The Dutch Health Council just said it: the problem is not the people. It is the system.
In April 2025, the Dutch Council for Public Health and Society published a report called "Brake." They investigated why mental health in the Netherlands has not improved in ten years, despite all the programmes, trainings, and interventions. Their conclusion was refreshingly honest: we are not addressing the problem at its source.
We teach people to cope with pressure. We make them more resilient. We offer more therapy. But we do not look at what produces the pressure in the first place.
I recognise that.
Four years at Google. I hit my targets. I was more resilient than most people around me. And in August 2024, I could not work at all. Not because I was not strong enough. Because the system works exactly as the Council describes: it loads people until they break, then helps them recover so they can perform again.
What the Council calls the hyper-nervous society
The Council describes three forces that together produce an environment where mental health is structurally under pressure.
The first is institutionalised individualism. Everything is oriented towards the individual. Success is a personal achievement. So is failure. If things do not work out, you let them slip. This creates a society where people are constantly held responsible for their own outcomes, and where the illusion exists that you are always in control.
The second is the self-steering performance society. It can always be better. At school, at work, in your relationships, in your free time. There is no brake. People do not just have this pressure imposed on them from outside. They have internalised it. The drive to perform comes from both directions. That is what makes it so hard to see.
The third is obstructing acceleration. Everything moves faster. And every acceleration sets a new norm. Those who cannot keep up fall behind. The sociologist Hartmut Rosa writes that today's effort does not lead to less pressure tomorrow. It leads to more. The bar moves with you.
What this has to do with leadership
The Council addresses society as a whole. I work with a specific group within it: founders and leadership teams of fast-growing companies.
What I see is exactly what the Council describes, but concentrated and amplified. Fast-growing companies are hyper-nervous systems in miniature. Everything moves quickly. Performance is visible and measurable. Individual responsibility is high. The leader is the model for the culture, whether they intend to be or not.
What a founder feels, the team feels. Their pace becomes the pace. Their patterns under pressure become the patterns under pressure. Their inability to slow down produces a team that does not know how to either.
The Council cites resilience training as an example of an approach that does not address the problem at its source. We make people better at withstanding the pressure, without asking what produces it.
That is exactly why I do not work with resilience training.
What is actually needed
The Council argues for three things: connection, diversity, and slowing down. Three values that are systematically crowded out in the hyper-nervous society.
Connection disappears when everything is oriented towards individual output. Diversity disappears when there is only one norm for what success looks like. Slowing down disappears when every minute has to be productive.
In leadership work, I see what happens when those three are present. When a team stops performing and starts being honest. When a leader stops pretending they always know what they are doing. When there is space for something that does not immediately produce a result.
Something shifts. Not dramatically. But clearly.
The Council calls this the value of empty time. Time that does not need to produce output. In my work, it looks like a session where we are not trying to solve a problem, but trying to see it properly first.
That is where what comes next becomes possible.
The bill always arrives
The report ends with a calculation. A one percent increase in the number of people with mental health problems costs Dutch society almost 870 million euros per year in additional costs. Those are the known costs. The real costs are higher.
For a company of 30 people, you do not need to count in billions. The costs sit in the decisions that are made too late. The people who leave without anyone knowing why. The energy that goes into managing tension that nobody names out loud.
The Council says: put the brakes on society. That is large and slow and requires policy and culture change.
But you can also start at the scale where you actually have influence. Your own leadership. Your own team. The culture you produce, day after day, through how you run meetings, how you give feedback, how you respond when things get hard.
That is not a small scale. That is exactly where it begins.
Mees Loman is the founder of Loman Leadership, a leadership coaching practice for founders and leadership teams of fast-growing companies in Amsterdam and beyond. lomanleadership.com