The idea that work might be hazardous to your health - a crazy notion many employees have held for years - is now a scientific fact. A new study shows that stress at work more than doubles your risk of death from heart disease, can raise your cholesterol levels and help make you overweight.
This litany of 21st-century afflictions arises because of increasing levels of stress in the workplace, according to researchers from the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health. They publish their findings in today's issue of the British Medical Journal.
Producing the report must have involved a degree of stress for the researchers, given they took a 25-year look at more than 800 healthy Finnish employees, 545 men and 267 women. The team gathered data on stress, blood pressure, cholesterol and "body mass index" or height-to-weight ratio, using questionnaires, interviews and clinical examinations.
The researchers got very specific about what causes stress, splitting it into different categories. "Job strain" caused stress related to high work demands but low job control at work. Then you have your "effort-reward imbalance", in other words too much work and too little pay.
"Health risk derives from the mismatch between high efforts at work and low reward received in turn. Rewards concern money, social approval, job security and career opportunities," they write. What hard-working, diligent employee has not experienced effort-reward imbalance?
Employees in the study who experienced job strain had a 2.2 times higher risk of death from heart disease, the researchers found. Those experiencing the infamous effort-reward imbalance had a 2.4 times greater risk of death from heart disease.
The health risk doesn't stop there. "High job strain was associated with increased serum total cholesterol," the researchers report, and effort-reward imbalance "predicted increased body mass index", in other words too much weight.
The traditional view in promoting heart health was for people to stop smoking, reduce alcohol intake, eat less fat and take more exercise.
The prevention of work stress should now be added, the authors conclude. Employers please take note.