Whether you're entering a busy season or feeling the pressure of year-end deadlines, the cost of stress can be higher than you realize. For many, work is pushing us to our limits and beyond. From decreased productivity to stalled promotions, workplace stress can have tangible financial and career consequences. Understanding how stress impacts your time, income, and long-term growth is key to making informed decisions about your career.
Understanding Your Time Currency
Time is one of our most valuable currencies, yet we often underestimate how much stress drains our productivity. Consider how many hours you spend outside of work:
Thinking about work
Spinning in stress and self-doubt
Second-guessing decisions
Losing focus during actual work hours
For many professionals, this mental toll adds up to thousands of lost hours—equating to over $150,000 annually in lost time value for executives.
The Hidden Cost of Stress
The cost of stress goes beyond time—it directly affects income, career progression, and financial security. Here’s how:
Delayed promotions leading to lower base salary growth
Reduced annual raises due to underperformance caused by stress
Smaller performance bonuses as stress lowers productivity
Decreased retirement contributions due to slower salary increases
Increased health-related expenses from stress-related conditions
The longer stress remains unaddressed, the more costly it becomes—not just in dollars but in missed career opportunities.
Breaking the Cycle: Reclaiming Your Time and Energy
Every week you delay addressing stress, you’re potentially losing thousands in opportunity costs—money, career progression, and valuable personal time.
The solution isn’t about working harder; it’s about working smarter and recognizing that investing in stress management is a strategic career move. When you learn to reduce stress and improve efficiency, you open the door to:
✔ Higher job performance and career growth
✔ Increased income through promotions and bonuses
✔ Better work-life balance and personal fulfillment
Looking Ahead to 2025: A Strategic Investment
Waiting to address workplace stress only makes it more expensive—financially, emotionally, and professionally. The compounding effect of stress impacts your career trajectory, health, and personal life. Instead of seeing stress management as an “extra” task, view it as an investment with tangible returns.
The goal isn’t just to survive at work—it’s to thrive. When you understand the real cost of stress, you can take action now to set yourself up for success in 2025 and beyond.
Remember: Your time, career, and well-being are invaluable assets worth protecting.
Have you subscribed to my weekly newsletter? It’s designed for high-achieving women in accounting, finance, law, and consulting who want to reduce the cost of stress—both personally and within their teams. Each week, I share practical strategies to prevent burnout, improve well-being, and create sustainable success. Subscribe here.
What You’ll Learn From This Episode:
How to calculate your personal cost of workplace stress
The hidden financial impact of career stagnation
Why addressing stress now is crucial for your 2025 success
The compounding effect of delayed action on your career growth
Watch The Full Episode:
TRANSCRIPT: Hi, and welcome. We are live. Hello, Instagram. Hello, YouTube. Hello, LinkedIn and Facebook. All the places where this goes. It is December 11th, and I am, as always, so happy to be here with you. This is episode 36, and I'm calling it the ROI of winning, or should we talk about it as the financial cost of stress? I'm gonna dive right in because this is a good one. They're all good ones, but this one, I have a special a special affinity for. Let's talk about it. This is billable hour burnout. Welcome to the show. If you need helpful or tactical advice that actually gives you the career of your dreams without the stress or the overwhelm, you are in the right place. If you want to enjoy the life that you've spent decades building, you are in the right place. If you're finding yourself here today, it means you're ready to experience more work life balance, more ease, more confidence, and you're ready to make it happen without having to quit your job or burn down your life. My name is Lauren Baptiste, your big four auditor, regulatory tax compliant consultant, turned life coach, and you're listening to billable hour burnout. On the show, I share simple tactical advice and mindset strategies specifically catered to the modern woman in accounting, consulting, law, and finance. You ready for episode 35? Let's do it. Alright. This is a good one because it's just the time of year. I don't know. It feels so good to share a little bit about the cost of your your stress. And why does it feel so timely? Because I know a lot of you are hitting the bottle hard right now. I know a lot of you are stressing out right now. Whether you are already starting your next busy season or you're on the cusp of starting your next busy season, you're feeling the stress building, and you need some support. So I wanna talk to you all about today's episode very shortly. I'm even gonna share some slides today. We're going deep, and we're also gonna get a little mathematical. So make sure you have your pen and paper ready so you can take some notes on the side of this episode. But let's talk about what's going on in my life. It's been a fun week. I've been really using this month as just enjoying the ride. I will say the last 11 months, there's been a lot going on personally and professionally, and I decided that I get to just show up for December how I want it to be. And I could