6 Things You Can Actually Do When Your Colleague Is Struggling (And 4 That Make It Worse)
Someone you work with is having a hard time. You can tell — they've gone quiet in meetings, or they teared up at their desk, or they said something in the hallway that landed heavier than they probably meant it to. And now you're standing there, very aware that you are not a therapist, wondering if anything you say is going to help or just make it weirder.
We hear this a lot, from executive directors and program coordinators and the volunteer who's been around for fifteen years and somehow become the person everyone unloads on. The fear is almost always the same: I'm not qualified for this, so I should probably stay out of it. And we get it. NAMI's 2024 workplace poll found that something like 80% of employees said training on how to spot and respond to a mental health crisis would actually help them — and fewer than a third of people have ever gotten any. So if you feel unequipped, you're not failing at something everyone else figured out. You were just never taught, same as almost everybody. But here's the thing we want you to actually believe — supporting someone who's struggling is not a clinical act. It's a human one. You don't need a license to be the person who responds well. You need a handful of skills that, frankly, nobody ever taught you, because we've decided as a culture that this is specialized knowledge when it really, really isn't.
So. Here's what actually helps, and then a few things that feel helpful but quietly make it worse.
What actually helps when someone's struggling
1. Listen in a way that reflects instead of redirects.
Most of us, when someone tells us something painful, immediately reach for the thing that fixes it. They say "I'm so behind and I don't think I can catch up," and we say "oh you'll be fine, you always pull it off." That's a redirect. It's well-meaning and it shuts the whole thing down, because what you've communicated is please stop telling me this, here is the exit.
Reflecting sounds like: "It sounds like you're carrying a lot right now and it feels like it's piling up faster than you can get through it." That's it. You're not solving anything. You're showing them you actually heard the words they said. People will tell you so much more, and feel so much better, when they're reflected instead of redirected — and it costs you nothing but the urge to fix.
2. Validate before you advise.
This is the one people skip the most, and it's the one that does the most work. Before you offer a single suggestion, the person needs to hear that what they're feeling makes sense. "Of course you're overwhelmed, you've been covering two roles for a month" lands completely differently than jumping straight to "have you tried blocking your calendar?"
Validation isn't agreement, and it isn't saying the situation is fine. It's saying your reaction is a reasonable response to what's happening to you. When you skip it and go straight to advice, even good advice bounces off, because the person is still stuck on the part where they feel alone in it.
3. Know the grounding basics (and why they work).
If someone is spiraling — heart racing, can't think straight, that underwater feeling — you can offer them something concrete. The most well-known one is 5-4-3-2-1: name five things you can see, four you can hear, three you can touch, two you can smell, one you can taste.
It sounds almost too simple to do anything. But there's a real reason it works. When someone's anxiety has them living in a catastrophic future, naming physical things in the room pulls their attention back to the present, where the actual emergency usually isn't. You're not erasing what they feel. You're giving their nervous system a way to come down a notch so they can think again. You can literally just say "hey, want to try something with me real quick?" and walk them through it.
4. Use de-escalation language when things get heated.
When someone is activated — angry, panicked, on the edge of tears in a way that scares them — your job is to be the calm in the room, not to match their intensity. Slow your words down. Lower your voice instead of raising it. Don't crowd them physically. Give them a little space and a lot of steadiness.
The instinct when someone escalates is to escalate back, or to get very fast and urgent trying to calm them down, which somehow always reads as you are a problem I am managing. The opposite works better. Slow, low, unhurried. Your calm is contagious, the same way panic is.
5. Challenge a thought by asking, not correcting.
Sometimes people are stuck in a story that isn't quite true — "everyone thinks I'm failing," "I always mess this up," "there's no point in even trying." You can help loosen that, but not by arguing with it. Telling someone "that's not true, everyone loves you" just makes them feel unseen and a little patronized.
Instead, ask. "What's making it feel that way right now?" or "has there been a time it went differently?" You're not correcting them, you're inviting them to look at the thought from a slightly different angle and notice the edges of it themselves. That's the difference between debating someone and walking next to them while they think.
6. Refer with a hand, not a finger.
There's a point where the most helpful thing you can do is connect someone to real support — a therapist, an EAP, a crisis line, their doctor. But how you do it matters enormously. "Have you thought about therapy?" delivered and then dropped can feel like a brush-off, like you've just handed them a homework assignment and walked away.
Referring well sounds like "I want to help you find something that actually fits — want me to sit with you for ten minutes and look at what's covered under our benefits?" You're offering to take a step with them, not pointing them toward a door and wishing them luck. The follow-through is the whole thing. Anyone can say the word therapy. Being the person who helps them find the number is what people remember.
What NOT to do when someone's struggling
None of these come from a bad place. That's exactly why they're sneaky.
1. Toxic positivity.
"Just stay positive!" "Everything happens for a reason!" "Good vibes only!" We know it's meant as encouragement. But to someone who's struggling, it reads as I am not able to be with you in this, so please cheer up and let me off the hook. It teaches people that their hard feelings are unwelcome here, which means next time they won't bring them to you at all.
2. Advice before listening.
Leading with solutions before you've actually understood the problem is the single most common misfire, usually from people who genuinely want to help (so, the good ones). The trouble is that advice given before listening almost always solves the wrong problem, and it tells the person you were more interested in fixing it than in hearing it. Listen first. The advice will be better anyway, because it'll be aimed at the thing that's actually going on.
3. "Have you tried therapy?" with nothing behind it.
Yes, this is the flip side of number six up there, and yes, it's worth saying twice. Tossing out "you should really talk to someone" and then changing the subject is one of those things that feels supportive to say and feels dismissive to receive. If you're going to name it, be ready to help with the next step, even if that step is just googling options together for five minutes.
4. Comparing or minimizing.
"It could be worse." "At least you have a job." "You're so strong, you'll be fine." Even "you're so strong" — which sounds like a compliment — can quietly tell someone they're not allowed to fall apart, that you're counting on them to hold it together so you don't have to worry. Comparing someone's pain to someone else's, or to how much worse it could theoretically be, doesn't shrink the pain. It just adds a layer of and now I feel bad for feeling bad.
You're more qualified than you think
Here's the part we actually came here to tell you. There's a real body of research on training regular people — not clinicians, just coworkers and managers and community members — to respond to someone in mental distress. Across that research, somewhere between roughly two-thirds and the high-eighties of people who get trained go on to actually use what they learned out in real life, with real people, when it counted.
Sit with that for a second. The skills are learnable. They stick. People use them. The only reason this still feels like specialized, license-required, leave-it-to-the-experts knowledge is that we've never bothered to make it standard — to treat "what do I do when a coworker is falling apart" as a normal thing everyone should know, the way we treat actual first aid.
You don't have to be a psychologist to be the person who responds well when someone's having the worst week of their year. You just have to listen before you fix, validate before you advise, and stay when it gets uncomfortable instead of reaching for the nearest exit. That's most of it. That's most of what any of us ever needed from another person, honestly.
Want your team to actually be good at this, not just well-intentioned? That's a lot of what we do. Book a free 30-minute strategy call and we'll talk about it.
