused on charity, nonprofit, and pro-social organizations, which is unique for this podcast. I don’t know how many folks I’ve had on that have a background, or similar mind in the nonprofit space. She’s also a mental health first aider which is a thing in the UK and has a particular interest in improving while being at work.
So this episode is going to be perfect for you if you want to learn about how to evaluate whether you have anxiety and if your job is contributing to it, learn more about whether others in the SEO industry experience workplace anxiety, and learn more about the soft skills and coping techniques that can help you manage your anxiety and better handle workplace stress.
So Kayley, welcome to the show.
[00:01:50] Kayley Dempsey: Hello. Thanks for having me.
[00:01:52] Katherine Watier Ong: So why don’t you just give the listeners a little bit of background about you? I’m kind of particularly interested in how you ended up focusing on nonprofits since it’s not a normal path, I guess, as an SEO.
[00:02:03] Kayley Dempsey: Yeah, I think I ended up in non profits the same way a lot of people do, initially working in commercial.
So I worked with a lot of e-commerce businesses. I worked in automotive for a bit, and then I kind of had a, I need more of a sense of purpose in what I’m doing, not to disparage anyone working in those industries, but I suddenly felt like I wanted to, I guess, be able to understand the impact I’m having on the world.
So I went freelance for a bit working and looking for nonprofit and social good clients. And then eventually, I came back to the agency side again. And I’m currently at Manifesto, who again, specialize in nonprofit museums and attractions, and sort of organizations that make a positive impact on people and planets.
[00:02:51] Katherine Watier Ong: That’s awesome. I also love working on pro-mission type work, 10 years in a nonprofit. And then, but that’s a bulk of my clients are actually nonprofits. So tell us more. I have you on the show because I heard a rumor that you had Brighton SEO, which by the time you all listened to this, would have happened.
You’re going to be talking about research that you have about anxiety at work in particular in the SEO space. So can you tell us a little bit more about that research?
[00:03:19] Kayley Dempsey: Yeah, so I feel really passionately that workplaces should have like a positive effect on your mental health and not a negative one.
I think that’s a really standard belief, but to say it out loud is a little bit revolutionary. And I decided to do my own research into the field. So I put out a survey asking people who worked in marketing, in SEO, in tech and digital about their experiences with anxiety, because a lot of studies that have been conducted often focus on sort of big organizations rather than, you know, 50 people agency sort of thing.
And I wanted to understand The circumstances that were more unique to what we work in. So I had 119 people respond to the survey, and I’ve been looking at the results. And I think it’s really interesting. And luckily, Brighton SEO was very keen to have me talk about it.
[00:04:17] Katherine Watier Ong: Cool, so did you find any, are there any key findings that you?
At this point, would have presented in Brighton SEO research.
[00:04:26] Kayley Dempsey: I mean, one thing to know is that I think people who experience anxiety were probably more likely to answer the survey than those who did it. So it came back that people have, there’s a lot of people experience anxiety either in their day to day life or at work.
And that is consistent with career starter versus manager level versus senior manager. Yeah. It’s not something that’s unique to people who are starting out and suffering imposter syndrome, and it’s not unique to people, you know, responsible for the big numbers and big budgets and hiring and firing.
It’s something we experience as humans at all levels. The prevalence was slightly higher in women compared to men. I think I’ve got some numbers here somewhere. Yeah, for women, it was about 58 percent of people said that they often experienced anxiety at work compared to 46 percent of men. And sort of throughout everything, the number of women is slightly higher than number of men.
What was also interesting is that there was only quite a small in difference between agency and in-house. I think we’re so used to thinking, like, agency is fast-paced and long hours and high pressure, and in-house is slow and easy and you get bored. Like, that’s the old-fashioned sort of stereotype.
But that isn’t really reflective in what we found. People working at an agency reported 62 percent of them often experienced anxiety at work, compared to 53 percent in-house, which isn’t a huge difference. And when we looked at some of the markers. That indicated sort of a positive work-life balance.
So taking a lunch break, finishing on time, getting outside, eating good, decent food, those sort of markers. We often found that in-house people actually did worse. So there’s really not that much difference at all in types of employment.
[00:06:25] Katherine Watier Ong: And did you have respondents from globally or is it mostly UK based or were the folks that are answering?
[00:06:31] Kayley Dempsey: Okay. Do you know what? That wasn’t actually a screen, a question. I imagine because it was sort of my network and friends of friends and friends of friends, it was probably more UK based.
