From Zoomers to Boomers: Anove’s Intergenerational Approach to Mental Health
As a psychology student, working in the corporate world makes me feel like a mouse being thrown in a vat of cheese. It’s a place where people of all ages come together and create a group dynamic you can analyze forever. Deadlines, meetings, brainstorming; It’s a catalysator for stress and everyone reacts differently, especially due to the age gaps (Miteva et al., 2024).
For 2025, Anove has dedicated itself to the topic of mental-health. We wanted to do our part in society and bring attention to reducing the stigma around it, without waiting for larger companies to take the lead in this discussion.
To do that, we must start with ourselves: How do we at Anove, across all generations, deal with our mental-health? In five conversations, I tried to get to the bottom of it.
What does mental-health mean to you?
To talk about something, we must give it meaning. The APA dictionary describes mental health as a state of mind characterized by emotional well-being, good behavioral adjustment, relative freedom from anxiety and disabling symptoms, and a capacity to establish constructive relationships and cope with the ordinary demands and stresses of life (APA Dictionary of Psychology, n.d.).
Anove’s idea of mental health isn’t much different. CEO Jean-Hugues describes mental health as the ability to manage difficult situations effectively. Good mental health allows you to cope with adversity and recognize both good and bad situations for what they truly are. He emphasized recognizing the good situations since that is often forgotten. Good situations can only be truly good when it is seen as such by the receiver.
“Something that I've learned also from my experience is that if your mental health is bad, you might not be able to cope well with good situations because you are incapable of being grateful and recognizing that something good is actually happening.”
Co-founder Yuri Bobbert took a more physical approach to mental health. To him, mental health is as important as physical health. The two should be balanced, and neglecting one affects the other. This two-way street needs to be protected at all costs. "You only have one brain and one body, you should treat them as if they were a God." Yuri protects it by working out every single morning.
How do you balance between work, studies, and personal life?
In the Anove team we have quite ambitious people, juggling careers, sports and university at the same time. Ezra is an 18 year-old computer science student and also assistant to the CTO. When asked how he balances his personal life with school and work, he had one word: Planning. He meticulously plans everything using time slots and reminders to keep structure in his life. Every responsibility needs to have its own place. "If I don’t have things planned, everything falls apart."
Overpreparing and planning isn’t always necessary. Sometimes, embracing flexibility and taking things as they come leads to better outcomes. This approach might feel unfamiliar to some, like Ezra, who prefer a more structured way of working. For Jean-Hugues, however, too much planning can slow down the thinking and resilience process. That doesn’t mean he works without structure, his structure is flexible, allowing enough mind space to find creative solutions and tackle new challenges as they arise. He understands that working this way requires confidence and the ability to perform under pressure, which are skills he has refined over time. “I just go with the flow. You provoke things to happen, and out of ten things, six might be good.”
Guy, a 27-year-old professional goalkeeper who works at Anove as a sales officer, stands out because of soccer-mentality. He has an extremely disciplined mindset, shaped by his soccer career. Punctuality and structure are deeply ingrained in him because of the strict rules in professional sports. This has carried over into his work life, where he struggles when others don’t match his level of discipline.
"In soccer, if you're late by one minute, you pay a fine. That mentality sticks with me in everything I do."
Being late to a Team's call doesn’t exist in Guy’s world. His robotic sense of working is the reason why he can juggle practice, games and taking care of Anove’s cashflow. During soccer breaks he’s avidly scrolling through Linked-In, always on the look for new leads, always eager.
While Guy squeezes his work into every gap he can find to get things done, Niels, a recently graduated information security officer and consultant, fully separates work from his personal life. Once work is done, he mentally switches off and doesn’t allow it to intrude on his free time. Even if something work-related comes up, he chooses not to engage unless it’s urgent. "If I get a message on the weekend and it’s not important, I just don’t reply.".
Bad days
Everyone experiences bad days, there’s no escaping that. Or is there? During Yuri’s interview he said something that I had never heard anyone say before: “To be honest Nia, in my entire life, I never had a bad day. Ever." He explained that he has never had a truly bad day because he has developed such strong coping mechanisms. Whenever he experiences stress or frustration, he counteracts it by surrounding himself with positive energy. Talking to uplifting people, finding humor in situations and maintaining perspective.
Maybe Yuri is the needle in the haystack, because the rest of our team definitely knows that bad days exist. Jean-Hugues recognizes bad days by noticing mood swings. When he becomes easily irritated or impatient, he knows he’s not in a good mental state. His way of coping is to avoid overpreparing and instead handle situations as they arise. However, in recent years, he has realized that sometimes he needs to slow down and reflect on past events rather than always pushing forward.
"I used to just run forward without ever looking back, but at some point, that stops working."
Reflection is needed to see where you went wrong, but also to recognize that it’s not all so bad, good things happen when you recognize them.
