“Unnatural work produces too much stress.”
— BHAGAVAD GITA
You already know that workplace hazards can harm your health. The soldier dies in battle. The policeman gets caught in the criminal’s crosshairs. A construction worker falls from a 20-story building. A researcher experiences a biohazard accident and winds up with a rare infectious disease.
What you do during your workday can clearly affect the body. But it affects the body not just through physical hazards. It also affects the body through the power of the mind, which responds to what you do during your workday by either triggering stress responses or initiating relaxation responses. You know work has the potential to stress you out. But you may have also experienced times at work when you’re doing what you love, you’re in the flow, you feel a sense of mission and purpose, and you’re grateful to be doing something that matters. Such feelings can benefit the body as much as stress responses harm it.
We all know that work stress is poisonous and can translate into physical symptoms. Anyone who has ever gotten a migraine after a deal went bad or stiff shoulders after the boss criticized him can attest to that.
But has your doctor ever prescribed doing work you love as treatment for your tumor or suggested that quitting your job might cure your irritable bowel syndrome? When was the last time you diagnosed your job stress as the root cause of your stroke or credited your professional fulfillment with the spontaneous remission of your chronic disease?
Perhaps it’s time for a paradigm shift.
You may not have thought much about how your work affects your health. If you’re sick, you may have assumed that your illness is the result of a defective gene, poor diet, insufficient exercise, or a biochemical imbalance—and this may indeed be true. But work stress may be a contributing, even causative, factor. You might be surprised to realize that the prescription for your illness might not be a pill or surgery. It might be finding new ways to handle work stress, making changes in your current job in order to reduce anxiety, or even finding a new career.
As it turns out, you really can work yourself to death. You can also follow your bliss back to health. In Japan, there is more awareness about the effect of job stress on health. They even have a word for it—karoshi, which is defined as “death by overwork.”
Like many of the other 7.7 million Japanese who slog their way through 60-plus-hour work weeks, Satoru Hiraoka was a good soldier, the kind who prioritized the company first and his family last, while banishing any frivolous notions like leisure time, weekends off, or vacation days. For over 28 years, Hiraoka, a middle manager at the Tsubakimoto Seiko precision bearing factory in Osaka, dutifully worked 12- to 16-hour days, often capping out at 95 hours of work each week.
This was no exaggeration. Review of Hiraoka’s time cards showed that in the year prior to his untimely death, Hiraoka put in over 1,400 hours of overtime. Like the perfect employee, he never called in sick, never took a hangover day, nor skipped out on work to catch his child’s school play. He was the ideal kigyo-senchi (“corporation soldier”).1
Then one day, on February 23, 1988, after putting in a 15-hour day, the 48-year-old came home from work and suffered from what the doctors called “sudden cardiac insufficiency.” He died instantly.
Hiraoka’s death, and tens of thousands of others just like his, might have gone unnoticed had a group of Japanese occupational-medicine specialists and cardiologists not been studying the phenomenon. These doctors noticed that people who were overworked were at increased risk of dying of unexpected cardiovascular and cerebral diseases, such as heart attack and stroke. The first case had been reported in 1969, when a worker died of a stroke at the age of 29.2
But it wasn’t until 1987 that the Japan Ministry of Labor began collecting statistics on karoshi. Since that time, Japanese officials estimate that approximately 10,000 cases of karoshi occur each year.3 Some lawyers and scholars claim that the number of karoshi deaths in Japan equals or exceeds the number of traffic-accident fatalities each year.4
According to Shunichiro Tajiri, head of the Osaka-based Social Medical Study Institute, karoshi victims are typically otherwise healthy men in their 40s and 50s who are middle managers in stressful jobs that require them to work more than 12-hour days, six or seven days a week. Just before dying, most complain of varying combinations of dizziness, nausea, severe headache, and stomachache. In 95 percent of karoshi cases, death occurs within 24 hours of the onset of severe symptoms, though milder symptoms sometimes precede the severe ones.
In a Chicago Tribune article, Tajiri said, “In each case, the men were healthy, with no evidence of any disease. They simply worked themselves to death.”