[00:06:42] Katherine Watier Ong: I just kind of wonder, it could go either way. I know that salaries are different, for instance, in the US versus the UK.
And I wonder how that impacts people. Just feelings about their job, right?
[00:06:54] Kayley Dempsey: Possibly. I think we get a lot more holiday in Europe as well.
[00:06:58] Katherine Watier Ong: That’s true. And then, right, vice versa, you guys actually take a break, and we don’t. Yes. Sadly. Anyway, just. Totally curious about that. Was there, were you able to suss out whether there were particular things that were driving the anxiety?
[00:07:14] Kayley Dempsey: Yeah. So the number one thing that came through was change. 89 percent of people said that change triggers anxiety. And then the following two that was poor line management and poor senior management. And all of that together just paints a picture of culture. So it’s not like, You know, some people said speaking in client meetings or delivering presentations or deadlines like all of those things can trigger anxiety, but actually, it’s cultural things that have so much more of an impact on our mental health.
[00:07:46] Katherine Watier Ong: Yeah. Now go ahead.
[00:07:49] Kayley Dempsey: I was just about to say, is it worth doing a quick description of the difference between stress and anxiety?
[00:07:55] Katherine Watier Ong: Oh yes, please. That would be great.
[00:07:58] Kayley Dempsey: So, to boil it down really simply, stress is an internal, like, feeling that you experience when something stressful happens, so an external event like moving house, changing jobs, working on a big project, you’ll feel an internal level of pressure and discomfort.
But once that event passes, your feelings of stress will also pass. Whereas anxiety is a persistent feeling of dread, fear or nervousness that might be triggered by external events, but it doesn’t tend to pass when the event passes, or it might be completely out of proportion to the event. So like if you miss a train, you might think, you know, that causes a certain amount of stress because you’ve got to rearrange your travel plans for the day.
But if that was triggering anxiety, you might think, Oh my God, I’m missing the train. I’m going to be late. My boss hates me. I’m probably going to lose my job. I’m going to lose my house. And like, you can get sort of catastrophic thinking from that. So there can be a lot of overlap between the two. And it’s also worth noting that some level of stress is good for us as humans.
And that level will be different between different people. But anxiety, when we talk about anxiety, we’re really talking about. An internal sort of level of pressure and fear and worry that isn’t in proportion to things that are going on around you.
[00:09:17] Katherine Watier Ong: Well, it’s interesting that you broke down the things that can cause stress or cause anxiety at work, and some of those like you had mentioned public speaking and presenting to a client, et cetera.
You can train yourself to get better at some of those, right?
[00:09:30] Kayley Dempsey: Absolutely.
[00:09:31] Katherine Watier Ong: The people management part, the soft skills, the managing up, or if you got stuck with a bad manager, there’s not much you can do about it. I had a, I had a moment where I interviewed with one person and met another person at the organization.
The second person I was like, I don’t want to interact with that person. It’s just, I could, I got a bad, bad vibe. Right. And don’t you know, I get hired, and then the person who’s supposed to manage me disappears. I get managed by person two. Like, there’s not much you can do in that situation except leave, right?
Like you knew it wasn’t going to be good from the beginning. Anyway, it’s just kind of interesting that you’re thinking the anxiety piece is the part that’s less controllable because of the change of the industry and stuff, you just can’t control Google algorithm updates and stuff. I wonder if you, it’s too bad you’re doing it now.
And you hadn’t sort of magically known to do this five years ago. Cause I wonder if the overall unpredictability of life, in general, is eking into what’s going on at work. You know, the fact that we’re still in a pandemic, and there have been economic impacts of that’s been shaken down and, you know, in general, climate change, whatever, in general, life is more uncertain than I think it probably was 10 years ago, or it feels that way to me anyway.
[00:10:52] Kayley Dempsey: I think I would agree with that. I think politically, a lot of countries are seeing big swings from one direction to another. And I think the pandemic, like, I see a lot of comments that’s like, that thing, that massive thing that happened for years of our lives and now we just ignore it and don’t talk about it.
That lack of social interaction for months on end. A lot of people are worried, are you keeping your job? Are you not keeping your job? Are you getting paid? Are you not getting paid? Seeing family getting to work, like all those basic sort of things of survival were just under threat for such a long time. And I think probably a lot of people still are feeling the effects of that, whether they realize it or not.