Other times, you just need to wait it out. Niels knows he’s not doing well when he withdraws from social interaction, preferring to be alone. His main way of coping is to work out or practice mindfulness, but he also recognizes that you can’t always control your state of mind. "When I have a bad day, I just wait for it to pass. Most of the time, there’s nothing else to do."
Asking for help
Humans are social beings, we rely upon each other. Though the west can be quite individualistic, seeking support from your community is a key factor in nearly every psychological treatment plan (Wenn et al., 2022). However, recognizing when you need help is not easy. Jean-Hugues spoke about difficulties in asking for help in a nuanced way, revealing that for a long time, he didn’t think he needed it. He always believed he had good mental health because he was high-functioning and was always pushing forward. However, at a certain point, he realized that being capable didn’t necessarily mean he was in a healthy place mentally. Even good things that were happening slipped by him. "When you don’t stop to reflect, you don’t realize that something is wrong, you just keep going until you hit a wall."
At first, he hesitated about seeing a psychologist. He admitted that there’s often a stigma around it. People think you only go if you have serious psychiatric issues. But for him, it was more about learning how to manage stress, understand his emotions better and prevent himself from burning out. Jean-Hugues explained that therapy helped him gain more self-awareness. He learned that some of his behaviors, like constantly pushing forward and avoiding deep reflection, were coping mechanisms he had developed over time. Talking to someone helped him put things into perspective. "It’s not weak to ask for help. It’s weak to ignore your problems until they explode."
Self-reflection plays a big part in asking for help. Guy admits that he doesn’t reflect much on his emotions or past experiences and that this is largely due to the way he was conditioned in soccer. In his world, everything was about moving forward. There was no time to dwell on mistakes, emotions or deeper thoughts. He acknowledges that this has made him somewhat robotic in how he processes things. "If you waste time reflecting too much, you’re already behind. That’s how I was trained to think.".
Since being with his girlfriend, he has started to realize that reflection is an important part of personal growth. She has helped him become more aware of his emotions and the need to process things rather than just moving on automatically. She encourages him to slow down and think about why he reacts the way he does instead of just brushing past it. "Before, I never really questioned why I felt a certain way, I just moved forward. She helped me realize that sometimes, you need to look back."
As for the Gen-zers, talking about how they feel is less foreign. Both Ezra and Niels see talking about their struggles as natural, even if a clear solution might not come from it. Sharing doesn’t need a specific outcome or world changing realisations, sharing is a form of reflecting and releasing negative energy. This process, often referred to as "affect labeling”, involves putting one's feelings into words, which can attenuate both positive and negative emotions (Fan et al., 2018).
Generational gaps
In this team we have Gen-zers, Millennials and Gen-xers. You’ve gotten a peek into how we see mental health and how we deal with it, but what sets us apart? How does our age difference contribute to the gaps in our different ideals?
Ezra believes that younger generations are much more aware of mental health compared to previous ones. However, he also feels that this increased awareness sometimes leads to over analyzing or feeling overwhelmed by emotions.
"Our generation knows more about mental health, but I feel like sometimes we overthink it. Like, we always have to label how we feel instead of just feeling it."
He took the example of pop psychology. It has become a statement of individuality to label yourself with a mental illness, as if it’s a part of your personality, instead of a serious disorder that affects your day to day life. He finds that this internalisation of psychiatric buzzwords can make people feel stuck and resistant to letting go. Nonetheless he emphasizes the importance of the reflective and tolerant skills that Gen-z practices consistently in contrast to older generations. "Older generations just pushed through, but we reflect more. That’s good, but it also means we can get stuck in our heads."
Niels, who is also a part of Gen-Z, believes that mental health was always an issue, but older generations just didn’t talk about it. He thinks the biggest change is not necessarily that people struggle more now, but that they acknowledge it instead of pretending everything is fine.
"I don’t think older generations had fewer problems. They just ignored them or dealt with them in ways we wouldn’t now."
On the flip side, like Ezra, he also sees the good of pushing forward and not overthinking things excessively. "There’s something to be said about just accepting that some days are bad and moving on. Not everything has to be a deep emotional process."
Yuri, a Gen-xer, aligns with this sentiment. He sees a major difference between how his generation and younger people view mental health. While he believes it’s great that mental well-being is taken more seriously today, he also thinks previous generations had a certain resilience that younger people sometimes lack. "Younger people today are more in tune with their emotions, but they also get overwhelmed more easily."
He put an emphasis on this being different for people who suffer from serious psychiatric illnesses and that “just pushing forward’ does not apply to them, but looking at the general younger population he does notice a lack of stamina.
Guy , though he is younger than Yuri, goes even further by openly acknowledging that his way of thinking is more rigid and old-fashioned, shaped by the strict discipline of football. He sees that younger generations are more open about discussing mental health, but he still struggles to fully relate to that mindset. "I know people talk about mental health more now, but for me, it’s simple: if you feel bad, you fix it and move on."
