How to Improve Your Mental Health as a Marketer

Looking after one’s mental health should always be a priority, but ever since 2020, it has become more difficult for people to keep their minds healthy. If you work in marketing, you know how difficult it can be to stay on top of your work assignments and your mental health.

Marketers have very demanding jobs. Having to deal with creating campaigns and always presenting a business and its products in the best possible light can be draining at times. If you want to stay focused and learn some tips to improve your mental health, you’ve come to the right place.

Why Mental Health Matters

A person’s psychological, emotional, and social well-being can all be grouped together to describe what mental health is. And mental health affects how we feel, think, relate to other people, handle stress and negative emotions, and even make choices.

No matter what stage of life you’re in, mental health is very important because it allows you to:

• Cope with stress
• Cultivate and maintain good relationships
• Be a contributing member of your community
• Realize your full potential, both privately and professionally
• Be physically healthy

A lot of people disregard the fact that physical and mental health go hand in hand, but mental disorders can actually raise your risk of having physical health problems. Not taking care of your mental health can lead to heart disease, type two diabetes, and strokes, just to name a few.

As for realizing your full potential, no matter what industry you’re in, bad mental health will only cause you problems and won’t allow you to be as efficient as you could be.

As a marketer, you know the importance of efficiency and the ability to cope with stress. If you don’t have either of those qualities, your work will suffer.

Issues Marketers Face on a Day to Day Basis

Marketing is a rewarding job, but it can often be a real challenge to get through your daily responsibilities. Dealing with a lot of pressure and stress is just the tip of the iceberg and there are many things that have an influence on mental health for marketers:

• Incorrect feedback collection and analysis methods that cause you to draw the wrong conclusions
• Inaccurate data that doesn’t show the full picture of what’s going on
• Lack of marketing budgets which in 2021 has plummeted to only 6.4% of overall company revenue
• Creative blockages that can influence entire marketing campaigns and lead to a decrease in revenue
• The inability to distinguish quality traffic from bad traffic
• Information overload and overwhelming data that make it difficult to process everything
• Deciding which tools and technology are the best choices for their business and which ones would be a waste of money
• Working long hours and dealing with inconsistent work schedules and poor time management

These issues are pretty much the same for every marketer everywhere, and they occur much more often than one would think. Therefore, marketers need to pay close attention to their mental health and not overpromise when they’re already struggling to deliver.

Mental Health Tips for Marketers

Work is important, but it shouldn’t be something that makes you suffer. You need to take care of your mental health at work if you want to be the best version of yourself. 

Here are some tips on how to do that.

Check your workload

Burnout can happen to anyone and the number of workers that have to deal with it keeps rising every year. Burnout can lead to a lot of mental health issues, and studies show that as many as 75% of workers have experienced burnout at some point.

To prevent it from happening to you, check your workload regularly to see if it’s manageable or overwhelming. We often think that we can take on more work than we can handle, so try to be as realistic as possible. See if there are any tasks that you can remove, delay, or deprioritize.

When you check your workload, decide what tasks are a priority and what tasks you can say no to because they’re not essential. When you do this, your stress levels will decrease significantly.

Take back control and draw the line

You can’t predict how your audience will respond to your content. But, no matter how good you think it is, at some point you’re probably going to see some type of backlash and negative comments. Abusive language has become common, especially nowadays when marketers use the internet to promote products and services.

This can become rather overwhelming. If it happens, you need to draw the line and think about how to improve mental health. Establish a response protocol that will detail how you and your team will deal with delicate situations and not get stressed about them.

When you feel yourself getting too overwhelmed, step out of the office, get away from technology, and have a break where you won’t think about the campaign at all. And, when your campaigns receive backlash or negative comments, remember that they’re not directed towards you.

There’s life beyond work

You might love your job or maybe you just see it as a way to support yourself. Whatever the situation for you is, if you find yourself thinking about work too much, even outside of working hours, or taking on extra shifts, you need to remember one thing:

There is life beyond work, no matter if you love or hate your job. The things worth living for are your friends, family, free time, and hobbies. If you give your all to your work, you will waste a lot of time and energy focusing on projects when you could be spending quality time with the people you love, doing the things you enjoy.

Of course, sometimes there are valid reasons for putting in the extra hours. But that should never be the norm, rather it should be seen as an exception to the rule. If you forget that there’s life beyond work, burnout is imminent.

Ask for help

Most of the time, people in workplaces don’t have enough courage to speak up about their mental health issues because they fear they will be shamed and discriminated against. But the stigma around mental health has to be eradicated and people should feel free to talk about it.

When you talk about what you’re feeling, it’s not a sign that you’re weak. Rather, it’s a sign that you want to take care of your wellbeing and that you care about your health and happiness. Always speak up if something’s bothering you and be open with your colleagues.

One of the best habits to improve mental health is to talk about the pressures you’re dealing with freely without feeling any shame.

Stay Sane

Mental health for marketers is a very important issue we shouldn’t ignore. Marketing professionals deal with a lot of stress daily and that can cause some serious problems. 

If you’re feeling signs of burnout, can’t seem to reach your full potential, or are having health problems, it’s time to pay attention.

Pro Tip: Ask your HR department to run periodical mental health surveys in the company. Here’s a mental health questionnaire template that they can use to collect responses.

Don’t think that you’re weak if you want to take care of your mental health. Your health and safety always need to come first. Be safe and stay sane. Both your work and your loved ones will be grateful you did. As for that campaign? Relax. You can always come back to it.

Load more...