either push through or I can just enjoy what the harvest that I've created this past year. And that's what I've decided to do. So what that means for me and for my business is just, you know, externally, you're not gonna see anything differently. But in you know, internally, I'm bringing in, of things that are creating more spark and fun in the back end of the business and things that are coming to you that will actually give you more opportunities to dive into this work. I've been getting some feedback from some of you, and I know what you're looking for. And so be on the lookout because some good stuff is coming end of this year in January 2025. And how do you know what's going on? Get on my newsletter, accolowellness.com/newsletter, and you can be part of the party. You'll be always the first to know, the first to get special offers, the first to get in on opportunities. You're gonna want to be on my newsletter because that's where all of the stuff is happening. Alright. But I said personal anecdote. What's going on with me personally? So I'm having more fun this month. Maybe you saw on Instagram, I'm playing with some of my girlfriends. There's just been some local gatherings and hangouts. My husband and I celebrated our dateiversary, which we like to celebrate. We celebrate our wedding anniversary and the first day we met. And, that was this past weekend. So we had a nice dinner. We went out. We had a great time. And then we got our Christmas tree, and we didn't get enough lights for our Christmas tree so it's half done, mostly done, 2 thirds done. So we I see we got our lights today. So I will finish the tree and I will post it for you so you could see our beautiful tree. I haven't gotten a real tree in a long time, and I kinda remember why. But the smell is amazing and I'm so happy that I have it and I have all these extra bows, I guess, and I'm gonna be creating a wreath. So you will get to see all of these fun things that I'll be doing on Instagram stories, and I'll be telling you more about it in my daily posts. But let's talk about today because we've got some good stuff to go into. So I'm pulling up on my computer. I'm gonna make sure so oh, here's other fun news. I got a Mac, and it is different. I've been a PC girl forever. I actually, fun fact, used to build PCs with my dad. My dad owned a computer business, so I build the inside of the computer. I kind of when I was a little girl, I would treat it like a puzzle. So I would build it all up. But yeah. So I've been a PC girl for life. So the fact that I'm switching to a Mac is big. Alright. Let's talk about the cost of winning. Let's see if my screen is sharing. Alright. I think I'm in on this side. So I'm gonna take you from Instagram, and I'm just gonna flip the camera, and you're gonna enjoy it from this side. Alright. So let's talk about the ROI of winning. And what I like to talk about it as is the cost of stress. Now when we think about the ROI, right, I want you to be like, what is the return on your investment of your job. Maybe you say money. So then we're like, okay. Maybe you say, a beautiful house, vacations. Great. All good things. But let's talk about what it would really feel like to win. Right? There's a difference in just having a good job that pays well, and then there's the having a life that you love. And so what I've noticed as I've done this work with a lot of women in corporate, women at the top, is that we're striving for meaning, for purpose, but we're also hoping that at this point we would be winning. And sometimes I hear from many of you, it doesn't feel like winning. So I wanna show this to you. It's a little bit of a how to or I guess, not smart like an educational component of understanding what what I mean by this. So let's dive in. Alright. ROI of winning. The only way we can accurately calculate the ROI of winning is by understanding the cost. I'm a math girl. Right? I'm a CPA. A lot of you like the numbers, so I wanted to take it to a deeper level. Many of you say, you know, stress costs me in my health, but I suppress it or I deal with it. It costs me my presence with my kids, but at the end of the day, I never miss the things that I really wanna go to. So there's, like, some subtle cost happening in the background that we're not thinking of that I want you to be thinking of. And so you owe it to yourself to know the cost of what we're calling learning for the purposes of this or the cost of your stress. And so what I'm gonna show you today is a way to calculate the annualized cost of learning as it relates to your time. We have so many currencies in our life. Most of us think of time and money. Those are the big ones. Love is a currency. Energy is a currency. There's so many other currencies out there, but I want you to focus on time. This one's very easy to calculate and see the impact. So realize as we're going through today's exercise, you're only getting one side of the story. So buckle up everybody because you're gonna be really surprised at what is going on. Alright. And every penny spent learning or spent living in your stress is a dollar that you're not winning. So let's talk about that. Every penny spent learning. This means the longer we're stewing in our mind. Right? We're losing time if we're, like, debating between which dishwasher to buy. Every time we are hoping to get promoted, but don't take the action to actually get promoted. Right? So we're we're wasting time and money, And we need to be mindful so that every penny that we're, like, not going all in is dollars we're losing. I want you to feel the difference between pennies and dollars. They're they it's