The Person Who Says “I’m Fine” May Be Telling the Truth
Workplace stress can change the way you think, react and make decisions long before you realise you’re struggling.
If somebody asks how you’re doing and you say, “I’m fine,” there’s a good chance you mean it.
You’re going to work. Things are getting done. Nothing has fallen apart.
Meanwhile, you’re a bit more impatient than usual. You rush a decision because you don’t have the mental capacity for another problem. You read an email and completely misjudge the tone. You walk into your next meeting still carrying what happened in the one before it.
You probably don’t think of any of that as “not coping.”
You just keep going.
And that is where workplace stress can become difficult to recognise.
Workplace stress does not always look like someone falling apart
We tend to notice stress once it becomes obvious.
Someone is off sick. Their performance drops. They have an outburst. They tell their manager they can’t cope anymore.
But pressure can start affecting the way someone works long before any of that happens.
A person can still be productive and reliable while their patience, concentration and judgement are starting to change.
That is why some of the signs of stress at work are easy to miss.
They can look like somebody being a little more impatient than usual.
A person who normally takes their time over a decision suddenly wants everything resolved immediately.
Someone who is usually good at picking up detail starts overlooking small things.
A difficult interaction in the morning affects how they speak to somebody three hours later.
None of those things automatically mean somebody is struggling badly.
But if they are different from how that person normally operates, they are worth paying attention to.
Pressure can change your normal without you noticing
Workplace stress often builds more like heat being turned up slowly than a switch being flipped.
If the change happens gradually enough, you adapt to it.
A bit less sleep becomes normal. Then being permanently behind becomes normal. Then the shorter fuse, the mental fog and reaching the end of every day with very little left start feeling normal too.
Nothing major happened on Tuesday at 10:15 that made you suddenly “not okay.”
Your baseline just moved.
And because you are still getting through the day, you may not realise how much it has moved.
That is why I think “Am I coping?” is often the wrong question.
A much better one is:
Am I operating like myself?
If you are usually patient, are you still patient?
If you normally think things through carefully, have you started making quicker decisions just to get them off your plate?
Are you still picking up the things you normally notice?
Are you responding to what is happening now, or are you still carrying the pressure of what happened earlier?
Stress can affect how we process information, what we notice and how we make decisions.
You don’t need to know the neuroscience to recognise what that can look like at work.
A manager who is normally thoughtful becomes impatient and makes a poor call.
A safety officer who would usually double-check something decides it will probably be fine because he is exhausted.
A team leader misses something obvious because her head has been overloaded for weeks.
They have not suddenly become incompetent.
Their capacity has changed.
Why this matters for employers
We put a lot of effort into procedures, systems, equipment and controls.
Every one of them still depends on a human being using them.
And that person does not leave their stress, exhaustion or mental load at the door when they start work.
It comes into the decisions they make, the things they notice, the conversations they have and the way they respond when something goes wrong.
That is why I don’t think workplace stress belongs only in the wellbeing conversation.
There is a safety and performance conversation here too.
For HR and leadership teams, the difficulty is that you may not see a clear problem yet.
The person is still at work.
The manager is still managing.
The safety officer is still doing the checks.
The team is still hitting deadlines.
And then something starts changing.
There is more conflict than usual. A normally reliable person starts making odd mistakes. A manager becomes unusually reactive. Decisions get rushed. Somebody withdraws. Absence starts creeping up.
By the time those things become obvious enough to demand attention, the pressure may have been building for quite some time.
That is why earlier recognition matters.
It gives the person themselves a chance to notice what is happening.
It gives managers a better chance of having a useful conversation.
And it gives teams something more practical to work with than waiting until somebody finally says, “I can’t cope.”
Why I created Human Safety Under Pressure
Human Safety Under Pressure came out of a serious workplace incident involving an employee who ultimately died by suicide.
I do not believe we can look backwards after something terrible happens and assume we could have known exactly what somebody was going to do.
We cannot.
But it left me with questions I have never really stopped asking.
What happens before somebody reaches crisis?
What changes?
Who notices?
Does the person themselves realise how far their normal has shifted?
And if the people around them do notice something is different, do they know what to do with that information?
Those questions became part of the foundation for Human Safety Under Pressure.
It is a 60-minute practical workshop for employees, supervisors, team leaders and managers.
We look at what sustained pressure can do to perception, behaviour and decision-making, and how to recognise when your own baseline has started to move.
People learn four regulation tools they can use in real time, including in the middle of a working day. We also look at how to reset after a high-pressure event instead of carrying it straight into the next task, meeting or conversation.
And because pressure rarely affects just one person in isolation, the workshop gives teams a shared way of talking about it.
A manager can notice that somebody is not operating like themselves and know how to check in without trying to diagnose them.
An employee can recognise, “I am functioning, but I am not at my normal baseline,” and have something practical they can do before that pressure follows them into the next decision.
A team can start noticing these changes earlier instead of only talking about them afterwards.
That is what I want people to leave with.
Not more information about stress.
Something they can actually use when the pressure is happening.
Why have this conversation now?
September is Suicide Prevention Month, which gives organisations a very relevant reason to talk about what happens before somebody reaches crisis.
That does not mean stress, irritability, exhaustion or somebody behaving differently means they are suicidal.
They do not.
We also cannot expect managers or colleagues to predict suicide.
But we can make it easier for people to recognise when something has changed and know what to do next.
And this is where I would challenge HR, Safety and leadership teams to look at what is happening in their own organisation.
Are you seeing people under sustained pressure?
Managers becoming more reactive?
People pushing through exhaustion because they are still technically coping?
Teams carrying one difficult situation straight into the next?
People noticing that a colleague “isn’t themselves” but not really knowing what to do about it?
If any of that sounds familiar, Human Safety Under Pressure is probably worth a conversation.
The workshop can be delivered in person or online, and the 60-minute format makes it easy to include in a Wellness Day, safety programme, leadership initiative or standalone team session.
If you want to see whether it would be useful for your organisation, get in touch with me at ann@flagacademy.co.za or 078 458 5338, I’ll send you the workshop outline and talk you through how it could work for your team.
Sometimes “I’m fine” is completely true.
The more useful question is whether “fine” still looks like you.
In your corner
Ann
Ann du Plessis is a human safety specialist and the founder of FLAG Academy. She works with organisations, schools and individuals to build practical skills for physical, emotional and psychological safety.
Her work focuses on what happens to people under pressure: how stress can affect judgement, behaviour, communication and decision-making, and how to recognise those changes before they start creating bigger problems.
Through workshops such as Human Safety Under Pressure, Ann helps employees, managers and teams understand their own warning signs, regulate in real time and notice when someone around them may no longer be operating like themselves.
Her wider work includes psychological safety, self-defense, GBV prevention, anti-bullying and personal safety. Across all of these areas, the same question sits underneath her work: what helps people recognise risk, respond effectively and know what to do when something does not feel right?
Ann holds a black belt in Goju Ryu Karate and has a background in trauma-informed coaching. Her approach combines practical safety skills, human behaviour and lived experience to help people and organisations move beyond awareness and respond more effectively when pressure is high.