[00:11:27] Katherine Watier Ong: Right. So I just kind of wonder also on top of it, because I’ve, I’ve been in the industry long enough. I don’t think I’m the only one who thinks the pace of the change in the industry has ramped up exponentially. I mean, it’s always changed frequently, but it seems like since the fall or so the changes are just, they’re bonkers.
Like the pace is really intense.
[00:11:50] Kayley Dempsey: I think, like, the two big things if you’re working in search, like AI, search generative experience, like content production, all of that is changing ridiculously quickly. And then at the same time, when you’re measuring results, you’ve got the cookie bucket list, so you can’t track things, and privacy rules are changing day by day.
So it’s like every part of your job is just changing minute by minute at the moment.
[00:12:15] Katherine Watier Ong: Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I guess for folks that are listening, we all get it. I think everybody’s experiencing this level of intense change. Yeah. Particularly early in my career, I forget. I want to say it was the Dalai Lama, but I found some quote.
We’re going to pretend it was the Dalai Lama that sort of mentioned that yeah, rapid change is like the highest source of stress for almost everybody. And that’s when I realized that I needed personally to control everything else that caused my stress, like if it was controllable and I could get on top of it, I needed to.
So like when I found the quote, I was definitely underwater at an agency, and I didn’t have control of my schedule. So the first thing I did when I started running my own business was. To control my calendar because it was a huge source of stress for me. And that way, I could reduce that stress, right?
Because you can’t reduce the, you could leave search, but you can’t reduce the Google change.
[00:13:11] Kayley Dempsey: That’s really interesting though, because another finding that I had was I asked people to describe their job function. So do you work in design or development or marketing or SEO or account management or whatever?
Yeah. And the levels of stress in the job were fairly, sorry, the levels of anxiety in the job were fairly similar, but it was the account managers and project managers who experienced much higher levels of anxiety in their day-to-day lives. So They were sort of anxious all the time, whereas everyone else was a little bit more chill in day-to-day life, but got stressed and anxious at work.
So I wonder if people who are prone to sort of anxiety tend to lean towards roles where they get to take control of things. You know, like managing projects, managing clients. I don’t know. I’m wildly speculating, but it’s something that I wondered.
[00:14:04] Katherine Watier Ong: Well, I, or on the flip side, they end up at a project management role, and it’s just a very high-stress role because your entire job is herding cats, which is hard to control
[00:14:15] Kayley Dempsey: All their day-to-day life afterward.
[00:14:16] Katherine Watier Ong: Yeah, their whole job description is just herding cats, which sounds, yeah, that sounds challenging to me.
So, let’s see, did you uncover any other tips or soft skills people could develop to sort of reduce the anxiety in certain elements of their job?
[00:14:35] Kayley Dempsey: Yeah, so there’s no easy fix for a workplace to be less sort of poor mental health, whether that’s triggering anxiety or stress or whatever, however, we talk about it, the change really needs to come from the top.
So managers and leaders need to prioritize it. And that can be as simple as talking more openly about it, or you know, encouraging people to take a wellness day off if they’re having like mental health challenges that day and to not have them feel weak about doing so, or letting people go for a walk if they’ve had a rough meeting and not have to worry about, like, how do I account for that half an hour I spent getting some fresh air?
Do you know what I mean? In terms of softer skills if we’re looking at it as individuals. I think it’s important if, and it takes effort to think about different types of relaxation. So when we’ve had a rough day, it’s really easy to go, I’ve had a rough day. I need a treat and get a blanket and put Netflix on and have some chocolate and have a lie-in on the weekend.
And that sort of goblin mode I’m hunkering down. And that is a perfectly valid strategy, but it can’t be the only strategy. So there’s more research now talking about different types of rest and different types of happiness, and that will include creative rest, which might be going to an art gallery and just like looking at things, or it might include social rest, which means seeing people who you can be 100 percent yourself with and there’s no masking, and there’s no, I have to watch what I say because I’m with my partner’s parents or whatever.
And then the different types of happiness. There’s one book that talks about the difference between I’m going to get these words right, hedonic happiness, which is that kind of hunker down under a blanket. And there’s eudaimonic happiness, which is about finding purpose in the world. And it’s like that appears to be really important for our well-being so that might be gardening or singing in a choir or volunteering, like doing something that you enjoy, but it’s not just that you enjoy it, it’s that there’s like some sort of value and contribution to the world in it as well.
