They call it karoshi in Japan: death by overwork. But even in Japan, most people don’t rather die from working too much – they just get sick and suffer. And suffering, year after year, may be a prescription for career disaster…

We get stressed when we work too much or under bad circumstances, and it’s not news to any person that such stress may make us sick. But there’s a wrinkle that flies beneath the radar in the stress and health discussion: Not only may an excessively stressful career make us sick, but once we get sick, our lower energy levels affect the quality and amount of the work we may do, and sooner or later, our impaired performance may in turn destruct our careers.

Excess stress on a each day basis is something that’s unluckily very mutual for a large total of people. And for all too many, it has already resulted in an potpourri of health problems, ranging from the plainly annoying, embarrassing, and somewhat painful, such as cold sores, acne, neck pain, headaches, and hair loss, all the way to obesity, heart attacks, and even death.

Sometimes things may get so bad, that karoshi may seem like a merciful way out. But let’s focus on the kinds of health aftermaths that result from stress that doesn’t rather kill you and on the affect they may have on your career in turn. If the stress is ongoing, and it ordinarily is, you may well end up suffering for years, alive but not so well.

We recognise that when the body experiences stress, it releases adrenalin and cortisol as percentage of our primitive fight-or-flight response. These essential 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 may have been utile in an era where fighting or fleeing would have been considered reasonable options. But if your boss is yelling at you, neither bonking him on the kisser nor running away screaming qualifies as suitable behavior. Instead, there you are, a sitting duck, flooded with stress hormones that have no place to go and serve no aim except wreak mayhem on your well-being.

What havoc? For example, the immune scheme is suppressed or damaged, which compromises your body’s capacity to protest infection. So you’re the firstborn to catch the office cold and the last to recover from it. And then there are a number of chronic health conditions are either caused or made worse by stress, including high blood pressure, high blood sugar, migraine headaches, and heart disease. Some exploration proposes that stress may even cause cancer – or push the body over that critical hurdle where our immune system is just no longer strong sufficient to fight it off.

There are likewise somewhat less apparent conditions, less apparent at least to the outside observer: depression, fibromyalgia, insomnia, chronic fatigue syndrome, and adrenal burnout.

They all have in mutual that they’ll sap your energy and make it very difficult to get much work done. Come performance review, you’ll have a good deal of explaining to do. And if anything, that’ll make your stress-levels even worse.

Can you see where this is heading? Stress may hurt your body, but it will likewise injure your career if you don’t manage to get on top of it. Ratcheting down your stress levels has got to be a top priority, because it may not only cost you your health but your occupation as well. And then, what will you do for health insurance?

Stress And Health

Stress and Health: Biological and Psychological Interactions, Second Edition examines the biological links amid our emotions and changes in our health. Author William R. Lovallo provides an introduction to the conception of psychological stress, it is physiological manifestations, and it is effects on health and disease. The book concentrates on the psychophysiological kinship amongst cognitions, emotions, brain functions, and the peripheral mechanisms by which the body is regulated. Stress and Health is the only book on the biology of psychological stress for students and researchers in the behavioral sciences.