Gen Z faces many unique challenges as they enter the workforce and maintaining their mental health is one of the most critical. The good news is that taking advantage of your employee health benefits can help you to improve your mental health and stay productive while at work. With this in mind, let’s go over the six best ways for you to optimize your employee health benefits to support your mental health:
1. Does your plan cover wellness programs?
A wellness program can include many different things such as help with weight loss to education regarding the negative effects of smoking to a gym membership. In short, a wellness program is designed to keep you as healthy and productive as possible. This means that it is a good idea to preemptively review your company’s health benefits and see if it covers wellness programs so that you understand your options if you ever need them.
2. Review your available benefits and prioritize based on your needs
The first thing you want to do when utilizing your employee health plan for mental health is to begin matching up your unique challenges with your available benefits. For example, if you’re feeling stressed out on a regular basis, you could see if there are any provisions in your plan that can help with therapy or meditation classes. This way you can address your mental health issues as they arise and keep them from becoming more serious.
3. Understand your plan’s substance use disorder benefits
Addiction can happen to anyone, and if you’ve become a victim, the best thing you can do is to admit to it and see if your employee health benefits can help you. Not all plans have specific provisions for substance abuse, such as covering rehab, but you may be able to find options that are still helpful. This may include therapy as previously mentioned and/or other medical help that can give you assistance in overcoming your addiction.
4. Self care
Self-care is a term used to improve one’s health and usually takes the form of a daily or weekly routine depending on the situation. As the name implies, this type of activity is done mostly on one’s own but can also include activities such as massage therapy (RMT). However, some company health plans will provide coverage for self-care activities since this can be an important part of maintaining mental health and worker productivity.
5. Does your plan cover therapy?
If you have had a serious mental health incident that requires therapy, then you’ll want to check with your plan to see what is covered. This can range from problems such as postpartum depression, anxiety that’s causing sleep issues to PTSD. The important thing is to seek therapy as quickly as possible since mental health issues that aren’t treated tend to only get worse as time goes on. This can negatively impact your productivity at work and other areas of your life.
6. Use your annual coverage
When it comes to maximizing your employee health benefits, you need to understand your annual coverage. This is basically a limit to how much the plan will cover your health needs. This can be limited in terms of a dollar amount or in terms of office visits to medical professionals. In either case, you need to know your annual coverage so that you can best plan out how to use your benefits to support your mental health throughout the year.
The most important thing to remember is to not be afraid to ask for help. Trying to press on through mental health difficulties is bad for you and bad for the company you work for. Familiarize yourself with your employee health benefits as soon as possible so that you know what help is available when you need it.