LoveBetter

Here is a set of numbers worth sitting with. Employers worldwide spent an estimated 53.3 billion US dollars on workplace wellness in 2024, according to the Global Wellness Institute. In 2014, a quarter of American employees strongly agreed their organisation cared about their wellbeing; by May this year that had fallen to one in five, and Gallup's daily-stress figure climbed over the same period from 40 to 50 percent. More money, more programmes, worse outcomes. Writing in CEOWORLD magazine this weekend, advisor Alessandra Edwards names the gap precisely: we have spent a decade investing in wellbeing, and almost nothing on biology. An Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre analysis of more than 46,000 UK workers found that people who did the standard offerings, resilience training, mindfulness apps, were no better off than those who did nothing at all.

Edwards draws a distinction I wish every executive committee in this country had to write out by hand: capability versus capacity. Capability is the toolkit, the judgment and skill a leader has built over a career. Capacity is whether the body carrying that toolkit can actually deploy it today, and again tomorrow. Organisations spend fortunes on capability. Capacity they outsource to the individual, with a meditation app and a fruit basket as the support structure.

I want to take her argument one layer deeper, from the room I work in. Because before you even get to blood sugar and hormonal shifts, there is a more basic biological fact: a person whose nervous system has been running on alert for years cannot absorb a wellness tool. She cannot meditate her way out of a threat state her body considers accurate. I work with professional women who have read the books, done the apps, attended the resilience workshop, and can describe their own patterns with painful clarity, and who still lie awake at 3am with their heart pounding as if something is chasing them. Nothing is chasing them. That is the point. The alarm system itself has been left on so long it has become the default setting. No app reaches that. It was never designed to.

Let me be honest about the tools, because I use regulation practices in my own work and I am not against them. Breathing exercises, mindfulness, movement, sleep hygiene: all of these are genuinely useful, in the right order. Edwards says she addresses the underlying biology first and introduces the tools once it is stable. My clinical version of that sentence is this: regulation first, then performance. A breathing exercise taught to a settled nervous system is a skill. The same exercise taught to a depleted one is a homework assignment from a system that does not understand why she is tired. The Oxford data is what the wrong order looks like at scale, 46,000 people being handed tools for a state nobody assessed.

There is a particularly South African layer to this, and it falls hardest on women. The professional woman in Tshwane or Joburg who is 'coping' is often running a second and third shift the wellness survey never asks about: the household, the children, the family members her salary quietly carries, the commute, the vigilance that is simply the cost of moving through this country as a woman. Her capacity is not a personal failure of self-care. It is a biological budget being spent by three employers, only one of which pays her. When her company then reports that the wellness programme has low engagement, the insult is complete: her depletion, rebranded as her disinterest.

So what would it look like to take capacity seriously? Edwards offers boards three moves, and they translate cleanly. Fix the biology before layering on the tools: give people access to individual, qualified, confidential assessment of where their system actually is, sleep, stress physiology, hormonal health, nervous-system state, before prescribing anything generic. Plan for capacity the way you plan for capability: before the brutal financial year or the big transformation, ask not only whether the team has the skills but whether the bodies carrying those skills can sustain the effort, and build recovery into the plan the way serious sports teams do. And audit every line item: for each wellness spend, name the specific problem it solves and for whom. 'Stress management for everyone' is not an answer. It is the absence of one.

I would add a fourth, from the consulting room. Make it safe to be honest early. The woman who is running empty has usually known it for a long time before anyone at work does, and she has usually said nothing, because in most organisations the honest sentence 'I am not coping' still reads as a career decision. The cheapest capacity intervention ever devised is a culture where a person can raise her hand at 70 percent empty instead of collapsing at zero. That costs no budget. It only costs the performance of caring less than actually caring.

53.3 billion dollars bought a lot of apps. The next decade's returns will come from a less glamorous investment: checking the body before handing it tools, and treating the human capacity of the people who run the business as seriously as their job descriptions. Your best performer is not a brain with a laptop. She is a biology with a mortgage on her attention. Invest accordingly.

This is a commentary, not clinical advice or a claim about any individual client. News links are starting points, not endorsements of every statistic in the source stories.

Source: https://ceoworld.biz/2026/09/27/weve-spent-a-decade-investing-in-wellbeing-we-havent-invested-in-biology/