So, unfortunately, none of those are just taking five minutes and do a meditation app like they’re big changes, but I guess if it’s something that you’re really driven to do like I want to improve my resilience and I want to feel less anxiety, it’s worth considering and sort of putting together a plan for it.
[00:17:07] Katherine Watier Ong: That’s interesting because the episode we just released with Lloyd Lobo actually talks about emotional resilience and he talks about, yeah, yeah, and he actually, he’s got a fascinating backstory of his life, by the way, but he talks about how to sink yourself in community and volunteering to get a little bit of perspective about maybe gratitude about where you’re at kind of thing.
But he talks a lot about community as a way to. Enhance resilience and improve your emotional resilience. I think volunteering particularly is a habit that we have as a family. And mind you, I come from a big volunteering family. Both of my parents won the President’s Volunteer Service Award, which is given out here in the US when people do a lot of volunteering.
But when you were, I don’t know, feeding the homeless, it just gives you perspective about, you know, a keyword losing a ranking.
[00:18:00] Kayley Dempsey: Yeah, exactly. This is if my team is going through a really stressful period, like maybe clients are being challenging and deadlines and whatever. It’s like, we’re not brain surgeons.
You know, I’m not, there’s not an operating table in front of us. Lives aren’t at stake. Let’s put this in perspective. We’re like, it’s Google at the end of the day.
[00:18:19] Katherine Watier Ong: But it’s hard to do if you haven’t seen the perspective, I guess, is my theory. Like you need to see it and, and, and be involved in it. And that particularly can help, but you know, I, I also think owning your own career, my last in house visit agency position that I stayed at for five years.
So obviously I liked it, even though it was stressful and challenging, I picked it on purpose because I realized the managing up part was hard for me and I needed to pick a good manager who was going to give me cover. And that’s why it worked. Right? Because it was going to be a lot of change. I knew that was going to be a constant, but I could control the manager.
Mind you, I also lucked out that he stayed. Right. So I just explained to him by previous job what they left. So you can’t fully control that, but at least starting out with a manager, that. That gives you good cover.
[00:19:06] Kayley Dempsey: So a couple of years ago, that said, your manager has the same effect on your mental health as your partner in your life is so much like having a good manager makes such a difference.
[00:19:19] Katherine Watier Ong: Maybe I’m going to have to come up with a bunch of good interview questions people could use to suss out their manager. I feel like it’s really valuable, right? And I don’t know if I had a good set of them necessarily. Though my last manager, I met him like somewhere else and got to know him as a person and then followed him.
So, you know, maybe you do that, but I’m sure there’s in an interview situation a way you could figure out. Whether your manager would be a good fit or not. I know.
[00:19:44] Kayley Dempsey: Yeah, definitely. That’s a really good idea.
[00:19:46] Katherine Watier Ong: Right. Because it’s so impactful to your entire dang life, so did you discover, or did you talk about anything related to (I started to get a little sciencey on you) but related to the vagus nerve?
So like the vagus nerve rolls, rules our nervous system, right? And you can actually get sort of ramped up, especially as we just talked about how stressful in general has been over the last few years. And I can assume that if it’s constantly in a revved-up state, it’s hard to get yourself back down to calm.
So I’ve been playing around… I thought I had it in here with me. I’ve been playing around with an Apollo Neuro, which supposedly helps regulate your heart rate variability. So when you can’t have a moment to stop and meditate, it vibrates on your wrist or wherever, but mine for me, it’s on the rest. And it helps you chill out.
Basically.
[00:20:36] Kayley Dempsey: The sound of that. So on a personal level, it’s something that really interests me, understanding like the amygdala and cortisol and the vagus nerve. Like I could read about that all day, unfortunately, I had to cut anything like that from my Brighton SEO talk because I just had so much to go through.
But I think there’s a lot around, like tapping and swaying. So, what do you call it? I can’t think– it’s all over TikTok at the moment, like opening up your hips and just rocking from side to side. I think splashing yourself with cold water as well. Yeah.
[00:21:12] Katherine Watier Ong: Or an ice pack on your chest. Right. But not, you know, yeah, anyway, I just think you could get to this revved-up state and then the rest of your life is just going to be anxious because you’ve got to calm down your overall level of rampedness from a nervous system perspective.
Singing as well…
[00:21:30] Kayley Dempsey: Oh, yes. Singing is a good.
