Well-being is no longer a nice-to-have at work; it’s a must have to prevent burnout, overwhelm, stress and other issues.

To improve our well-being, we’ve got to do way more than provide more employee benefits. We’ve got to stop pretending that the brain is a machine that can run on empty without needing much maintenance. Instead, we’ve got to start redesigning work to play to our brain’s strengths.

In this article, How well-being is evolving from an employee benefit to a performance boost, for the Forbes Coaches Council, published February 24, 2026, I explain how we can acknowledge the cognitive capacity and load challenges we face. We have to recognize these are structural problems that aren’t going away. Instead of fighting or just as worse, ignoring these problems, we need to work with them. I share how we can redesign work to do this, which actually improves our well-being as well as our performance. Namely, we can adopt and benefit from a three-part framework: prevention, recovery and sustainability.