significant. Okay. So what is the compounded cost of not winning? There's hours lost in inefficiency. Right? So we're talking about time here. Money left on the table, so now we're talking actual dollars. Opportunities missed. Right? Dinners with friends, quiet mornings on the couch with a coffee, mental and physical toll, career stagnation, work life imbalance. Now what happens is, like I mentioned, is we kind of ignore these bottom ones, and we're like, well, it's not that bad. Right? But what we're we'll focus on time and money and listen. I I know you, so let's talk time and money. But I want you to keep in mind, this is valuable too. Opportunities missed, mental and physical toll, career stagnation, work life imbalance. Girl, those things mean something to me, and I really hope at some point they mean something to you because we're gonna see that the longer we don't address them, the more amplified the, let's say, the more expensive the cost gets. Alright. So here's what I want you to do. I'm making sure everyone on Instagram can see this. If you're watching on LinkedIn or on YouTube, you're like, why is she holding her phone up the whole time? Because my stand's not working today. But I wanted to make sure everybody gets in on this really important wisdom. Alright. So I want you to take out a pen and paper. I told you that earlier. So pull out your paper and a Post it. You could do this on your phone, but if you're watching me on your phone, you you're not gonna be able to toggle back and forth. So this might require some hard paper. Now I want you to number it like that you see here, 1 through 7 down. And I want you to take a minute to really calculate this cost. So if you can't read it perfectly on LinkedIn oh, sorry. Instagram. So what we're calculating is the time spent learning weekly. And so I'm using learning as a nice way to say instead of failure, instead of saying stress, the time spent learning. So I want you to be thinking about the time or the number of hours, right, if we're going through 1 through 7 starting with number 1. How many hours each week do you think about work but you're not actually working? For example, are you thinking about work on your commute to work, home from work, as you're bathing your kid, as you're making dinner, as you're in the car, as you're on vacation, I want you on average to put a number here. How many hours are you thinking about work but not actually working? Is it 1 hour a week, 5 hours a week? Right? If it's our commute every day, maybe it is 5 or 10 hours a week. I talk to many of you, and when you fill out a consultation form, one of the questions I've asked is, how many hours are you working and or thinking about work? Because even if you're working 40 to 50 hours a week, you're likely thinking about work at least another 10 hours a week. So here we go. Number 1, fill in your answer, and let's move to number 2. How many hours each week do you spend spinning out or stressing out about work? For example, news comes to your inbox, Things were all hunky dory until you got this one email, and all of a sudden, you go into a spiral. You're like, what? I can't believe this person said that. That goes against what we discussed. How could they? Right? And you're stressing out, you're spinning out, and it's not productive. How many hours each week is that happening? Number 3, how many hours are used each week in self doubt and second guessing decisions? So let's go back to that old dishwasher example. I had a client come to me, this was years ago, and she was like, I cannot decide which dishwasher. And I was like, oh, okay. Let's talk about this. Why? And she's like, there's so many options. There's so many, bells and whistles. Do I want that 3rd silverware thing on the top, or do I not? Like, what this is a 20 year decision. It feels so important. And then I was like, okay. Let's let's really think about this. Is it a custom size? No. Okay. It's a standard size. Great. Okay. What do you want it to do at the end of the day? Wash my dishes. Okay. Perfect. What's your budget? Let's say $2,000 Great. I don't know how much a dishwasher is, but in my head, that sounds about fair for a good one. And then it was like, okay. So then what are we really debating? Do you think you're gonna wash pots and pans all the time or do you think you're gonna have people over every weekend? Like what's the focus here? Pots and pans for sure. That would save me time and energy. Alright. So then here we go. We've narrowed it down probably to like 1 or 2. We had maybe 20 we were thinking about and now it's 1 or 2. How many hours I'll tell you for this client I spoke to spent weeks being like, I haven't decided. I have to decide. My husband wants me to decide. I'm still washing dishes in the meantime. Right? It's such a waste of time. So we narrowed it down, and then she finally made a decision and bought the dishwasher. Win. Alright. How many hours do you spend scrolling when you don't wanna be? I will also put for number 4, how many hours are you playing candy crush on the couch? How many hours are you, on LinkedIn looking for a new job when you don't really think you're gonna leave or at least leave until next summer? Right? How many hours are you scrolling on the socials when you don't want to be? Number 5, how many hours are you redoing tasks because you weren't focused? I remember, I would work I was working in FATCA at the time when FATCA, if anybody knows, it came out of the Higher Act, but it was one of those things that in the beginning, there was a lot of regulatory guidance, and it'd be like, okay, Lauren. Here, read this. I would, like, lose it. It's