[00:21:32] Katherine Watier Ong: Gargling. Singing is a good one. Deep breathing. Let’s see. My PT has shown me how to, if you blow on a balloon, it forces you to like blow correctly. So you could try blowing on a balloon, trying to give people tips for when they feel really ramped up.
[00:21:48] Kayley Dempsey: Can I do a shameless plug? You can help us if this is not good. So I’m really lucky that Manifesto, where I work, tries to prioritize mental health. And when we came to market with the brand Manifesto, there are nine statements that, you know, as part of our manifesto that we stand for, and one of them is pause, breathe and step away.
Like we don’t make good decisions when we’re stressed. Like it’s so important to have that distance and get perspective. And if you go to our website onto that page there’s a cheeky little Easter egg with a breathing exercise that you can do, and it just helps you breathe in and out with the circle.
So if anyone wants two minutes of breathing, you can find that on our website.
[00:22:29] Katherine Watier Ong: That’s perfect. Oh, that’s perfect. I have an app that does the same thing. You can follow the breathing. The breathing that’s really, it’s more impactful. I always blew it off. And I’m still really bad at meditation.
Hence the watch, but I do try to have the breathing in and the watch. It’s my attempt to kind of squeeze it in as much as possible.
So, what do you think was there anything that came up? Did you ask people in the survey whether or not they had coping techniques for anxiety? I forget.
[00:22:57] Kayley Dempsey: I didn’t ask in the survey, I asked people at my workplace, some of their coping techniques.
I did ask people, what is the number one thing a workplace has put in place to help your anxiety. And you know, what, what might you expect to see here? Like, Oh, I have access to a counselor, or we get a free download of this app, that sort of thing. No, the number one answer, I think just about everybody in different words said: just management who care, like a culture of openness. Like everything was basically, it’s culture, it’s culture.
It’s not like you’ve got to think preventatively and organization-wide and stop thinking that like your anxiety is your fault. Like you can do your best to have those self-preservation techniques, like gardening and singing and all of that.
But if you’re in a toxic workplace, you know, you’re, putting a damp flannel on a raging fire, aren’t you? There’s only so much you can do.
There’s different techniques like I’m sure lots of people with an interest in mental health know this. So this is like sitting calmly, naming five things you can see, four things you can touch, three things you can Smell. No, I’ve skipped hearing. If you Google five, four, three, two, one technique, it tells you the sequence to do it.
And I think one thing you can taste, and that just helps you ground like ground yourself back into the room. One that I like that’s a bit more simple is just sitting in a chair, like putting your feet on the ground and pushing your palms together. And it just brings you sort of back into your body a little bit.
Like you feel that bit of pressure, you feel where you are in the room. One last thing that helps me is statements. So things like, I’m really stressed and worried right now, and I am safe in this room. So it’s not, but it’s not like conflict in your head. It’s like this situation is worrying me and I’m going to finish work at five o’clock and be fine.
So sort of, state what the thing is, but then state something positive as an and statement, not as a but, or an or, or a what if, because your brain struggles to hold two sort of opposing ideas at the same time. And it’ll, like the idea is — start to latch onto the positive thing at the end of the statement.
And that sort of starts to calm you down a bit.
[00:25:18] Katherine Watier Ong: Yeah, I don’t, I don’t know if I have any tips for people that are in toxic work environments other than leave because life is too short, right? Like it’s hard as somebody who’s been hired to change. When I was in- house, I was the one trying to convince places that weren’t digital first to be digital first.
So like I was doing a lot of organizational change work. Damn, it is that hard. It is hard and frankly impossible a lot of the time. And so if you’re, you know, faced with. Needing to change the vibe of the company pretty significantly. And depending on where you are in the pecking order.
[00:25:57] Kayley Dempsey: Yeah. And it’s who’s on your side.
You need a stakeholder to help push it through. So if you’re like lower down, you either need a big enough group of people or someone with influence to help you push through, actually, can we change these things? If anyone is looking to build a business case in the UK, it’s 12 percent of all time off is attributed to poor mental health and not physical mental health.
So, I mean, just from a financial and productivity perspective, that’s an argument to improve the situation.
[00:26:27] Katherine Watier Ong: Right. Yeah. So have you seen organizational practices or initiatives that can help? Create less of a stressful environment like you said. Basically, out of the survey, nobody was doing anything.
[00:26:41] Kayley Dempsey: No, I think they are doing things. It’s just more the intangible than the tangible things. So things like just encouraging people to speak openly about mental health, don’t be like, Oh, that person’s up with stress. It’s like that person’s feeling a high level of stress. They’re taking a break today, and no one’s ashamed of that or looking down on them for it.
