Cover Wellness solutions in the office can be as simple as introducing more plants and sunlight. (Photo: Getty)
Wellness solutions in the office can be as simple as introducing more plants and sunlight. (Photo: Getty)
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This Global Wellness Day, here are three small changes that can support calm and focus at work
Workplace wellness has arguably escalated from a “let’s circle back” concern to an “urgent, please fix” one. The World Health Organization estimated in 2024 that depression and anxiety cost the global economy roughly US$1 trillion each year in lost productivity. With the rise of what Microsoft described in 2025 as the “chaos of the infinite workday” brought about by always-on communication channels, knowledge workers often sacrifice rest for the sake of productivity. But addressing the root causes of high stress and potential burnout can be challenging while juggling immediate tasks and meeting KPIs.
“Wellness at work isn't about doing desk yoga, it's about ruthlessly protecting your peace and mastering 'micro-boundaries,' like actually leaving your desk for lunch,” Gianne Chan, a Hong Kong-based well-being practitioner and songwriter, told Tatler Asia. “If your body is asking for a reset, give yourself permission to do heads-down, quiet tasks instead of forcing high-energy projects.”
For team leaders and employees alike, supporting boundaries has effects beyond individual health, and can even help improve performance in the long run. Before pitching campaigns against long-term burnout, consider smaller, incremental changes that can help you find balance and improve your sense of calm throughout the day. Here are three ways to begin in the week ahead.
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Introduce mindful pauses for (actual) eating and breathing
Jam-packed schedules tend to require hunkering down at the desk through lunch, typically accompanied by what some commentators have dubbed the corporate “slop bowl”—a basic mix of salads and grains, consumed in harried bites while typing. Eating away from the desktop can provide a clear point to pause and reset, as well as a dividing line between work and food.
After lunch, carving out a 10-minute break for a short breathing or meditation session can also help relieve frustration from work tasks, emails, or overtime meetings. Controlled breathing techniques have been linked to reductions in self-reported stress and improvements in attention, and the appeal of the method is that it asks very little of you, aside from a few minutes and the willingness to look slightly silly with your eyes shut. The habit of meditation has high-profile adherents like billionaire investor Ray Dalio, who told Tatler Asia about his daily 20-minute routine earlier this year.
As a manager hosting a breathing or meditation session, you can experiment with free audio recordings of guided meditations; and for those reluctant to commit more than 5 minutes at a time, a simple technique such as box breathing, involving a four-count inhale, four-count hold, and four-count exhale, requires no training and suits most people.
Read more: Inside OceanX: Ray and Mark Dalio’s mission to explore the seas no one has mapped
Add hard-to-kill plants in shared workspaces
Introducing greenery to communal areas is a simple environmental change that can yield significant benefits. Indoor plants have been linked to measurable improvements in mood and cognition: employees who spent at least 120 minutes a week around some form of nature were more likely to report good health and psychological wellbeing, according to a 2025 report published by the British Chamber of Business; a separate 2025 review in the journal Frontiers in Physiology suggested that the presence of live vegetation in offices can actively improve indoor air quality, regulate office humidity, and potentially lower employee anxiety while directly supporting focus and creative thinking.
A handful of medium-sized plants can transform a communal area for a modest outlay. Consider placing them in shared zones where people gather or pass through, such as kitchens, breakout areas and meeting rooms, rather than parcelling them out to individual desks where they might be forgotten. As the usual cause of a plant's demise is being asked to survive somewhere it was never going to, so keep pots near light sources, like windows, where you can. Pothos, snake plants and ZZ plants all tolerate variable light and the occasional fortnight of neglect, according to a helpful 2025 list from Homes and Gardens, which makes them suited to offices where staffers don’t have green thumbs.
Try out a “do not disturb” hour
Frequent digital interruptions fragment attention and stretch the time it takes to finish tasks. Research by Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, found that workers took an average of 23 minutes to fully return to a task after being interrupted. Yet distractions keep coming. According to Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index report, office workers are interrupted every two minutes by an email, message, or meeting during working hours, totalling an average of 275 'pings' per day.
Establishing a protected, "do not disturb" hour each day can provide an uninterrupted stretch of time to collect your thoughts and focus. Based on your and your team's needs, agree on one fixed window during which you can mute messaging channels and email alerts (Slack and Microsoft Teams both allow scheduled, workspace-wide pauses). Make sure to settle on what genuinely qualifies as an emergency and provide one fallback channel, such as a phone call, for the rare crisis.
A final word for leaders of all company sizes: if a manager insists on everyone working through mealtimes, or keeps lobbing non-urgent queries into the team chat during a "do not disturb" hour, or neglects the office plants to the point of committing second-degree murder, teams may assume that any initial commitment to wellness was performative. Don't prove them right.
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Cat Wang is an editor at Tatler Asia based in Hong Kong, where she covers business, wealth, innovation, and impact. Previously, she was a Forbes Asia reporter and assistant editor of the Forbes Asia 100 to Watch list, spotlighting startups and small companies on the rise across the Asia-Pacific. She began her career as a trainee reporter at the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s newspaper of record. Born in New York City, she graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a B.A. in political science.
