That invisible effort

Talking about health in the workplace is not easy. In the same way, it is not easy to manage deadlines, business trips, and family responsibilities when everything overlaps: daughters and sons, parents, one’s own health. It happens when a partner needs to stop and take care of themselves, when parents are no longer self-sufficient, and children need to be driven to sports practice, taken to the dentist, or picked up after a night out with friends.

The result is a widespread feeling of pressure: on one side, commitments, family, elderly parents; on the other, work that never stops — calls, meetings, video calls, emails, colleagues. It is precisely this condition that gave rise to the expression “the sandwich generation”: my generation, the one caught in the middle, expected to provide stability and certainty while, too often, struggling just to stay afloat — and doing so silently. From this silent struggle often comes a form of distress that is difficult to explain and hard to share, even with the people closest to us. It is a skill we had never developed and that has suddenly become a priority: a completely new way of organizing our lives, one that cannot be solved simply through workplace arrangements, but requires much more; a new issue tied to welfare and health that is becoming increasingly urgent in an ageing society.

This condition generates anxiety and a constant feeling of racing against time: between traffic, unexpected problems always around the corner, and increasingly complex schedules, every day becomes a challenge. If once the goal was to carve out time for ourselves, now time itself has suddenly become our greatest enemy. Even taking a break can feel frustrating, because it comes with the awareness that there is probably something urgent we have forgotten to do. And all of this happens in silence, hidden from view. Faced with this pressure, the most common reaction is not to ask for help. We withdraw into ourselves, avoiding sharing a burden we want to keep entirely our own. Yet this very lack of openness contributes to the absence of support and understanding in the workplace. And this is certainly not just a matter of remote working: reducing the issue to a working arrangement means overlooking a much deeper need for care, support, and practical tools.

Unable to find answers, unwilling to share our worries and responsibilities, we choose to hide them, because we do not want them to affect our professional relationships or our everyday work. We live with the fear that a younger colleague may not understand, just as our children often do not; that our manager may see it as a sign of weakness; that our career could suffer; that even our results and performance might decline. On issues so intimate and personal, the absence of dialogue and open discussion can also create tension and misunderstanding.

We tend to forget that companies are made up of people, each with a personal story and a complex life that extends far beyond the walls of the office. In this context, sharing is not simply a form of emotional release, but a way to overcome the feeling of isolation: discovering that others are experiencing similar dynamics and concerns transforms an individual burden into a shared awareness, from which reassurance and collective solutions can emerge.

For this reason, it is meaningful to read, in this issue, so many experiences and projects connected to caregivers, mental health, wellbeing, and disability: they represent a concrete response. At this point, however, an individual effort is also required: stepping out of invisibility, opening a dialogue, and crossing boundaries that until now have remained unexplored — for ourselves, and above all for others.