And that might be something like, at our place, we have a monthly well being session where we talk about different topics, talk about how we’re feeling, and anyone can drop in, drop out of that as they see fit. I think signposting resources. So if you’re managing someone or you have a colleague who seems to be really struggling, like tell them openly, go and take a breath.
It’s fine. Don’t worry about this deadline or that call or that, whatever. No one’s judging you for it. Prioritize yourself. And it’s just saying those kinds of things again and again, and more and more often is what starts to build this culture of sort of trust and looking after each other more so than saying.
You know, here’s an app and you can speak to an online counselor once a month.
[00:27:51] Katherine Watier Ong: Yeah, all that still seems like it’s supporting the individual like the individual can fix the anxiety completely in their own bubble. Not that those aren’t valid things to try, but I would just keep, I kept thinking about how like some of my workplace stress moments were.
The fact that it’s rare to find an organization that estimates the time involved in a project accurately. So everybody’s got this magical thing where of course I can complete two jobs worth of work with one person. Like, right? That’s been my experience over and over and over again. And it’s definitely a source of stress.
So, if organizations can’t figure that out, you can’t solve that as a person. I mean, you can say no, you could try to delegate. Maybe you could rally for resources. I actually do have a podcast where one person actually did that. But again, it’s coming back to the fact it’s, it’s hard. You would have to, how do you change the culture if they regularly think two people can, or two persons worth of work can be done by one person?
[00:28:54] Kayley Dempsey: Yeah, I think that’s the difference between anxiety and stress. Like if you’re stressed because you’re being given an impossible amount of work, then all the mental health wellbeing initiatives aren’t going to help you. Like that is a workload, like a project management kind of problem. Yeah, exactly. And unfortunately a few people in the survey did say they found agencies just so difficult to work in for reasons like that, that they went freelance for those reasons.
[00:29:22] Katherine Watier Ong: Right. So they can control the workload.
[00:29:24] Kayley Dempsey: Exactly.
[00:29:25] Katherine Watier Ong: Yeah. I was going to actually try to find the episode. It’s with Morgan Petrov. It’s actually one of the most popular episodes, but she was actually, she got hired inside an agency, just her workload got intense, and she goes through how she mapped out the hours.
And rallied for additional support. So occasionally, it can happen.
[00:29:44] Kayley Dempsey: Yes.
[00:29:45] Katherine Watier Ong: Take note if you’re in that kind of situation. So, did you get anything in relation to like leadership? So, if you’re a management, like any tips on how you could manage people more effectively, if you’re noticing anxiety, or do you have any tips around how managers could spot anxiety, maybe?
[00:30:00] Kayley Dempsey: Yeah, so the number one tip I would give is if you Google, or I don’t know if you can send a link after this, Mind Wellness at Work action plans. So Mind is a big mental health charity in the UK, and they realized that in the pandemic, everyone went remote working, and it was much harder to get back to sort of get a read on how your colleagues were doing because we were all behind screens and just can’t see each other.
So the wellness at work action plan, is a lot similar to working with me documents that I know like a lot of sort of neurodivergent people like to use to like get colleagues and everyone on the same page. And it just asks questions like, what are the things that trigger your anxiety or stress you out?
How would you like those things avoided? How do you like people to communicate with you? What signs might I see if you’re struggling? And what would you like me to do if I notice them? So in the pandemic, it was literally like. You know, the phone number to your husband, that sort of thing, or whoever you live with, because, you know, if you’re in trouble, like, how can I help now?
It might be things like. Don’t ask me if I’m okay because that will make me cry, like, give me time, like, everyone is different. Some people who are anxious will bottle up, and they won’t talk. Other people will sort of panic and spiral and talk more and more and more because they need to gain a sense of control, like, there’s no sort of obvious that is an anxious person.
The best way is to ask people if they know how it manifests in them or just watch out for general changes in behavior if someone doesn’t particularly feel like themself, ask to have a talk with them, ask how they’re getting on, how are you feeling? One of the things I talk about in my talk is that one to ones with your manager shouldn’t be just, tell me about how all your projects are doing.
It should be about how are you doing. How’s your mental well-being? Are you content here? Do you feel challenged? Do you feel stressed? I am trying to get that kind of read on people because people aren’t going to do their best work if they’re just feeling burnt out and anxious. And some people like to talk a lot about like, I’m an open book.
