Nearly a million people in Britain reported work-related stress, depression or anxiety last year. The HSE counts it every year: 22.1 million working days lost, half of all work-related ill health. The standard response has not changed in a decade. A resilience workshop. A stress management course. An app. Advice on sleep, boundaries and breathing.

Every one of those asks the same person to do something. The person who is ill. Nobody asks what they are being asked to be resilient against, or who decided it.

Richard Murphy has given me a way to say why that matters.

Two kinds of adapting

In July, Murphy published a long piece he calls the political economy of adaptation. His starting point is biology. Every living thing survives by adapting to what is around it, and adapting has a cost. If the demands come now and then, the body recovers in between. If they never stop, it never gets back to rest, and the cost piles up. Biologists call the pile allostatic load.

Then he makes the distinction the whole argument turns on. Some adapting is just life. Illness, ageing, loss, the unexpected. Everyone gets that share. But there is a second kind, and it is not handed out by nature. It is handed out by the way we have built our institutions, which were designed with some people in mind and not others. If you fit, the world runs smoothly around you. If you don’t, you spend every day working out how to fit in, and that work is done in the body, whether or not anyone counts it.

His examples are poverty, racism, disability, neurodivergence, the long shadow of empire. His question for economics is simple. How much unnecessary adapting does this society demand, and who is made to do it?

I want to ask that question of the workplace.

Who made the decision, and who is adapting to it

Think about what actually produces the stress in the HSE figures. A restructure. A headcount cut that leaves the same work for fewer people. A target set by someone who will never do the job. Hybrid working withdrawn by memo. A rota that changes every week. A manager who was never trained. Hours that vary so much you cannot say what next month’s pay will be.

Not one of those just happens. Each is a decision, made in a boardroom, a shareholders’ meeting or the Treasury, by people who will not be adapting to it themselves.

Then the adapting is passed down. It arrives as a lunchtime webinar on managing your stress. As a line in the wellbeing strategy about building personal resilience. As a mindfulness app on the intranet. The decision stays where it was made. The cost of living with it goes to the person with the least say in it.

Nirit Cohen put it well, writing about how AI is being rolled through workplaces faster than the people inside them can absorb: “The uncertainty people feel is not a weakness. It is feedback.” That is exactly it. The distress is information about the decision. Resilience training treats it as a fault in the person receiving it.

The cost does not go away. It moves.

Murphy makes a point about wealth that I think applies just as well to seniority. Money does not only buy things. It reduces the number of decisions you have to make just to keep life running. If the car breaks, you fix it. If the income stops, there are savings. Fewer things threaten the shape of your week.

Seniority does the same at work. The further up you are, the fewer surprises reach you, and the more of the surprises you cause. The person on the zero-hours contract is running a calculation every week that the director never has to run. That calculation is adaptive work. It is exhausting, and it is invisible in every account the organisation keeps.

Except one. The body keeps its own account, and the HSE reads it once a year. Twenty-two million days is not a measure of how fragile British workers have become. It is the bill for adapting, sent to the wrong address.

We count work-related stress and we stopped asking why. Murphy’s frame is the why. The causes are decisions, and the adapting has been handed to individuals.

I know what the second kind costs

I have an energy limiting condition and brain fog. Adapting is not a concept for me. It is most of my day. A morning I planned to work and can’t, a call moved at short notice, a system that assumes I will remember what happened yesterday. Each one takes something out of a battery that does not refill on demand.

So I built my working life to demand less of it. External memory, so I do not have to hold the business in my head. A calendar that tells me what is real. A work day that starts when I can start it. None of this is me being resilient. It is me refusing to adapt to things that were never designed with me in mind, and building things that adapt to me instead.

The strange part is that everything I built for that reason works better for everyone who touches it. Notes nobody has to remember. Decisions written down where the next person can find them. Meetings with a gap after them. That is what Murphy means by institutions that adapt to the people who use them. It is not a favour to me. It is just better design, found by someone who could not afford the alternative.

What a good workplace does with this

Murphy’s answer for a good society is not one that removes adapting, because life will not allow that. It is one that reduces the unnecessary kind. Security where insecurity serves no purpose. Certainty where uncertainty achieves nothing. Institutions that adapt to people rather than the other way round.

Read that as a workplace and it is not mysterious. Hours you can plan a life around. A restructure announced with reasons, not rumours. A manager who is trained before they are given people. Confidence made by the design of the job, not demanded of the person doing it. The HSE has had a set of management standards saying much the same for twenty years. They are about the demands placed on people, not the coping skills of the people they are placed on.

That is the work I do. I don’t teach resilience. I teach people to notice what their colleagues are carrying, and to meet it with kindness, and I teach organisations that the carrying is the thing to look at. A wellbeing strategy that starts with the individual has already decided who is going to adapt.

So the next time someone offers your team a resilience course, ask two things. What are they being asked to be resilient against? And who decided that, and why aren’t they in the room?

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