Job stress, health and consequences: how health problems caused by stress can kill your career

In Japan they call it karoshi: death from overwork. But even in Japan, most people don’t die from working too hard, they just get sick and suffer. And suffering, year after year, can be a recipe for professional disaster …

We get stressed when we work too hard or under bad circumstances, and it’s no news to anyone that stress can make us sick. But there is a wrinkle that goes unnoticed in the discussion about stress and health: Not only can an overly stressful career make us sick, but once we get sick, our lower energy levels affect the quality and quantity of the work we can do. Sooner or later, our poor performance can, in turn, ruin our careers.

Excessive stress on a daily basis is something that, unfortunately, is very common in many people. And for many, it has already resulted in a variety of health problems, ranging from the merely annoying, embarrassing, and slightly painful, such as cold sores, acne, neck pain, headaches, and hair loss, to obesity. , heart attacks and even death.

Sometimes things can get so bad that karoshi can seem like a merciful way out. But let’s focus on the kinds of health consequences that result from stress that doesn’t quite kill you, and the impact they can have on your career in turn. If the stress is ongoing, and it usually is, you may end up suffering for years, alive but not as well.

We know that when the body experiences stress, it releases adrenaline and cortisol as part of our primitive fight or flight response. These important hormones help increase the level of oxygen in the blood and raise blood sugar, preparing us to flee or fight.

That reaction may have been helpful in an era when fight or flight was considered reasonable options. But if your boss is yelling at you, neither hitting him in the kiss nor running away screaming qualifies as appropriate behavior. Instead, there you are, an easy target, awash in stress hormones that have nowhere to go and serve no purpose other than wreaking havoc on your well-being.

What havoc? For example, the immune system is suppressed or damaged, compromising your body’s ability to resist infection. So you are the first to catch a cold in the office and the last to recover. And then there are a number of chronic health conditions that are caused or worsened by stress, including high blood pressure, high blood sugar, migraine headaches, and heart disease. Some research suggests that stress can even cause cancer, or push the body to overcome that critical hurdle where our immune system is no longer strong enough to fight it.

There are also slightly less obvious conditions, less obvious at least to the outside observer: depression, fibromyalgia, insomnia, chronic fatigue syndrome, and adrenal exhaustion.

They all have in common that they will drain your energy and make work very difficult. Come check the performance, you will have to give some explanations. And if anything, that will make your stress levels even worse.

Can you see where this is heading? Stress can harm your body, but it will also harm your career if you can’t master it. Reducing your stress levels has to be a top priority, because it may not only cost you your health, but your job as well. And then what will you do for health insurance?