This piece was written by Dr. Kizzy Gandy, Partner at Jacaranda Partners

Australian GPs are reporting a sharp rise in patients presenting with workplace-related mental health problems. A January 2026 poll by the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) found that 82% of GPs had seen an increase in patients seeking medical certificates for work-related depression, stress, or anxiety over the past two years — and lodgements to the Fair Work Commission, Australia’s national workplace tribunal, hit a 14-year high in 2023–24, up 27% in a single year.

The standard explanation points to the usual culprits: doing more with less, toxic management, always-on culture. But when I ran a short survey two years ago asking people about their work habits and health, the findings pointed somewhere less expected.

The strongest predictor of having experienced physical or mental health problems caused by work stress wasn’t how hard people worked, how much their job defined them, or how much they thought about work outside of hours. It was how much they worried about money.

What the survey asked

The survey was simple — eight questions, three minutes. I posted it on LinkedIn, which matters for how you interpret the results: the 121 respondents (90 female, 30 male, 1 other – average age 42) self-selected from my professional network. It asked respondents how often they worked to the best of their ability, how much their job defined their identity, how much they thought about work outside hours, how goal-attentive they were in life generally, whether they’d ever had health problems they attributed to work stress or being overworked, how much they worried about their financial situation, and their gender and age.

Shockingly, 83% said they had experienced physical or mental health problems they believed were caused by work stress or being overworked. That figure almost certainly overstates the true rate in the general workforce, given who was likely to click on a survey about work and health in the first place. Even so, it points to something real about the population who showed up.

What the data showed

Statistical analysis of the factors associated with work stress-related health problems showed the strongest predictor was financial worry. The more people worried about their financial situation, the more likely they were to have experienced health problems they attributed to work stress.

Being highly goal-attentive in life generally was also associated with work stress-related health problems, though less strongly.

What wasn’t associated with work stress-related health problems? How hard people worked. How much their job defined their identity. How much they thought about work when they weren’t working. Gender. Age. None of these made a meaningful difference.

What this means

The financial worry finding aligns with what GPs are seeing on the frontline. RACGP’s Dr Karen Spielman, commenting on the recent poll, pointed directly to “financial distress” and “employment insecurity” as factors behind the spike in workplace mental health presentations. The survey gives that clinical observation some quantitative backing: financial worry appears to be independently linked to work stress-related health problems even when you account for other factors.

Part of what makes this finding important is that financial worry impairs work performance. The Money and Mental Health Policy Institute reports that around a third of employees believe financial concerns are preventing them from performing their best at work, and that seven in ten have spent time during the working day worrying about their finances. When cognitive bandwidth is consumed by money anxiety, there is simply less capacity left for the concentration, decision-making, and resilience that demanding jobs require. Work becomes harder, errors more likely, and the sense of being overwhelmed more acute — creating a feedback loop between financial stress and work stress.

This has real implications for how organisations and governments approach worker health. Most wellbeing initiatives focus on flexible working, psychological safety, and workload management. Those aren’t wrong priorities. But if financial stress is doing much of the damage — and doing it partly by making work itself harder to cope with — then pay levels, employment security, and pay transparency may matter more.

The goal-attentive finding is also worth taking seriously. Driven people carry a health cost in organisations without boundaries. In a separate piece on how cognitive boundaries in knowledge organisations unlock productivity and wellbeing, I argue that these workers are disproportionately vulnerable to poor workplace structures: without clear boundaries around what “enough” looks like, they tend to compensate for organisational dysfunction by working harder and longer, compounding the risk of work stress-related health problems. Organisations that depend on driven people have a particular responsibility to protect them — not just benefit from them.

Conclusion

This was a self-selected LinkedIn sample so the findings should be treated as suggestive, not definitive. What the analysis can offer is a prompt.

The factors most commonly associated with burnout — working too hard, letting work define your identity, being unable to switch off — weren’t significant predictors of work stress-related health problems in this sample. Financial worry was, and strongly so. What drives that worry will differ across workplaces. For some workers it will be primarily material — wages that haven’t kept pace, rising costs, genuine economic precarity. For others it may have as much to do with how their workplace operates: whether job security feels real, whether development is supported, whether expectations are achievable. The survey can’t tell us which. But it does suggest that anyone serious about worker wellbeing should be asking the question.

Thanks to Dr Thi Hao (Hannah) Nguyen for the statistical analysis.

Methodology notes: For regression analysis, 'unsure' responses were treated as missing. Financial worries odds ratio = 4.32, p = 0.001. Goal-attentive odds ratio = 3.74, p = 0.02.