Work Stress Increases Risk Mental Health Disorder Risk & More Sick Days

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"Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life," Confucius said, but regardless of career path one takes, work stress may sometimes be inevitable. There will be aspects of work—whether events or people we have to deal with—that are beyond our control. This is when work stress takes a toll on one's body.

The University of Cambridge reports that there are several physical, emotional, intellectual, and behavioral effects of work-related stress, most commonly, sleep disturbances, headache, gastrointestinal upset, and raised blood pressure or cardiovascular disease. People who experience work stress may also feel labile emotions, depression, anxiety and irritability. Additionally, there is a noticeable loss of concentration, lack of motivation, loss of memory, poor decision-making, and difficulty with thought process.

A study done by the University of Rochester Medical Center in 2010 revealed a link between chronic job stress and lack of physical activity to obesity.

The report revealed: "Stressful working conditions are known to impact health behaviors directly and indirectly. Directly, stress can affect the neuroendocrine system, resulting in abdominal fat, for example, or it may cause a decrease in sex hormones, which often leads to weight gain."

The study was led by Diana Fernandez, M.D., M.P.H., Ph.D., an epidemiologist at the URMC Department of Community and Preventive Medicine.

CBS News reports that high levels of job-related stress cause people to take more sick days and increase the risk of mental health disorders, based on a new study. Published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, the study observed data from around 12,000 workers in Sweden over a five year period. The results showed that eight percent of these workers took mental health sick leaves, and 75% of them were women.

Researcher Lisa Mater of the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm and her colleagues wrote: "Interventions to reduce sick leave due to mental disorders that focus on improving the psychosocial work environment, especially reducing high psychosocial job demands, may prove effective."

Fernandez recommended in her 2010 study: “It is important to focus on strengthening wellness programs to provide good nutrition, ways to deal with job demands, and more opportunities for physical activity that are built into the regular workday without penalty.”

URMC says that Fernandez's study is just one among many research that continue to "associate high job pressure with cardiovascular disease, metabolic syndrome, depression, exhaustion, anxiety and weight gain."

Mater and her study associates concluded that attempts to get workers to adopt healthier lifestyles would be less effective if problems in the workplace are not addressed. Similarly, Fernandez's study concludes that organizations should "not only offer ideas on how to be healthy, but should examine the organizational structure and provide ways to minimize a stressful environment for everyone."