Southeast Asia's most stressed workers are also among its happiest

Half of Filipino workers reported feeling stressed for much of the previous day in 2025, the highest rate in Southeast Asia, even as the same workforce ranked among the region's happiest and most committed to their jobs.

Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026 report, which surveyed 263,810 people across more than 160 countries and territories, found that 50% of Filipino employees experienced stress "a lot of the previous day," double the Southeast Asian average of 25% and above the global average of 40%.

"The Philippines emerges as a clear outlier," wrote Rogelio Alicor Panao, a University of the Philippines Diliman associate professor and data scientist at the Philippine Daily Inquirer, in an analysis of the figures.

Stress is easing almost everywhere else in the region. Panao noted that the share of Vietnamese workers reporting daily stress fell from 35% in 2021 to 13% in 2025, while Thailand's dropped from 41% to 25%.

Malaysia, Indonesia and Laos all sat below the regional average. At 50%, Panao wrote, Filipino daily stress runs close to four times Indonesia's 14% and tops both Cambodia's 34% and Singapore's 43%.

The Philippines also posted the region's highest daily sadness, at 31%, and anger, at 29%. Only 34% of Filipino workers said they were thriving in their lives.

The same workers were nonetheless the most engaged in Southeast Asia, with 39% involved and enthusiastic at work, against a regional average of 25% and a global average of 20%.

Gallup regional director Kanika Singh tied that to an upbeat job market, telling the Inquirer that 76% of Filipino workers saw 2025 as a good time to find work, higher than in Indonesia or Singapore.

Filipino workers, including nurses applying to work in United Kingdom, attend a lecture at a review center for the International English Language Testing System or IELTS in Manila, Philippines, April 2, 2019. Photo by Reuters

Filipinos sit near the top on happiness, too. The Workplace Happiness Index: Philippines 2025 by Jobstreet by SEEK, which polled about 1,000 Filipino workers within a wider Asia-Pacific sample of more than 10,500, found 77% described themselves as "extremely happy" or "somewhat happy" at work, second only to Indonesia's 82%, GMA News and The Manila Times reported.

Workers increasingly linked that happiness to a sense of purpose and room to grow rather than pay alone.

The same survey exposed the strain underneath. Only 41% of workers felt in control of their stress, 38% reported burning out or feeling extremely exhausted, and 55% said they thought about changing careers somewhat or extremely often.

Local research has long tied Filipino workers' mental health to conditions on the job more than personal circumstances.

A University of the Philippines Open University study of 173 PhilHealth employees who worked remotely during the Covid-19 pandemic found 96.32% under moderate stress and 49.69% with mild anxiety, with no significant link to age, gender, marital status or income.

The researchers pointed instead to heavy job demands, technological strain and blurred lines between work and home.

Health experts want employers, not just employees, to carry the fix.

At an April 28 Department of Labor and Employment forum, clinical psychologist Carolina Uno-Rayco, national executive director of the Philippine Mental Health Association, described burnout as a "syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed."

Psychologist Mary May Fernando urged companies to audit workplaces for psychosocial hazards and rethink workloads, saying "the goal is to 'fix the job,' not just 'fix the person.'"