Decades of data show you manage stress affects your personality.
Both employees and their families suffer anxiety and lower well-being as a result.
Both employees and their families suffer anxiety and lower well-being as a result.
The ‘always-on’ culture in modern organisations is killing people’s satisfaction with life.
Central to the always-on culture is monitoring email out of hours.
Merely expecting to be available for work creates considerable strain on employees and their families.
Both suffer anxiety and lower well-being as a result.
Dr William Becker, who led the research, said:
“The competing demands of work and nonwork lives present a dilemma for employees, which triggers feelings of anxiety and endangers work and personal lives.”
The study of 142 couples found that even without doing work during nonwork time, the expectation of work created stress.
Dr Becker said:
“…the insidious impact of ‘always on’ organizational culture is often unaccounted for or disguised as a benefit — increased convenience, for example, or higher autonomy and control over work-life boundaries,
Our research exposes the reality: ‘flexible work boundaries’ often turn into ‘work without boundaries,’ compromising an employee’s and their family’s health and well-being.”
Dr Becker said:
“If the nature of a job requires email availability, such expectations should be stated formally as a part of job responsibilities.”
Instead, the best solution is to have periods of time when employees are not required to respond to email.
Dr Becker concluded:
“Employees today must navigate more complex boundaries between work and family than ever before.
Employer expectations during nonwork hours appear to increase this burden, as employees feel an obligation to shift roles throughout their nonwork time.
Efforts to manage these expectations are more important than ever, given our findings that employees’ families are also affected by these expectations.”
The study was published in the journal Academy of Management Proceedings (Becker et al., 2018).
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The way to react to stressful situations that protects your health.
It is not just major events, like deaths and divorce, that affect our health.
It is not just major events, like deaths and divorce, that affect our health.
Letting go of negative emotions related to everyday stress is linked to fewer long-term health problems.
How people react to little, daily irritations on the very same day is linked to both long-term health and physical limitations later in life.
The key is to avoid allowing the negative emotions to carry over to the next day.
Contrary to common belief, it is not just major events, like deaths and divorce, that affect our health.
Dr Kate Leger, the study’s first author, explained:
“Our research shows that negative emotions that linger after even minor, daily stressors have important implications for our long-term physical health.
When most people think of the types of stressors that impact health, they think of the big things, major life events that severely impact their lives, such as the death of a loved one or getting divorced.
But accumulating findings suggest that it’s not just the big events, but minor, everyday stressors that can impact our health as well.”
For the research people completed an 8-day survey of their emotions.
They were then followed up 10 years later to ask about the state of their health.
Naturally, people experienced more negative emotions in response to daily stressors.
But the people who let these negative emotions fester had the worst health 10 years later.
Dr Leger said:
“This means that health outcomes don’t just reflect how people react to daily stressors, or the number of stressors they are exposed to – there is something unique about how negative they feel the next day that has important consequences for physical health.”
Dr Leger explained that the best strategy for health was to let the emotions go:
“Stress is common in our everyday lives.
It happens at work, it happens at school, it happens at home and in our relationships.
Our research shows that the strategy to ‘just let it go’ could be beneficial to our long term physical health.”
The study was published in the journal Psychological Science (Leger et al., 2018).
The key to understanding why you feel older some days might be in how you see yourself.
The key to understanding why you feel older some days might be in how you see yourself.
Feeling really stressed out can make you feel more than 10 years older.
Just one stressful event, over and above the norm, can make a young adult feel one year older, psychologists have found.
Dr Shevaun Neupert, study co-author, said:
“Emerging adults are at an age where they are no longer kids, but they haven’t settled into their adulthood yet.
We wanted to know if stress affected their subjective age – how old they felt – and we found that it could make a big difference.”
For the study, the researchers followed 106 people aged 18 to 22 over 8 days.
The results showed that as their stress levels changed, so did the age they felt.
Dr Neupert said:
“Stress was the determining factor.
It could be stress related to school, work or social circumstances, but stressful days led to study participants feeling older.”
The effect of stress was additive, said Dr Neupert:
“The more stressors someone experienced, over and above their average day, the older they felt.
We calculated that each additional stressor made people feel an average of at least one year older.
There was also an effect of being generally ‘stressed out’ such that young adults who were generally more stressed felt an additional five years older.”
This levels was increased to 11 years older when they were under a lot of pressure.
How old people felt under stress depended on how fixed their identity was.
Those with a more fixed identity reported little change to subjective age.
Dr Neupert said:
“We know that children often report feeling older than they actually are.
And that adults often report feeling younger.
This work helps us understand the role that emerging adulthood plays as a crossover period from one to the other – as well as the importance of stress in influencing fluctuations during that transition.”
The study was published in the journal Emerging Adulthood (Bellingtier et al., 2018).
Prolonged stress weakens the synapses — the connections between brain cells — in the hippocampus.
Prolonged stress weakens the synapses — the connections between brain cells — in the hippocampus.
Running reverses the damaging effects of chronic stress on critical areas of the brain.
Stress can damage the functioning of the hippocampus, a structure of the brain important for memory and learning.
Running, however, protects the brain’s ability to learn and recall information, even under stress.
Dr Jeff Edwards, the study’s first author, said:
“Exercise is a simple and cost-effective way to eliminate the negative impacts on memory of chronic stress.”
Prolonged stress weakens the synapses — the connections between brain cells — in the hippocampus.
The study on mice, though, found that running over a 4-week period negated these negative effects.
Stressed mice who exercised did just as well on a maze-running experiment as non-stressed mice who exercised.
The mice who exercised also had stronger connections between the synapses in their brain.
Naturally, the best memory and learning performance is achieved in a low stress, high exercise environment.
Dr Edwards said:
“The ideal situation for improving learning and memory would be to experience no stress and to exercise.
Of course, we can’t always control stress in our lives, but we can control how much we exercise.
It’s empowering to know that we can combat the negative impacts of stress on our brains just by getting out and running.”
The study was published in the journal Neurobiology of Learning and Memory (Roxanne et al., 2018).
Discover the effects of stress on your body and mind, from anxiety and sleep issues to heart disease and weakened immunity.
Stress is a natural response to challenging situations, but prolonged exposure can have serious effects on both physical and mental health.
When faced with a stressful situation, the body reacts instantly to prepare for danger.
This response, known as the fight-or-flight reaction, involves several physiological changes.
Stress affects behaviour in various ways, often disrupting daily life and well-being.
If stress remains constant, it can lead to serious long-term health consequences.
Stress is not just an emotional state but also a complex biological process that affects multiple systems in the body.
Stress affects people differently depending on age, gender, and socioeconomic factors.
Managing stress is essential for maintaining overall health and preventing long-term damage.
Understanding stress is an evolving field, and researchers continue to explore new methods to mitigate its effects.
Stress is an unavoidable part of life, but its effects on health and well-being can be managed with the right strategies.
Understanding how stress impacts the body and mind allows individuals to take proactive steps to mitigate its consequences.
By adopting stress reduction techniques, maintaining social connections, and staying informed about emerging research, people can improve their resilience and overall quality of life.
Prioritising stress management is essential for long-term health and happiness.
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