so hard. Right? I would lose focus because I would be distracted. I would let an email notification or a text message get in the way of me actually reading. I'd lose focus. I'd have to read it again. Or I try to read it before bed. I'd pass out, and then I'd realize I didn't really read or attain anything. So how many hours are you redoing tasks? Number 6, how many hours are you not fully present with your family? Right? So so if I talked about, like, thinking about work while you're in the bathtub, we don't have to duplicate hours, so just make sure that you, you are fair here. And then number 7, how many hours are lost from lack of productivity? This is a symptom of burnout here. We wanna be mindful that when we're not productive, it's time wasted. So a lot of you will say to me, okay. I stayed up until 2 AM. And when I kinda get to the root of it, I hear that you're not productive from, like, 10:30 to 2 AM. So why would you work 3 hours, 2 and a half hours, if you could get it done in 1 hour? But instead, you sacrifice sleep, you push through, your work product isn't as good. This is hours and time lost. So what I want you to do here people are trying to call me while I'm going live. So what I want you to do here is add up the total number of hours for learning per week. So maybe you're adding 10 plus 2 plus 1 plus 3 plus 5 plus 0 plus right? So get your total of how many hours, and that is your total hours of learning or your cost of stress that's and this is, like, kinda the mental health aspect of your stress. This is more of, like, wasted time, each week. So let's go to the next slide. So I want you to identify your hourly rate. So we know our number before. Hold that number. Maybe your number is, like, 45 or something. Maybe it's, like, 15. I don't know what your number is, but hold on to that on the side. Now what I want you to do is to calculate your hourly rate. How do we do that? Right? Some of you know your billable rate, which is high, maybe higher likely higher than what your salary is, but I want you to know in your own mind. Right? If I get paid $200 a year and I work on average or get paid for, like, 40 hour weeks, my rate, my hourly rate is $96.15. A lot of factors here, but we're just trying to get a number for the sake of getting a number. Right? We can talk about, like, what's the actual take home if you, you know, if your salary is 200 grand, of course, it's far less. If you work more than 40 hours a week, then this number goes down and your rate goes is even lower. So if you work 50 hours a week, it looks different than 40 hours a week. So just being mindful, we're just trying to get a number here for numbers sake. So now that you know your hourly rate, you take your salary divided by the number hours of year. So again that 20.80 is your hours if you are working 40 hours a week. Alright. And, yeah, if you make 200 k, here's your shortcut, 9615. So now here we're gonna do, we're gonna calculate the cost of learning, and this is also the ROI of winning. And here we go. So we're gonna take the total hours of learning per week that we did in that first exercise where we added up 1 through 7. And so for the sake of this exercise, my sample said 15 hours a week were spent in spinning out, indecision, unproductive working, etcetera, and I multiply that by my hourly rate. Now if that's 15 hours a week, let's say 5 hours a week commuting, 5 hours a week while I'm washing my kids up at the end of the night, and then another 5 hours that are just, like, spinning out, not productive, etcetera, that's 1,000. I'm gonna zoom in on Instagram. That's $1,442 that you're spending each week in your stress. That's the cost of learning. It's the ROI of not winning. And so when we annualize that number, we take this, 1,442, we times it by the number of weeks in a year, 52, and that, for this example, is 74,984. That's nearly $75,000 of time that's spent learning, that's spent in stress, that's spent not winning. So I want you to know your number. I'm gonna tell you something interesting. I did this with a group recently of executive women, and many were far over 150,000. I would say probably most. We had some going over, like, 300 k, and you can then start to feel why spinning out or your overwhelm feels like a full time job because it is. Notice how all of this time is being wasted. It's a full time job of amount of energy that you are foregoing instead of winning. So now we're understanding time. So this is where I this is slides from how I've done, but I would love to know even from this group. Message me. DM me on the side. You don't have to make it public. What is your annualized cost of learning? Is it under 15 k? Is it over 15 k? Over 30 k? Over a 100 k? Over 200 k? So I wanna know your annualized cost of learning. So take a moment and send me a DM. I would love to know. But here's what I want you to know. I'm gonna zoom out on Instagram so you can see, but I'm gonna talk you through it. We just did time. Remember? That's one of the currencies. Let's talk about the cost of money. And remember, then we add it to the other balance. So a missed promotion. Let's say you got punted an extra year and you had to deal with a lower base salary for another year. That's an opportunity lost of 30 k, for example. Maybe it's higher. A lower annual raise due to average performance reviews instead of a high performance review. That could be $20,000 that you're not getting from your salary. So if you miss the promotion and you got an average review, you might have missed out on 50 grand. Now a lot of you working in accounting finance law consulting are like, yeah. That kinda makes