I’ll be like, this has happened. That’s happened. That’s happened. I’m all over the place. Other people don’t want to bring that part of themselves to work. And that is fine. Understanding what different people need and being the person that they need, I think, is the main thing to try and crack.
[00:32:28] Katherine Watier Ong: Also, as a manager, if you see that somebody, like you said, change how to change your behavior or they were performing and suddenly they’re not performing, maybe have some empathy and figure out what’s going on with the rest of their life.
I mentioned earlier on this podcast I had an employee who did that and he just wasn’t eating. It’s not like we talk like, you know, like having a snack in your drawer cause you couldn’t get up and eat frequently cause the pace was too intense. Anyway,
[00:32:51] Kayley Dempsey: That was one of the things in the survey about how people said they don’t eat well.
I’m like, you wouldn’t, not eating well, yeah, and not going outside. It’s like you wouldn’t treat your dog like that. So why would you treat yourself like that? Like look after yourself as you would look after your dog, feed yourself on time, and go for a walk.
[00:33:09] Katherine Watier Ong: You know, that was the big, one of the big things that I regained when I started my own business and I have to admit it was delightful.
Yeah, it was kind of a big thing, like eating on time and then not only like taking a walk but sometimes I can just take my laptop outside and just work outside all day, which is also delightful. But yeah, no, my schedule was so packed. I had food in my desk cause I literally. Had trouble finding time to go to the bathroom.
It was so intense.
[00:33:33] Kayley Dempsey: I know. Yeah. I’ve been there, and it’s horrible. And you look back now, and you think, why was I putting up with that? When you’re all up in it, yeah. You don’t even stop to think, is this normal? Is this okay? You’re just in it.
[00:33:49] Katherine Watier Ong: Yeah. So intense. There’s other stuff to do with your life.
So, do you have tips for? I think you sort of mentioned the difference between anxiety and stress. But do you have any tips for people to really,, evaluate their anxiety? And I know we talked about it. Okay, maybe look at your workplace and see if it’s toxic. And then make decisions. We talked about some other stuff, but then I know some people really need help.
Like, they need maybe some counseling or coaching or medication. I certainly was on a team. This is actually what encouraged me to leave when I realized that a lot of people on my team were only coping because they got medicated. Everybody needs medications for various reasons. But if the job requires you to take anti-anxiety medication and it’s just the job, then maybe you should be somewhere else.
But anyway, what tips do you have for people to evaluate and then take some action?
[00:34:39] Kayley Dempsey: I mean, you can get a standard list of questions. So if you’re experiencing like fast heart rate or sweats or nausea or unexplained aches and pains, trouble sleeping is a big one. They’re all indicators that you could be experiencing anxiety, but I would like to heavily caveat with that, that if you’re feeling any of those, go and see a medical professional. Don’t just sit on it and go. Oh, it’s probably anxiety that my heart skips a beat sometimes, like get stuff checked out properly. And I would also say a lot of people that you speak to when they start thinking, should I ask for mental health support?
Should I not? It’s so easy to leave it too late. Like getting help can take a long time, and it can be a battle. So you should like start that process sooner rather than later. And not when you’re completely burnt out, and there’s nothing left in you. Yeah, I don’t know about it in the US., but in the UK.
it can take a long time to get any kind of mental health support.
[00:35:39] Katherine Watier Ong: You know, and I also just want to mention, I know we say the pandemic’s over, it’s not over. We still have COVID-19 floating around there. And some of those symptoms are a Long COVID thing. So, Post COVID, you can have heart rate issues, anxiety, sweats, and the rest, which would mean that you have perhaps a few diagnoses.
And I know the UK is harder, but here in the US, you can get some medication that might help. So, just put that in your head, too. So yes, go to your healthcare provider. If you’ve had COVID, explain that you’ve had COVID and then explain the stuff you’ve got going on now. You should not live with it.
It’s really the, don’t live with it. You can do something about it. But yeah, That said, you can also just have anxiety without health reasons, right? Your nervous system can get ramped up just due to stress. And also, if you’re under prolonged, I should mention this. If you’re under prolonged stress, your immune system can also flip out.
So if you’ve been under, like, say you get, I don’t know, divorced or you lose somebody, and then you lose a job and then something else, you’ve had lots of stressors. That can tank your immune system, and you can start having something called Mast Cell Activation Syndrome, which causes all those symptoms, including anxiety.
