A recent study reveals that job stress might make you sick. The new research suggests that high levels of work stress may put you at an increased risk of becoming sick because of disorders of the mental health.
Scientists examined the data from around 12,000 workers from Sweden. Over a period of five years, around 8 percent of the workers took sick leaves due to mental health disorders. And out of the people who took the mental health sick leaves, three quarters were women.
People who have demanding jobs, stressful jobs, little social support at the job and job strain were at a significantly higher risk for taking mental health sick leaves. The same thing applied to those people who have unhealthy lifestyles. A significant factor for the mental health sick leaves was also smoking. However, alcohol consumption doesn’t play any important role in mental health sick leaves.
Increased levels of physical activity and exercise dropped the risk of sick leaves due to mental health issues, according to the recent study. Lisa Mater from the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, and one of the authors of the study said that the new discoveries add to prior studies revealing that the psychological conditions at the workplace affect the rates of sick leaves because of mental health problems, and may also suggest some ways to decrease the risk.
Lisa Mater and her colleagues said that interventions in order to decrease the sick leaves because of mental disorders that concentrate on how to improve the psychosocial work environment, particularly how to reduce high psychosocial demands from jobs may prove to be very effective.
The authors of the study also added that efforts to make workers adopt lifestyles that are healthier without also dealing with the issues within the work environment might prove to be a lot less effective.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned said that while everybody experiences stress from time to time, a prolonged period of it can have an impact on a person’s health and their ability to deal with life. This is why these kind of social support and self-care are incredibly important.
The recent study conducted by Lisa Mater and her colleagues support previous ones that suggest that psychological conditions inside the work environment are directly connected to how many sick leaves employees take because of mental health problems.
The recent study regarding how job stress might make you sick was published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.
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