Young Workers Feel Better, But 71% Skip Needed Stress Leave

This month's World Mental Health Day brought young workers a headline that looks like good news and a number that spoils it. According to Deloitte's World Mental Health Day release of its annual survey of more than 22,500 Gen Z and millennial workers across 44 countries, 63% of Gen Zs now rate their mental health as good — a sharp rise from 52% a year earlier. Yet when it came to the stress leave they said they needed, most never took it: seven in ten said they needed time off because of stress, but only 41% actually stepped away.

That disconnect is the real story of this year's findings. Young workers report feeling better than they did in 2025, and most say their workplaces take mental well-being seriously. But needing a stress-related break still feels, for many, like an admission they cannot afford to make. Among those who did take the time off, one in five lied about why.

The Numbers Behind the Stigma

The improvement is real. In 2025, barely half of Gen Z respondents rated their mental health as good; this year nearly two-thirds do, and 34% say they feel stressed most or all of the time, down from 40%. Around nine in ten still feel stressed or anxious at least some of the time, and nearly half describe themselves as burned out — so the progress is partial. But the direction is unmistakable: workplaces appear to be taking the issue more seriously, with 69% of respondents saying their employer genuinely cares about mental health and 72% confident they would not face discrimination for raising concerns. The odd part is what that goodwill has not fixed: all that support has yet to translate into people actually taking stress leave.

Here is the counterpoint that undercuts the cheer. Needing help is one thing; being seen needing it is another. Gen Z workers were more likely than millennials to say they needed stress leave and less likely to take it, and 21% of those who did take the break told their employer a different story about where they were going. The fear is not only of being judged. Long working hours and a lack of recognition top the list of job-related stressors, with Gen Zs specifically saying they do not have enough time to get their work done. When the workload already makes you feel behind, asking for stress leave can feel like handing the office evidence.

The data hints at a pressure cooker of the quiet kind. Financial worries — long-term security, family welfare, day-to-day bills — remain the leading drivers of stress overall, and around three in ten stressed workers point to work itself as a major contributor. None of this is loud or dramatic. It is the ordinary grind of being early in a career while the cost of everything climbs, compounded by the sense that admitting exhaustion will mark you as the problem rather than the symptom.

Digital Fatigue and the Always-On Job

Part of what is grinding people down is not the work at all, but the way the work arrives. More than half of Gen Z respondents — 58% — say they regularly experience digital fatigue, with 54% of millennials saying the same. The tools that promised to lighten the load have multiplied into a constant hum of notifications, messages, and app-switching that leaves people drained without having done anything obviously exhausting. For a generation that lives inside workplace technology, there is no clear boundary left between being connected and being consumed.

A separate October release of workplace research lines up behind that finding. As reported by The HR Director, 29% of workers name fatigue or burnout among the top barriers to their own productivity, with 28% pointing to workload — and one in five Gen Z workers cite a lack of skills or training as a barrier, a noticeably higher share than among millennials. The throughline is consistent: young workers are not short on effort. They are short on recovery — and stress leave, the recovery tool they need most, is the one they are least willing to use.

What Actually Helps

Deloitte's takeaways for employers read less like perks and more like plumbing. Set realistic workloads. Reduce unnecessary complexity. Train managers to spot overload early, set boundaries, and normalize open conversations about stress. Cut down digital noise with clear communication norms, fewer and better-integrated tools, and protected focus time. None of it is glamorous; all of it is the kind of structural respect that makes a workplace feel survivable on a bad week.

For the reader who is currently powering through, the data suggests a few concrete moves. First, recognize the lie the numbers expose: you are not the only one who needed the break and skipped it, so the shame attached to taking stress leave is a collective illusion. Second, treat focus time as a real boundary — the research keeps finding that fragmentation, not hours, is what exhausts people. Third, ask for the norms to be stated out loud: when messages can wait, which tools are actually for work, and whether taking a mental-health day is genuinely fine or merely technically allowed. A workplace that cannot answer those questions is telling you what it values.

There is also a simpler reading of the headline trend. The 63% figure is not a finish line; it is a beginning. Eleven points of improvement in a single year, on a sample of twenty-two thousand workers, suggests that something — better conversations, better policies, the slow normalization of the whole topic — is working. The next step is not another wellness webinar. It is making sure that when seven in ten young workers say they need a day, they can take stress leave without inventing a cover story. For more on the pressures shaping the modern workday, see our productivity coverage and the related piece Gen Z's faking productivity habit.