Hiraoka’s widow is one of many Japanese who filed karoshi claims to receive workers’ compensation benefits. But because karoshi is itself not quite a disease—it’s a constellation of what are believed to be stress-induced physiological changes—and because it’s often hard to prove that a victim’s death is directly related to too much work stress or long hours, these benefits can be tougher to secure than those given to people who die from on-the-job accidents.5 Nonetheless, karoshi claims are rising, and workers’ compensation benefit payouts are too.
Death by Overwork in the United States
It’s not just the Japanese who are working themselves to death, and it’s not a new phenomenon. In June of 1863, a London newspaper reported a story entitled “Death from Simple Over-work” about a 20-year-old woman who died after working days that averaged over 16 hours a day (up to 30-hour shifts during the busy season) in a garment factory. While this might sound like the stuff of Dickensian novels, the truth is that it’s happening right now in the United States, as much as it is in Japan or England.
The Information Age has transformed us into workaholics who no longer have the forced respite of snail mail and hand-delivered memos. Now, it’s not just doctors who are on call 24/7. It’s most of us. The advent of e-mail, cell phones, pagers, fax machines, laptops, and iPads means we are accessible almost all the time and increasingly poor employee health is reflecting it. Not that poor health stops employees from coming in to work. A study conducted by the health insurer Oxford Health Plans found that one in five Americans come to work even if they’re ill, injured, or seeing a doctor that day.6 The same sort of work obsession has about a third of employed Americans failing to use accrued vacation time, according to a survey by Expedia.com.
Similarly, about a quarter of British workers do not take all their vacation time, and in France, many don’t either. The difference is that most Europeans get much more vacation time—an average of 26 days for the British and 37 for the French—compared with 14 days for the average American. Another difference is that, while 137 countries mandate paid vacation time, the United States is the only industrialized country that does not.7
This failure to take a break has actually been associated with early death. One study, published in Psychosomatic Medicine in 2000, looked at 12,000 men over nine years and found that those who failed to take annual vacations had a 21 percent higher risk of death from all causes and they were 32 percent more likely to die of a heart attack.8
In another study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, researchers at Johns Hopkins evaluated data collected from patients in the Framingham Heart Study over a period of 20 years and found that women who vacationed once every 6 years or less often were almost eight times more likely to develop coronary heart disease or have a heart attack than women who vacationed twice a year.9
There’s a good reason why Workaholics Anonymous is now an active 12-step program in the United States as well as in many countries. Although most of the data on karoshi comes from Japan, the International Labour Organization released statistics showing that the United States far exceeds the Japanese when it comes to overwork. Our doctors and our government have yet to recognize karoshi as a distinct disease or award workers’ compensation benefits the way the Japanese do, and because we don’t track it, it’s hard to say how frequently work stress manifests as death in the United States. But you can bet it affects the health of many.
Types of Job Stress
People who experience stress at work get their stress responses repetitively triggered throughout the workday. Imagine the red-faced, pot-bellied prosecuting attorney screaming at the quivering, weepy witness—like a cartoon character with steam coming out of his ears—until the attorney keels over in the middle of the courtroom with a heart attack. Then there’s the type-A Wall Street stock trader who spends 16 hours a day screaming bloody murder until her blood pressure skyrockets and she has a stroke at the age of 42.
Golden handcuffs are alive and well, and many high-powered professionals are coming in at dawn and staying until bedtime, working 100-hour weeks in exchange for big, fat paychecks. Other, less privileged workers slave away just as hard, minus the fancy payout. Exceptionally long hours and unusually demanding workloads face physicians, investment bankers, business consultants, truckers, pilots, attorneys, and countless others.
Job stressors vary, but the stress affects the body in similar ways. There’s the stress caused by interpersonal conflict, which may be experienced by lawyers, debt collectors, customer-service representatives, or anyone who is bullied by co-workers, supervisors, or customers. There’s the stress experienced by people in high-stakes careers, such as doctors, nurses, firefighters, soldiers, air traffic controllers, commercial airline pilots, and criminal attorneys, where one wrong move can ruin someone’s life.
There’s the stress of jobs that expect you to sell your soul or sacrifice your integrity, like the advertising executive expected to spearhead a campaign for an unhealthy product, the white-collar insider commanded to keep quiet about fraudulent activities the company might be engaging in, the soldier ordered to carry out an on operation he doesn’t believe is ethical, and the politician who sacrifices her own values in order to get a law passed.
