Individuals
When the exposure is not chemical. Psychosocial hazard is one of the five recognised classes of occupational hazard — and the least often measured.
The picture
Threat, survive, recover. That is the sequence the human stress response was built for, and it works well when there is a recovery phase at the end of it. Modern work removes the recovery phase. The email, then the meeting, then the commute, then the family, then the phone at eleven at night — each one small, none of them a lion, and no point at which the body is given permission to stand down.
The consequence has a name in the literature: allostatic load. The cumulative physiological cost of adapting, over and over, without full recovery. It is measurable through composite biomarkers, it is well documented in occupational cohorts, and it is almost never assessed in an ordinary health check.
This is not a conversation about resilience or mindset. It is a conversation about physiology, and about a workplace that is producing it.
What this looks like
Long before anyone uses the word, the physiology has usually started shifting.
How I work
The point of this consultation is to turn something that gets treated as a mood into something with numbers attached.
Hours, autonomy, recovery time, shift pattern, availability expectations, caregiving load, and what changed before the symptoms did.
Circadian pattern, metabolic and cardiovascular markers, and where appropriate the composite indicators of cumulative load — with an honest account of what each can and cannot show.
In that order. Interventions that only support the physiology while the exposure continues are treating a symptom.
Tell me what your week actually looks like and how long it has looked like that.
Get in touch
Message me on WhatsApp with what's been happening and how long it's been going on. Writing on behalf of an organisation? Send your sector, headcount and sites.