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“There’s still a way through.”
It may be one of the most common ways we minimise psychological strain. You have been sleeping badly for weeks, feel more irritable than usual, cancel plans more often and notice that even a free weekend no longer leaves you feeling properly rested. At the same time, you still get up in the morning, go to work, answer emails, buy groceries and take care of the things that need to be done.
As long as all of that still works, it is easy to assume that things cannot be that serious.
Maybe there is simply a lot going on at the moment. Once this project is finished, things will calm down. After the holiday, everything will probably feel different. And other people have much bigger problems anyway.
Sometimes those thoughts are perfectly reasonable. Not every difficult week requires professional support. It becomes more interesting when one difficult week turns into several difficult months – and our sense of what is still “normal” quietly shifts along with it.
Research has repeatedly shown that people often delay seeking psychological or psychiatric support. This is not simply because services are unavailable or because people fear being judged. A large international study published in 2025 found another important barrier: even among people who recognised that they might need treatment, many still felt that their problem was not serious enough. More than half of those who perceived a need for treatment but did not receive it reported low perceived severity as a barrier.
That is a striking finding because it describes something very ordinary. We do not have to believe that we are doing well. Sometimes it is enough to believe that we are not doing badly enough.
As Long as We Can Still Function
Psychological strain rarely has a clear beginning. There is usually no particular morning when you wake up and know with certainty that something has changed.
More often, everyday life shifts gradually. It takes longer to wind down in the evening. Thoughts about Monday begin earlier on Sunday. Tasks that once happened almost automatically now require noticeable concentration. After work, there is less energy left for exercise, friends or anything that does not absolutely have to be done.
Each change is easy to explain on its own. It has been a busy week. Work is stressful. Sleep has been poor. Only when you look back over several weeks does it sometimes become clear that a few difficult days have turned into a pattern.
We can also become accustomed to feeling worse. What seemed unusual in the first month may simply feel like everyday life by the third. Someone who used to go out several evenings a week and now spends most evenings recovering on the sofa may eventually stop experiencing that change as a change at all. It has simply become normal.
Being able to function can make this even harder to notice. The work gets done. Appointments are kept. Perhaps hardly anyone around you notices anything unusual. But functioning says surprisingly little about how much effort it now requires.
You can perform reliably at work and have nothing left afterwards. You can concentrate in meetings while barely sleeping at night. You can be attentive and friendly with other people and find yourself unusually impatient once you get home. What others tend to see is whether you are still managing your responsibilities. They rarely see how much it costs you to do so.
People who are used to being reliable can often compensate for strain for a remarkably long time. They organise more carefully, reduce their social life, sleep less or invest additional effort to make sure that as little as possible slips.
The fact that everyday life is still running is not always proof that everything is fine. Sometimes it only shows how much effort is currently going into keeping it running.
Why Asking for Help Can Feel Like a Last Resort
Most people try to deal with difficulties themselves first. That is normal and often useful. Many difficult periods do pass, and not every period of stress requires therapy.
The problem begins when an unspoken rule develops. Instead of “I’ll first see what I can do myself,” it becomes: “I am only allowed to ask for help once I have proved that I really cannot manage this alone.”
Support then starts to feel like failure.
We often approach other areas of life much more pragmatically. Asking an expert about a complicated tax issue does not mean that you have failed at doing your taxes. Seeing a physiotherapist for persistent pain does not require first proving that every possible self-help strategy has failed. Companies regularly bring in external expertise without concluding that nobody internally knows how to do their job.
With psychological support, however, another question often appears in the background: Am I really doing badly enough to justify this?
Perhaps that is not the most useful question.
A more practical one might be: Is what I am doing now actually helping?
If more sleep, taking a weekend off, exercising, distracting yourself or talking to friends has not changed much for quite some time, that is useful information. It is not a diagnosis. But it is information worth taking seriously.
“Other People Have It Much Worse”
Few thoughts are better at making our own difficulties seem smaller than comparing ourselves with someone who appears to be struggling more.
And the problem is that this comparison can almost always be won.
If you are still working, you can compare yourself with someone on sick leave. If you are sleeping badly, you can think of someone with severe depression. If getting to work every morning has become exhausting, you can remind yourself that some people cannot get out of bed at all.
There will almost always be somebody in a more difficult situation. That tells us very little about whether our own situation deserves attention.
