Job Stress, Health, And Consequences - How Stress-Caused Health Problems Can Kill Your Career
Article Source: HealthSnare.com
They call it Karoshi in Japan: death by overwork. But even in Japan, most people don't quite die from working too much - they just get sick and suffer. And suffering, every single year, can be quite a prescription for career disaster...
We get stressed when we work too much or under bad circumstances, and it's not news to anyone that such stress can make us sick. But there's a wrinkle that flies under the radar in the stress and health discussion: Although an excessively 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, and eventually, our impaired performance can in turn ruin our careers.
Excess stress every day is something that's unfortunately very common for many individuals. And for all too 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, completely to obesity, heart attacks, and even death.
Sometimes things can get so bad, that Karoshi may seem like a merciful way out. But let's pinpoint the kinds of health consequences that result from stress that doesn't quite kill you and on the impact they can have on your career in turn. If the stress is ongoing, and it usually is, you may well end up suffering for years, alive but not so well.
We know that when the body experiences stress, it releases adrenalin and cortisol within our primitive fight-or-flight response. These important hormones help increase the oxygen level in the blood and boost the sugar in the blood - preparing us to either flee or fight.
That reaction had been useful in an era where fighting or fleeing would have been considered reasonable options. If your boss is yelling at you, neither bonking him on the neither kisser nor running away screaming qualifies as appropriate behavior. Instead, there you are, a sitting duck, flooded with stress hormones that have no place to go and serve no purpose except wreak havoc on your well-being.
What havoc? For example, the immune system is suppressed or damaged, which compromises your body's ability to resist infection. So you're the first one to catch the office cold and the last to recover from it. And then there are numerous of chronic health conditions are either caused or made worse by stress, including high blood pressure levels, high blood sugar, migraine headaches, and heart disease. Some research suggests that stress can even cause cancer - or push the body over that critical hurdle where our immune system is just no longer strong enough to fight it off.
In addition there are slightly less obvious conditions, less obvious at least to the outside observer: depression, fibromyalgia, insomnia, chronic fatigue syndrome, and adrenal burnout.
They all have in common that they'll sap your energy and make it very difficult to get much work done. Come performance review, you'll have some explaining to do. And if anything, that will make your stress-levels even worse.
Can you see where this is heading? Stress may hurt your body, but it will hurt your career unless you manage to get over it. Ratcheting down your stress threshold is required to be a top priority, because it will not only cost you your health but your job as well. And then, what will you do for health insurance?
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Dicky Rejaka
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Date: Sun, 19 Sep 2010 Time: 5:15 AM
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