{"id":525928,"date":"2026-06-30T14:17:13","date_gmt":"2026-06-30T14:17:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/525928\/"},"modified":"2026-06-30T14:17:13","modified_gmt":"2026-06-30T14:17:13","slug":"southeast-asias-most-stressed-workers-are-also-among-its-happiest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/525928\/","title":{"rendered":"Southeast Asia’s most stressed workers are also among its happiest"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 report, which surveyed 263,810 people across more than 160 countries and territories, found that 50% of Filipino employees experienced stress “a lot of the previous day,” double the Southeast Asian average of 25% and above the global average of 40%.<\/p>\n

“The Philippines emerges as a clear outlier,” wrote Rogelio Alicor Panao, a University of the Philippines Diliman associate professor and data scientist at the Philippine Daily Inquirer, in an analysis of the figures.<\/p>\n

Stress is easing almost everywhere else in the region. Panao noted that the share of Vietnamese workers reporting daily stress fell from 35% in 2021 to 13% in 2025, while Thailand’s dropped from 41% to 25%.<\/p>\n

Malaysia, Indonesia and Laos all sat below the regional average. At 50%, Panao wrote, Filipino daily stress runs close to four times Indonesia’s 14% and tops both Cambodia’s 34% and Singapore’s 43%.<\/p>\n

The Philippines also posted the region’s highest daily sadness, at 31%, and anger, at 29%. Only 34% of Filipino workers said they were thriving in their lives.<\/p>\n

The same workers were nonetheless the most engaged in Southeast Asia, with 39% involved and enthusiastic at work, against a regional average of 25% and a global average of 20%.<\/p>\n

Gallup regional director Kanika Singh tied that to an upbeat job market, telling the Inquirer that 76% of Filipino workers saw 2025 as a good time to find work, higher than in Indonesia or Singapore.<\/p>\n

\"Filipino<\/p>\n

Filipino workers, including nurses applying to work in United Kingdom, attend a lecture at a review center for the International English Language Testing System or IELTS in Manila, Philippines, April 2, 2019. Photo by Reuters<\/p>\n

Filipinos sit near the top on happiness, too. The Workplace Happiness Index: Philippines 2025 by Jobstreet by SEEK, which polled about 1,000 Filipino workers within a wider Asia-Pacific sample of more than 10,500, found 77% described themselves as “extremely happy” or “somewhat happy” at work, second only to Indonesia’s 82%, GMA News and The Manila Times reported.<\/p>\n

Workers increasingly linked that happiness to a sense of purpose and room to grow rather than pay alone.<\/p>\n

The same survey exposed the strain underneath. Only 41% of workers felt in control of their stress, 38% reported burning out or feeling extremely exhausted, and 55% said they thought about changing careers somewhat or extremely often.<\/p>\n

Local research has long tied Filipino workers’ mental health to conditions on the job more than personal circumstances.<\/p>\n

A University of the Philippines Open University study of 173 PhilHealth employees who worked remotely during the Covid-19 pandemic found 96.32% under moderate stress and 49.69% with mild anxiety, with no significant link to age, gender, marital status or income.<\/p>\n

The researchers pointed instead to heavy job demands, technological strain and blurred lines between work and home.<\/p>\n

Health experts want employers, not just employees, to carry the fix.<\/p>\n

At an April 28 Department of Labor and Employment forum, clinical psychologist Carolina Uno-Rayco, national executive director of the Philippine Mental Health Association, described burnout as a “syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.”<\/p>\n

Psychologist Mary May Fernando urged companies to audit workplaces for psychosocial hazards and rethink workloads, saying “the goal is to ‘fix the job,’ not just ‘fix the person.'”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 report, which surveyed 263,810 people across more than 160 countries and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":525929,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[103,61,60,410,411,17759],"class_list":["post-525928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mental-health","tag-health","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-mental-health","tag-mentalhealth","tag-southeast-asia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/525928","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=525928"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/525928\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/525929"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=525928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=525928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=525928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}