It’s 1 of the sort of pathways to having this condition. So, again, if you have anxiety, get it checked out. Yeah, definitely sit on it. It could just be normal anxiety that you can control by quitting your job and starting a freelance business. Right? It could also be something that’s medically related either way.
[00:37:03] Kayley Dempsey: Another trigger can be if you’re a mother who has a child, your amygdala swells after birth that puts you on alert that I’ve got a newborn to protect, like it’s very primal and animalistic, and you can see on brain scans that remain enlarged for up to two years after your child is so you’re at a much higher risk of I say much higher risk like I’m the professional who did this research.
Like my reading of it is that you’re at a higher risk of feeling anxiety and feeling triggered because you are physically more on alert. And that is not feeling weak. That is not to say you’ve not done enough meditation. That is, your brain is wired to look for dangers in the environment right now.
[00:37:48] Katherine Watier Ong: Yeah, I was really surprised how after the post. So, I was never a sports-related person. I can’t catch a ball to save my life. But weirdly, if you’ve ever had kids, once you start having kids, if they fall, you got them, suddenly you get these great catching skills along with the whole like on alert for danger thing.
It’s very fascinating how your brain changes, but this is all the reason why women, in particular, are more at risk for immune problems. Or this ramped-up nervous system thing is because we are geared to fight off things during pregnancy. So we’re just biologically a little bit more geared towards some of these things.
Well, this has been really interesting. Have I not asked you anything about your research that you want to share?
[00:38:33] Kayley Dempsey: I don’t think so. I guess if someone were to ask is the one easy thing to like make my workplace less triggering for anxiety, I would say one thing that triggers a lot of people is saying quick catch-up in the diary and no agenda and no description, and people are just like what’s happening. So, always use a description for a meeting. Have an objective for the meeting, start it, and end it on time. If you’re running out of time at the end of the meeting, don’t just keep going because then that person has the rest of the day’s work to fit in in less time, which is going to cause more stress.
So just being vigilant about purpose descriptions and duration of meetings, I think, can ease a lot of anxiety triggers.
[00:39:16] Katherine Watier Ong: You just, you said quick catch up, and literally I got anxious. Oh, I hated those. Maybe layoffs are coming.
[00:39:28] Kayley Dempsey: Yeah. So I had one place. They, they were really good at this. To be fair. And they put in an emergency all-person meeting at 9 am the next day.
And in capital letters in the description, they put, don’t worry, your jobs are safe. And I think that was such a like they knew who they were. They knew their audience, and they responded appropriately.
[00:39:50] Katherine Watier Ong: I have never had that. I’ve had instead the opposite without your jobs are safe. Oh, those impromptu all-staff meetings are just nerve-racking.
I agree. So, we’ve shared a bunch of resources. Are there any other resources that you think would be helpful for folks?
[00:40:05] Kayley Dempsey: I think there is so much out there. I don’t know if there’s anything to direct specifically. I’m going to be sharing more data and more slides on my Twitter and on my LinkedIn. So feel free to have a look at that to, like, see about these survey results in more detail, but otherwise, like keep talking about it.
That’s the thing that’s going to have the most impact, and it’s not a taboo subject. It’s not a secret, and it’s not looked down on. We’re just speaking openly about mental health.
[00:40:36] Katherine Watier Ong: Yeah, agreed. And depending on what Slack community you’re in, some of them have channels. I know the SEO community actually has a mental health channel where you can chat with other people.
So, it’s a moment to online vent a little bit. So this has been great. How can people learn more about you?
[00:40:52] Kayley Dempsey: You can find me on LinkedIn. Kayley Dempsey, you can find me on Twitter. I think I’m on Twitter on KK Dempsey. My DMs are open. Yeah, always happy to chat more about this kind of thing. Yeah, find me there.
[00:41:04] Katherine Watier Ong: Great. That’s super useful information. Thanks for being on the show.
[00:41:08] Kayley Dempsey: No worries. It was lovely to be here.
[00:41:10] Katherine Watier Ong: Thanks so much for listening. To find out more about the podcast and what we’re up to, go to DigitalMarketingVictories.com. And if you like what you heard, subscribe to us on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.
Rate us, comment, and share the podcast, please. I’m always looking for new ideas, topics, and guests. Email us at admin at wostrategies.com or DM us on Twitter @dmvictories. Thanks for listening.
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