Is media burning through its most valuable asset? WONE founder Reeva Misra brings the science to FIPP Congress
Reeva Misra founded Walking on Earth after identifying workplace stress as the upstream cause of chronic disease. Here, she makes the case that managing human capacity isn’t a wellbeing initiative – it’s the most strategically important thing a media leader can do.
86% of workers report regular workplace stress. 45% are operating at chronic levels. As stress compounds, health claims increase two and a half times and sick leave eightfold. “That’s not a people problem,” says Reeva Misra, founder and CEO of Walking on Earth (WONE). “That’s a P&L problem.”
Reeva came to this work via neuroscience research at Oxford and AI strategy at BenevolentAI. “Over 70% of diseases are chronic and have no cure. I started digging into the academic literature, asking: what’s the leading indicator? What sits upstream of all of this? The answer, consistently, was stress.” What surprised her was not the science – the evidence, as she puts it, is unambiguous – but the gap between what the research showed and what organisations were doing about it. “No tool in healthcare was diagnosing and treating stress as the serious clinical problem it is.”
That gap became Walking on Earth, which uses data and AI to measure and address workplace stress. It is not positioned as a wellbeing platform. The framing is clinical and strategic, and the audience she’s increasingly speaking to is leadership. She lectures on this at Stanford, Harvard and Yale, and plans to bring the same argument to the FIPP World Media Congress this autumn. (Launch Tickets Offer valid until 31st May. Prices will increase by €200 after this deadline.)
The hidden cost
Media organisations, she argues, are particularly exposed. “High creative demands, relentless deadlines, always-on news cycles, real-time audience metrics, and now the existential pressure of AI is reshaping the industry entirely.” The conditions that produce great journalism are, she says, almost by design the conditions that generate chronic stress. “Unless recovery is built deliberately into the system, the two are in constant tension.”
The cost, she argues, is harder to measure than most organisations realise. “It’s the story that never gets pitched because someone’s running on empty. The creative instinct that gets dulled by the fourth consecutive deadline week. The brilliant journalist who’s mentally checked out six months before they hand in their notice. You don’t see that in an attrition report. You just feel it in their work.”
Her framework for sustainable high performance is rooted in biology rather than management theory. “It’s not about easing off. It’s about rhythm. Stress and recovery, cycling deliberately, building capacity rather than burning through it. That’s not philosophy, it’s biology. It’s how we’re wired.”
The stress signature
The best-performing teams she’s observed – across sport, media, and other high-stakes environments – are distinguished not by how hard they grind but by how fast they recover. “Almost nobody in this industry is building it intentionally. The organisations that crack this won’t just hold onto their best people. They’ll unlock a level of sustained creative output that burnt-out cultures simply cannot compete with.”
The early signs of a team running on empty, she says, show up in specific ways that leaders can learn to read. “In creative teams, the first thing to go is risk. People stop pitching the bold idea. They default to what’s familiar, what’s safe, what they know will get through.” In leaders, the signal is different but equally telling: “It’s the shift from expansive thinking to purely reactive thinking. The moment someone stops asking ‘what could we build?’ and can only ask ‘what do we have to ship?’ – that’s worth paying attention to. That’s not a workload problem. That’s a stress signature.”
What the data does, she says, is give organisations the ability to act with precision rather than intuition. “Most organisations are flying blind. They wait for the lagging indicators – attrition, sick leave, missed deadlines – by which point the damage is already done.”
BREAKING: Congress 2026 tickets just dropped
48th FIPP WORLD MEDIA CONGRESS
13-15 October 2026, Madrid, Spain,
Pace is not performance
Her challenge to the industry is conceptual as much as operational. “[Media leadership] confuses pace with performance,” she says. “Busyness has become a proxy for value. Everyone’s moving fast, shipping constantly, always on, and it feels like momentum. But what it’s quietly eroding is the one thing the media depends on above everything else: human creativity and judgement.”
Her central argument is that the creative brain is physiologically incompatible with chronic pressure. “The prefrontal cortex – the seat of original thinking, complex judgement, the ability to make unexpected connections – is acutely sensitive to sustained stress. When people are running on empty, they’re not just tired. They’re neurologically less capable of the very thing you’re asking them to do.”
“In the media, creativity is the product. Which means creating the biological conditions that make human creativity possible isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the most strategically important thing a leader in this industry can do.”
The FIPP World Media Congress takes place from 13-15 October 2026 in Madrid, Spain.
Current pricing ends May 31st.
FIPP & WAN-IFRA Members: €1290
Non Members: €1790
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