There’s also the stress of feeling powerless or lacking control in the workplace, which might be experienced by the nurse who knows the doctor has ordered the wrong treatment but must follow orders anyway, or by the person low on the corporate ladder who has big ideas but doesn’t think his little voice matters.
Other types of work stress fall under the heading of organizational constraints—tedious, frustrating hurdles that get in the way of getting the job done well, such as meddling co-workers, limited access to necessary information, or lacking the authority to do what needs to be done in order to successfully complete a task.
There’s the stress of role confusion, which comes about when you don’t understand what is expected of you or whether you’re meeting expectations. There’s also the stress of conflicting messages, when different members of a work environment deliver countering instructions that leave you scratching your head.
While the mind interprets all these stressors as different, the lizard brain perceives the same thing in each case—threat. The physiological stress response flips on. Regardless of what causes the stress, the body manifests a physiological response similar to what happens when a person suffers from chronic loneliness. Because the mind communicates with the body via hormones, the physiological response is the same, whether you’re listening to your boss rant at you, trying to calm down an angry client, or putting out a fire in a burning building.
So next time you choose to work overtime, your boss screams at you, or you’re put in a work situation that leaves you feeling powerless, keep in mind that you might be taking years off your life by taxing your heart, wearing out your blood vessels, irritating your digestive tract, exhausting your adrenal glands, weakening your immune system, and stressing your pancreas.
Is it really worth it? It’s easy to rationalize enduring stressful situations when you’re working your way up the corporate ladder, struggling to keep your job in a lagging economy, or worrying about how you’ll pay the rent if you don’t make those sales. But are you really willing to withdraw years from your life account to make more money, attract more clients, or impress your boss?
Consider, instead, making an investment in your health for years to come by setting boundaries and implementing self-care at work. In Chapter 8, we’ll talk about ways to protect your body from job stress, and in Part Three of the book, we’ll discuss how to ensure that your work is aligned with your highest truth in order to optimize your health. Until we get there, suffice it to say that work stress is not benign. In order to live a vital, long life, it’s important to find ways to feel peaceful and relaxed at work.
Typical Symptoms of Work Stress
When exposed to stress at work, the body whispers before it begins to yell. Before you collapse of a heart attack, keel over from a stroke, or wind up with cancer, you’re likely to experience milder physical symptoms, such as backache, headache, eye strain, insomnia, fatigue, dizziness, appetite disturbances, and gastrointestinal distress.
Consider the following symptoms warning signs of more serious diseases in the making.
Backaches
Several studies have shown that backaches, such as those related to arthritis and fibromyalgia, increase in response to daily stressors such as work.10 The relationship between work stress and backaches (as well as other types of musculoskeletal pain) is believed to occur because repetitive stress and activation of the HPA axis depletes cortisol and raises prolactin levels, thereby increasing the body’s sensitivity to pain by suppressing the immune system and increasing inflammation.11
Headaches
As anyone who has ever pulled an all-nighter and suffered a migraine can attest, work stress can also cause headaches, most likely because pain-signaling pathways in the brain become hypersensitized in times of stress. Once the brain is overly sensitized to painful stimuli, even the slightest twinge may excite nerves in the brain, causing pain and muscle tension.12
Eye Strain
Occupational stress can also lead to eye strain, which includes itchy, heavy, or sore eyes as well as blurred or double vision, believed to be caused by inflammation and increased responsiveness to pain stimuli in and around the eyes. Certain workplace tasks, such as computer use, can also increase eye muscle fatigue.13
Insomnia
Notorious for keeping us up at night, work stress accounts for more lost sleep than any other cause.14 A Swedish study showed that 10 to 40 percent of the working-age population reported work-related insomnia.15 Scientists theorize that higher levels of ACTH and cortisol triggered by the stress response reduce surges of nighttime melatonin levels, which we need for restful sleep.16
Fatigue
Obviously, if your job is affecting your sleep, you’re likely to feel fatigued, but other physiological factors may also make you feel fatigued when you’re stressed at work, even if you’re sleeping well. Although its mechanism is poorly understood, fatigue is one of the most common symptoms people experience when they’re stressed by work. Work stress also increases the risk of chronic fatigue syndrome.17 Theories link work-related fatigue to depleted cortisol levels, as well as to a genetic predisposition to stress-mediated fatigue.18 What is clear is that individuals respond to the chemical alterations caused by stress in unique ways, so some people are more likely to feel fatigue when they experience work stress than others.19
