BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. Hello, welcome to the programme. Many people feel they're

working ever harder and ever more intensely. And it's a fact that more people say they

suffer work-related stress, depression or anxiety than in the period before the pandemic. About

one in 40 people say they're

affected by it. It's too many, so we thought we'd look at burnout and why people are having to

cope with it today. Also, though, we want to ponder on why stress might have gone up, just as the

workplace discourse generally seems to be so much more appreciative

of issues around mental health and protecting it. So what is going on? Is it the work that's

making employees feel burnt out? And why might that be getting worse? Or is it external pressures

that people are dealing with and then bringing to work? I have three

guests talk us through this. So let's meet them now. First up, Rianne and Palmer, founder and managing

director of a PR agency called Lemon. And Rian, I can't get the name Lemon. It's not spelled

like lemon, but pronounced like the fruit, right? Yes. So we had an interesting journey, actually. So I launched the company three years ago and six months in, a company with a similar name tried to sue us, so we had to rebrand, and we copyrighted the name, which is another big story. We wanted to have a really unique name, so we spout lemon phonetically. So it's L-E-M-U-H-N. L-E-M-H-N. Right. Okay. Now, that's not the subject today. In fact, we are talking about copyright next week on the bottom line. However, talk us through any personal experiences you've had of workplace, stress or anxiety. Yeah, I started Lemon for that reason entirely. I was working in a PR agency in the pandemic and PR agencies can always be quite a crazy experience. There's lots of stress and crazy work pressures. Actually, 91% of PR professionals have had mental health struggles in the past year, which is a huge number. And I was one of those people in the pandemic. Lots of my colleagues had been put on furlough and I was working 12 hour days and then I was working on the weekend and it got to the stage where I was having panic attacks and I thought I can't go on like this. I looked for a PR agency that cared about its employees and had a good work life balance and there wasn't one. So I ended up starting one and we have lots of different work place benefits in place to make sure that people enjoy their jobs.

Work shouldn't be your whole life is something I'm really passionate about. And happier employees can actually deliver better work. So if we all have a better work-life balance, then we can all have a happier life and do better work. And it's great for the economy and for people in general. Now, look, the pandemic was a weird time for all of us. And one of the crucial things we want to get to in this programme is

whether the stress that people feel is sometimes work or sometimes life that they take to work.

And have you analysed what was going on when you had those? Yeah, for me, it was definitely the

hours and the stress load because it was obviously there had been less employees. I think it was because it is a service-based industry. If people can have less employees, they're going to make more money. So that's what a big part of the industry is about, really, which is quite sad, considering then the huge presses on people's mental health. So for me, it was definitely the hours and the work side of things rather than my life at that time.

One of the other distinctions I want to get to before I move to my next guest is the difference between short-term stress that if you like is within the day and the long-term stress of discomfort about the job or insecurity in the job and anxiety about whether the job is worth it or

you're up to it or doing it properly or getting on with colleagues.

Were your stresses, were they short-term stresses?

Like it's absolute, man, I've got to get this out and, you know, at 5 o'clock and it's all rush, rush,

and everyone's shouting at each other. But then it's calm and peaceful till the next crisis. Or was it something slightly more a chronic stress in that job? It was short-term stresses, of course, within the day, but then it wasn't, you finished this thing. And then actually the next day is karma. It was like that for kind of the whole pandemic.

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