Think about what a workplace usually provides when someone is struggling. A manager who notices the dip. An HR team with a policy. Sick pay. A colleague who asks, quietly, whether you are alright.

This year’s International Stress Awareness Week, running 2 to 6 November, asks employers to “rehumanise the workplace”. It is a good ask. But a great many people reading it have no employer to ask.

If you run your own business, freelance, or hold a small company up largely by yourself, you are the workplace. You are also the manager, the HR department and the occupational health service. On the days you are running on empty, all three of them are busy answering emails.

What the figures say

The Health and Safety Executive estimates that 964,000 workers in Great Britain had work-related stress, depression or anxiety in 2024/25, the highest figure on record, with 22.1 million working days lost. Rates are around a quarter higher among women.

For small business owners, the picture is just as stark. A Simply Business survey of 749 owners, run with Mind’s Mental Health at Work programme, found that 56 percent had experienced poor mental health in the previous twelve months, and one in three worked more than 46 hours a week. Half (51 percent) did not feel comfortable giving poor mental health as the reason for an absence or a missed deadline. A YouGov survey for Start Up Loans found that 44 percent of smaller business owners had felt lonely or isolated, and nearly two thirds felt the constant mental load of being responsible for their business.

The business surveys are self-reported and come from organisations with an interest in small business, so read them as a picture rather than a diagnosis. The HSE figures are official statistics. The direction is the same in all of them.

Why it goes unnoticed

The person best placed to see the strain is the person least able to step back from it. There is no one to hand the work to, no one to cover, and no statutory sick pay for the self-employed. So you keep going, and you tell the one person who might ask that you are fine. It is the same quiet pattern we wrote about in May, the high-functioning woman who is fine until she is not, with one difference. She has no one whose job it is to wonder.

Be your own occupational health department

None of this is glamorous, and all of it is easier to write than to do.

1. Set a finish line. Choose a time when the laptop closes on most days and treat it like a client you cannot let down.

2. Take a real lunch break. Away from the screen, sitting down, eating something that took a little thought. Lunch at the desk is not a break.

3. Choose one honest person. Not a network. One person who gets the true answer to “how are you?”

4. Write yourself a sick policy. Decide in advance what you will do on a day you are ill, because without one you will decide mid-illness to carry on.

5. Book the recovery. Put rest in the diary with the same seriousness as a meeting.

If low mood, anxiety or poor sleep has lasted for weeks, please see your GP. That is not a failure of resilience. It is using the service you pay for.

A word from us

We run a small business, and we know this from the inside. We are not saying it to sell you anything. We are saying it because it is true, and because almost nobody says it to the people it describes.

Running a business pushes the basics down the list, and meals are usually the first to go. A varied, balanced diet is the foundation, and no supplement replaces it. Within that, B vitamins contribute to the reduction of tiredness and fatigue, to normal psychological function and to the normal functioning of the nervous system. Our Vitamin B Complex is there for the weeks when the diet is not as varied as you would like. That is all we claim for it.

To end

Nobody is coming to check on you. That is the hard part. The good part is that you are allowed to be the one who does.

Check in on yourself this week, properly. Then tell one person the answer.

Food supplements should not be used as a substitute for a varied and balanced diet and a healthy lifestyle.

Sources

ISMA. International Stress Awareness Week 2026. isma.org.uk

Health and Safety Executive. Health and Safety at Work: Summary Statistics for Great Britain 2025. hse.gov.uk

British Safety Council. Work-Related Stress, Anxiety and Depression Reach Record High, HSE Stats Show. britsafe.org, 2025.

Simply Business. Mind Your Business: Small Business Owners and Mental Health. simplybusiness.co.uk

YouGov for Start Up Loans. Almost Half of UK Smaller Business Leaders Feel Isolated. Derbyshire Times, 5 December 2025.