Work Stress

category

Work stress is the physiological and psychological response to workplace demands — workload, time pressure, role ambiguity, interpersonal conflict, organizational unfairness, lack of autonomy, job insecurity, performance demands, and the mismatch between professional values and required actions — that exceeds perceived coping resources, producing the HPA axis activation, inflammatory response, and autonomic nervous system dysregulation that constitute chronic occupational stress and that account for the majority of the work-related disease burden in developed economies.

Role

Work stress is the primary chronic stressor in the lives of working adults — with its combination of unavoidability (most people cannot simply choose to have no work stress), duration (8–10+ hours of daily exposure), and the social, financial, and identity stakes that make its management particularly challenging. The WHO estimates that work-related stress is responsible for approximately 120,000 premature deaths annually in the US alone, and the economic costs of work stress through healthcare, absenteeism, and reduced productivity are measured in hundreds of billions. Yet work stress management receives only a fraction of the organizational health investment directed toward physical workplace safety — the visible risks — while the invisible neuroendocrine damage of chronic occupational stress goes largely unmeasured and unmanaged.

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