Although the dream for all working adults is to find yourself in a career that brings you maximum happiness and job satisfaction, we all know that the truth points to a much wider range of emotions and mixed feelings.
You may very well feel a lot of satisfaction from your job on a day to day basis, but at the same time, the majority of workers have stated that stress seems to be a big issue in their employment, often regardless of how much they love their job in the first place.
Sometimes even the most motivating and enjoyable things in life can produce feelings of stress along the way.
If that sounds like it applies to your own work situation, then you might want to start analyzing how much those feelings of stress have a negative impact on you.
With that in mind, here are some of the most common ways that typical workplace stress can harm your health.
1. High Blood Pressure
When you experience extended periods of stress and anxiety at work, your blood pressure starts to rise. In terms of health issues that you do not want to continue for an extended time, high blood pressure is definitely one of the most concerning. High blood pressure isn’t necessarily something that you can physically feel at the moment. Still, it is so serious because it is often a leading contributing factor in the onset of things like heart attacks and strokes. You need to take steps to reduce your workplace stress to return to and maintain blood pressure at a more normal level. Medications are also available if your blood pressure remains stubbornly high.
2. Stress Eating
One of the ways in which you might deal with stress at work is making bad choices with your diet. Comfort and stress eating go hand in hand, and bad experiences at work can lead to an increase in junk food consumption, which will lead to weight gain and the various health risks associated with it. Obesity is still something that is on the rise, and stress eating has been cited as one of the leading causes, particularly in adults.
3. Fatigue
Your body reacts to severe bouts of stress in an interesting way, almost trying to shut itself down in order to preserve itself. This is then felt by the person in question as a prolonged period of fatigue that you can’t seem to shake yourself out of.
If you have ever experienced fatigue before, you will know just how debilitating it can be, with your body not being able to keep up with what your mind wants to achieve. And although it sounds counterintuitive, fatigue can lead to sleeping problems.
4. Sleeping Problems
We have all had occasions when something on your mind keeps you awake late at night, and workplace stress can take this to a new level and start to cause extended issues with sleeping patterns.
A poor sleep routine can snowball into other habits like a bad diet, inability to focus and pay attention, and a general lack of motivation to do good work or even go to work.
This then comes around full circle because if you don’t have the energy to try your hardest in the workplace, you will end up feeling even more stressed about your levels of productivity and a general feeling of unhappiness.
5. Headaches
Stress and tension in your body can turn into headaches that feel completely debilitating. A bad headache will obviously lead to you having to step away from your work responsibilities for some time, and this is another symptom that works in a cyclical nature because the longer you stay away from work for your headaches, the more stressed you are going to get about what you might be missing.
There is a mass of information about managing stress available online. Experiment with a few methods to find what works for you or talk to your boss about things that may be able to change at work.