The link between stress and heart-related illness has long been recognized, especially its relation to sudden heart attacks.
This is why learning how to manage stress is an essential element of heart health training for anyone that wants to live a long and healthy life.
A good first step is to look at sources of stress that can be eliminated entirely. There are many causes of stress that can be avoided or reduced, from lifestyle choices like smoking to behaviors like excess anger. But some sources of stress can’t be avoided, and need to be managed instead.
Work-related stress is one of the latter.
In 2019, more than 50% of workers reported that work was a significant source of stress.
Implementing efforts to reduce stress can have a significant impact on the collective health of your team, contributing to a significant reduction in employee sick days as well as the issue of presenteeism.
How stress affects the heart
The body’s stress response, or ‘fight-or-flight,’ is your body’s method of preparing you for danger. In these moments, your body releases hormones intended to help you survive a dangerous situation.
This makes sense when we’re truly in danger, or in the distant past at the start of our evolutionary journey. However, these moments of genuine mortal threat were not around-the-clock occurrences.
The problem is that our stress response system hasn’t caught up to the fact that many people live much safer lives now, and the events that trigger the response are not threats to our life at all. An imminent deadline or a job interview aren’t at all similar to the stress of running for your life, but our response is the same.
Worse, because these stressful moments are almost constant in modern life, we’re also experiencing the stress responses much more often than we should. This is a problem because chronic stress can contribute to a number of conditions, including:
- High blood pressure
- Plaque buildup in the arteries
- Anxiety, depression, and addiction via chemical changes in the brain
Although the link between everyday stress and heart disease isn’t as well defined as acute and severe stress, Dr Deepak Bhatt, the director of the Integrated Interventional Cardiovascular Program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, explains that “Stress does cause some people to act in ways that increase their risk for heart disease.” For example, turning to comfortable but unhealthy behaviors as a coping mechanism.
Such behaviors can include:
- Unhealthy comfort foods
- Smoking
- Drinking high levels of alcohol
In other words, the worst offenders for increasing the risk of heart disease!
Stress and workplace health
Poor workplace health has a huge impact on the productivity and profitability of a business. In 2019 alone, American businesses lost an astonishing amount of money – more than $500 billion dollars just in sick days!
Studies have shown that stress reduction training can reduce the cost of sick days by as much as 20%, and that’s not including the cost of workers who are present in the office but unable to focus, and associated costs like insurance and medication prices.
You may look around your office and think the staff look healthy, but it’s usually impossible to know if someone is truly healthy or not just by looking at them. There are, however, a number of behaviors that can be seen in people suffering from work related stress:
- Working longer
- Increase in absence
- Irritability and mood swings
- Lack of motivation
- Decline in the quality of work
- Lack of confidence
- Uncharacteristic behaviors
Chances are you’ll see a number of people that display one or more of these – yourself included.
How you can reduce workplace stress
Working to reduce stress in your workplace is an important step in improving the health of your team. There are many methods that companies use to reduce the day to day stress, such as:
- Offering mental and physical health benefits: throughout 2020 and 2021, there has been a steady rise in employees quitting their jobs, largely due to feeling undervalued by their employers. Offering health-related benefits is one way that you can show your employees that their health is important to you, whilst also giving them access to healthcare they may need.
- Offer paid time off: vacations are incredibly valuable when it comes to stress reduction, as they provide an opportunity to distance yourself from the concerns of your day to day life. Despite the obvious benefits of a vacation, “The U.S. travel association found that American workers had 768 million unused vacation days in 2017.” Offering paid vacation can help to encourage your employees to take holidays, and they will come back refreshed and in a better state of mind for working.
- Take the team on off-site excursions: off-site activities can help to alleviate some of the stress of the usual working day, and also help to promote stronger bonds between your team members and improve your working environment.
The value of metabolic health coaching
If employee heart health is an area you want to improve in, then metabolic health coaching will give you the information and tools to make significant and lasting change.
Instead of being given vague advice to eat better and reduce stress, you and your employees will learn the specifics – with information that can be applied not just at work, but in all areas of life. This is the key to real change. Some of the things you’ll learn are:
- Healthy stress management
- Heart healthy diet
- The best forms of exercise
If you are looking to introduce heart health training into your workplace, I can work with you and your team either online or in person with my metabolic health coaching service.