That's the message from Dr Adam Fraser, founder of The e-lab, who along with Dr John Molineux, helped by sponsorship from AIA NZ, are conducting the first industry-wide study into the mental wellbeing of Kiwi financial advisers.

AIA NZ's chief partnership insurance officer Sam Tremethick and Dr Fraser sat down with Good Returns' Philip Macalister to discuss the New Zealand Adviser Wellbeing Research project.

Fraser says he was asked by Australian financial advisers to conduct a survey of the profession due to a spike in adviser suicides.

"These people actually pleaded with me, these were 50-year-old males who don't often ask for help or become that vulnerable."

What the research found was "pretty confronting," says Fraser.

"For 25 years we've been studying different roles.

"We've looked at home loan lenders, teachers, paramedics, executives, emergency room staff in hospitals...and in comparison [financial] advisers scored worse in every metric we measured than all these other roles.

"Worse on mental health, on wellbeing, the highest level of stress, the highest levels of feeling overloaded," says Fraser.

But what was driving those poor results?

"By far and above it was all the regulatory change and the constant changes hitting them in the industry, and it's been happening for 15 years,  so it's been relentless."

Tremethick says he's encouraging everyone in the advice industry to take the 15-minute survey.

"We want people to put on their own face masks before they help others and so we need to understand the mental well-being of our adviser community because they are dealing with the general public on a daily basis.

"Being an adviser can be a lonely game and you couple that with the changes the industry is going through and the Covid-19 environment where no one really knows what's going on," Tremethick says.

The study will also look at who is thriving in the industry and how they manage to stay productive and positive.

"What do they do with their time and what are their behaviours?", asks Fraser.

He says one of the things they discovered in the Australian survey was thriving advisers were just as frustrated by the change and by the regulatory shifts as others.

"But it was much more about how they didn't let that frustration run their behaviour and consume them...they still focussed on how do I respond to that and what is best for my business.

"We can use this to inform and regulation and compliance moving forward."

While Tremethick says he doesn't think Kiwi advisers are worse off than their Australian counterparts he's hearing more and more regularly that "...there is an overwhelming sense it's getting hard and people are struggling".

"There's the economic climate that's quite different, you're running a business potentially from home with homeschooling and whatever else - it's tough out there.

"We are hoping the adviser community gets behind this because we want to know where we are at and what we need to do to make sure that more of us are in that thriving state...a study that tells us how we can get better I think is really important."