Jean-Hugues, who like Guy, is also a millennial, is a bit less rigid and leans towards the younger generations more. Jean-Hugues acknowledges that mental health is taken more seriously today than in past generations, but he also sees that many people, especially those raised in environments that prioritize productivity over well-being, still struggle to talk about it openly.
"Older generations didn’t talk about mental health. They just dealt with things. That doesn’t mean they were fine, though."
He sees the good in Gen-z’s approach to openness, but that doesn’t mean the job is done. This prioritization to be independent and self-sufficient can create hesitation to seek help. To him, the job is not done yet.
Ultimately, their perspectives highlight a generational divide: while modern conversations about mental health promote self-awareness and openness, they also come with the risk of overcomplication. Older generations may not have had the healthiest ways of coping, but they often developed resilience and the ability to push through challenges without overanalyzing emotions. Their key takeaway is that balance is necessary: Mental health should be acknowledged and cared for, but without losing the ability to move forward and handle adversity effectively.
Nia’s perspective
And how do I think about mental health?
This may seem like a strange statement, but mental health is not about feeling good. It's not about always feeling good, feeling at ease or being able to laugh everything away. As Dr. Lisa Damour said, mental health is about having feelings that make sense in their context and about handling those feelings well (Damour, 2023). If you experience a loss, whether it's a death or a break-up, and you feel incredibly hurt, that's actually a testament to your mental health. In this day and age, we equate adolescent distress with adolescent mental health problems. This is far from an accurate comparison.
Damour believes the real hurdle lies in how we deal with these hurt feelings. Do I cry a lot? Do I write about my feelings in a journal? Do I talk to the people around me about how sad I am? Or do I seek solace in alcohol and weed? Do I take it out on myself or on the people around me? This contrast should tell us whether there is a psychological problem or an expected and typical reaction to something very difficult.
I notice that I have a bad day when I become overly self-critical. A small mistake can cause me to speak condescendingly about myself because it takes too much energy to fight against the negative narrative my brain is making up. On those days, like any 20-year-old, I find it hard to remember that I am not behind in life and that I’m still learning how to live.
The coping mechanisms I use to get out of that mindset vary, some good, some bad. Good ones are seeking comfort in God, hugging my mom, helping others feel better, allowing myself to cry and feel things without the pressure to get over it. A bad one, however, is that I tend to rationalize my pain, as if feelings are objective components that can be tamed by saying, “You have no reason to be upset.” It's normal to be upset when something bad happens, I try to remind myself of that.
Every generation forgets how idealistic they were when they were teenagers. I have no doubt that Yuri was appalled at how the adults around him handled their feelings when he was 16. And this applies to each of us. We all disagreed with the generation above us at times, but somehow we don't understand why a generation below us does the exact same thing. As Lorde said, “Even when I was little, I knew that teenagers sparkled. I knew they knew something children didn’t know, and adults ended up forgetting.” (Lorde, 2016).
Perhaps in a few years, I too will have ended up forgetting. But the most important takeaway from this discussion is our responsibility to approach each generation’s perspective with empathy. We must recognize the weight of the challenges younger generations face while also understanding why older generations may struggle to change their deeply ingrained ways of thinking. In the end, rebellion and resistance to change are inevitable cycles. We all push back, and one day, we too become stagnant. Because at our core, we are all simply searching for the same thing: a way to feel at peace with ourselves.
Literature
APA Dictionary of Psychology. (n.d.). https://dictionary.apa.org/mental-health
Damour, L., PhD. (2023). The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents (1st ed.). Ballantine Books.
Fan, R., Varamesh, A., Varol, O., Barron, A. T. J., Van De Leemput, I., Scheffer, M., & Bollen, J. (2018). Does putting your emotions into words make you feel better? Measuring the minute-scale dynamics of emotions from online data. arXiv (Cornell University). https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1807.09725
Miteva, S., Stoyanova, S., & Damyanova-Andreeva, M. (2024, August 17). GENERATIONAL DIFFERENCES IN PREFERENCES FOR COPING WITH STRESS. https://ikm.mk/ojs/index.php/kij/article/view/6911
Wenn, P., Meshoyrer, D., Barber, M., Ghaffar, A., Razka, M., Jose, S., Zeltser, R., & Makaryus, A. N. (2022). Perceived Social Support and its Effects on Treatment Compliance and Quality of Life in Cardiac Patients. Journal of Patient Experience, 9. https://doi.org/10.1177/23743735221074170
Lorde. (2016, November 7). A note from the desk of a newborn adult [Letter]. Retrieved from https://www.reddit.com/r/lorde/comments/18rc7gg/lorde_letter_to_adolescence/