We understand this easily with physical problems. A broken finger does not become less broken because someone else has broken a leg. With psychological strain, we seem to find the same logic much harder to apply to ourselves.
There is also the question of how other people might react. Mental health is discussed much more openly today than it was a few decades ago, but stigma has not disappeared. The World Health Organization continues to identify stigma as a barrier to seeking care, and one of the largest systematic reviews on the subject found an overall negative relationship between mental-health stigma and help-seeking.
Stigma does not always look like an openly hostile belief that people with mental-health problems are weak. It can be much quieter. Not wanting to be seen differently at work. Feeling that your problems are too minor for counselling. Knowing that you would immediately understand if a close friend needed support while judging yourself for needing exactly the same thing.
Sometimes it even sounds sensible: “I don’t want to take a place away from someone who needs it more.” “This is a bad time for my team.” “Maybe I’ll feel better next week.”
All of those things might be true. They can also allow a temporary problem to become something you learn to live around for months.
Support Does Not Begin With a Diagnosis
Part of the difficulty may lie in what we imagine when we hear the word “help”. It quickly brings to mind therapy, a diagnosis or a serious mental-health condition.
There is a large space between “I’m fine” and “I need psychotherapy”.
Support might begin with honestly telling someone you trust that the past few weeks have been more difficult than usual. If the problem is closely related to work, it may mean discussing a specific source of strain with a manager. Psychological counselling can help someone make sense of a situation without any diagnosis being present. A general practitioner can be a useful first point of contact for persistent psychological or physical symptoms. And if symptoms continue or interfere significantly with everyday life, a psychological or psychiatric assessment may be appropriate.
Not every option fits every situation. The more useful idea is that support does not have to begin only once everyday life has fallen apart.
A sensible time to pay closer attention may be easier to identify by looking at change over time rather than asking how bad a particular day feels.
Am I sleeping worse than I was a few weeks ago? Am I withdrawing more? Do ordinary tasks require noticeably more energy? Can I still recover after stressful periods? Are there still times when the issue is not running in the background of my mind?
One difficult Tuesday is not a reason to diagnose yourself. But several weeks in which work, sleep, relationships and recovery all begin to feel different deserve at least a closer look.
A Small Exercise: What Would You Tell Someone Else?
There is a simple way to look at your own situation from a little more distance.
Imagine that someone you care deeply about tells you about their past two weeks. The only difference is that they describe exactly what you have experienced: how they have been sleeping, how mornings feel, how much energy work takes, whether they have been withdrawing from other people, what they still think about after work and which things they have started avoiding.
What would you tell them?
Perhaps you would genuinely say that a stressful period is not automatically a reason for concern and that they should give it a little more time.
But perhaps you would suggest talking to someone. Changing something in their situation. Or getting some support.
Write down your advice in two or three sentences. Do not try to sound particularly wise or psychological. Write what you would actually say to someone you care about.
Then read those sentences again and ask yourself one question:
Why should a different standard apply to you?
That does not mean you need to begin therapy tomorrow. Perhaps the result is simply a conversation, a small change in everyday life or a decision to pay closer attention to how you are doing over the next few weeks.
But a reasonable time to look more closely often comes well before the point when nothing works anymore.
Sometimes the important realisation is simply this:
Things are still manageable. But they have not felt genuinely okay for quite some time.
Sources and Further Reading
Viana, M. C., Kazdin, A. E., Harris, M. G. et al. (2025). Barriers to 12-month treatment of common anxiety, mood, and substance use disorders in the World Mental Health surveys. International Journal of Mental Health Systems, 19, 6. DOI: 10.1186/s13033-024-00658-2.
Grosselli, L., Baumgärtel, J., Böhm, H., Hoyer, J. & Knappe, S. (2025). When Knowledge Falls Short: A Systematic Review on the Correlation of Mental Health Knowledge With Stigma and Help-Seeking. Mental Health Science, 3, e70022. DOI: 10.1002/mhs2.70022.
Clement, S. et al. (2015). What is the impact of mental health-related stigma on help-seeking? A systematic review of quantitative and qualitative studies. Psychological Medicine, 45(1), 11–27.
World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe. Information on mental-health stigma, discrimination and access to care.
OECD (2026). The Economic Case for Preventing Mental Ill Health.