sense. Right? Then we're talking about loss of performance bonus and other incentives. Right? So maybe on top of just your raise and your promotional bump, you would have had a a a bonus added to your compensation. Right? Reduced retirement contributions because it's based on, let's say, 6% of your salary, and then you get matched on 25% of that 6% or some whatever your company does for you. But notice then that's money lost. Then there's the loss of high profile projects that are tied to financial rewards. That doesn't apply to everybody, but that applies to some. Missed networking opportunities that you don't go to that could have led to higher paying roles, new clients, other opportunities. Right? Opportunity lost. The cost of stress related health, expenses affecting your long term savings. Oh, I hear this one a lot. Right? Digestive issues, skin care products, allergy testing, Adderall, prescriptions. Notice the cost of stress. It's real. It's real, but we don't factor it in because we think, oh, it's separate. It is totally part of the package. And here's the last thing, the compounded effect of lower income over multiple years. So if you said in the last slide that you lost nearly $75,000 year over year until you get that promotion, until you feel like you're winning, until you can break through your burnout. So I want you to really feel into how expensive it is when we take no action. The longer we take more action, it's a gotta cost. It's 4% year over year, and that's pretty expensive. So let's really talk about quickly why it must be solved before you enter 2025. Well, the truth is and I can put my Instagram back. We're good with slides for today. The truth is the longer we wait, the more we're paying, the more we're not getting the bonus we deserve, the longer we're not getting the promotion that we were promised. And then that hits our pocket, that hits our or doesn't hit our pocket, I should say, that hits our confidence. We start to take a hit on a lot of things, and we need to be mindful. I mean, the one that I I like to talk about most in this situation is your money. The money you're not making by not supporting yourself in what you need. So just being so mindful of that cost because it's real. Every hour you're spinning out is time you're not hanging out with your kids. You're not going to girls' night with your friends. There is a cost on your joy in the long run, and this is why you end up feeling resentful, feeling like you have to quit your job, feeling like you need something better. So if nothing else but for today, I really want you to understand while or answer this one question. What is the ROI of winning? Right? So now we understand the cost of our stress, and we could flip that and be like, that's the opportunity cost of a future bonus, a future raise, a future payout. But I want you to say, how would that how would that ripple effect on my time make my personal life better? How would it make my professional life better? This is where it begins. Now this is something that I walk many of my clients through because once they realize this, they realize how valuable take hiring a coach, taking action, putting themselves first. They really understand the financial component, not just the nice to have. It goes from I feel irresponsible to do this to it feels irresponsible not doing this. Right? Because you can see the financial impact. So I wanna share this with you today. A lot of my people, risk averse, I feel you. A lot of my people are also feeling this time of year. There's just a lot going on. A lot of my people want something better, but maybe aren't sure what to do. So this is where I wanna invite you to reach out to me. You can send me a DM wherever you're seeing this. You can reach out on my website. You can join my newsletter, and you can then have my email. So you have lots of ways to connect with me. So let's leave this here. I really want you to think about how you can start winning and why winning in 2025 isn't just a financial win, but it's a personal life win. It's a crushing it at work win instead of getting crushed at work. You can feel the difference, and I wanna walk you each step of the way. So thank you so much. This is today's episode. I am so excited to hear your numbers. I'm excited to hear how this episode lands for you. It's a little different today, but I wanted to share that. Now as I mentioned last week, we are coming towards the end of the year, which means the season finale of billable hour burnout. So if you wanna stay in touch, you're gonna wanna join my newsletter. I mentioned that earlier, but it's acalowa wellness.com/newsletter. You can join and be part of the party. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. Find me on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, and wherever you hang. I wanna hear more about what you're learning, what you're loving, how and how I can keep supporting you in 2025. I have some tricks up my sleeve for you to make your success inevitable. So make sure you are connected with me in all the places so that you are best informed. That's the Lauren Baptiste on Instagram, Lauren Baptiste on LinkedIn, and Akyloa Wellness on LinkedIn. The Lauren, Lauren Baptiste Coaching on Facebook and YouTube is, I believe it, Acolo Wellness. I don't know if you have to look into it, but I'm forgetting at the moment. But thank you so much, everybody, for listening. If you want more information about me, my program, Freedom, or just anything we're up to, visit accolowellness.com. Alright, everybody. I hope you found today's episode highly informative and supportive. I'll see you next time. Bye. |