Dizziness
As if some jobs aren’t dizzying enough, workplace stress makes some people experience dizziness, believed to be related to changes in heart rate, blood pressure, and respiratory rate caused by stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system.20 Alterations in these vital signs, particularly elevations in respiratory rate, can lead to hyperventilation, which alters the acid/base balance of the body, disrupting the nervous system’s responses to balance and coordination via the cerebellum and the eighth cranial nerve.21
Appetite Disturbances
Depending on your unique physiology, work stress can either increase or decrease appetite, leading to weight loss or weight gain, although the most common response to work stress is decreased appetite.22 Twenty-one percent of study respondents reported a significant loss of appetite following a stressful event.23 Emotional stressors can trigger the brain to release ACTH and melanocyte-stimulating hormone (MSH), which can lead to loss of appetite and subsequent weight loss.24
Paradoxically, stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system may also cause the stomach to release the amino acid ghrelin, which makes you feel hungry and can lead to weight gain.25 While these mechanisms come into play at the time of stress initiation, chronic work stress also affects appetite via stress-induced cortisol production. When cortisol levels are high, body fat tends to increase, and when cortisol levels are exhausted, release of the signaling peptide leptin decreases appetite.
Gastrointestinal Distress
Work stress commonly leads to gastrointestinal disorders such as nausea, heartburn, abdominal cramps, diarrhea, and irritable bowel syndrome, most likely meditated by the increased amounts of ACTH generated during the stress response. In response to ACTH, gastric emptying is delayed, which can lead to stomachaches and abdominal cramping. Heartburn can worsen, not only because stomach acid levels increase, but because the stress response reduces the stomach’s pain threshold, increasing the perception of pain in response to heartburn and predisposition to stomach ulcers.26 The stress response also lowers the stomach’s ability to expand, which stimulates contractions of muscles in the colon and can lead to diarrhea and other symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome, most likely related to overproduction of CRF.27
Work Stress and Life-Threatening Disease
While backaches, stomachaches, and insomnia might not strike you as serious health issues, they are early warning signs, resulting from the body’s stress response. These symptoms may be similar to the symptoms lonely people experience. The average American experiences 50 brief stress-response episodes each day, and lonely people or those unduly stressed about work experience even more, requiring the body to devote energy to maintaining healthy homeostasis.
At first, the body keeps up. But over time, the body gets tired and things go wrong. Frequent elevations in blood pressure result in thickening and tearing of blood vessel walls. Excessive production of fatty acids and glucose causes plaques that lead to heart disease. Chronic muscle tension and inflammation leads to pain and musculoskeletal disorders. Overproduction of cortisol suppresses the immune system, predisposing the body to infection and cancer.28
Chronic stimulation of the stress response caused by job stress can lead to heart disease, thyroid disease, ulcers, autoimmune disease, obesity, diabetes, sexual dysfunction, depression, anorexia nervosa, Cushing’s syndrome, chronic fatigue syndrome, inflammatory disease, and cancer.29 One study even showed that those in a hostile work environment are more likely to die young.30 Another study of 7,000 people demonstrated that, while being employed is generally better for your health than being unemployed, it’s better to be unemployed than employed in a badly paid, demanding, unsupportive job where you have little power or control.31
So while you might enjoy the paycheck a stressful job delivers, keep in mind that you may be paying a price even greater than what they’re paying you.
Financial Stress and Health
If you’re in a stressful job and suspect your health is suffering as a consequence, you may think about cutting back your hours, quitting your job, or switching careers. But if you’re one of those people, the boogeyman in your lizard brain is probably whispering evil nothings like “You can’t afford to quit, you moron. How will you ever pay the bills?”
This is a very real concern for many people. Your body might decompensate when you’re in a stressful work environment, but the fear of job loss can amplify these feelings further.
Usually, work stress and financial stress are linked. It’s a catch-22, really, because financial stress can be just as harmful to your health as work stress or loneliness. Studies linking wealth and health are numerous. Gopal Singh at the Department of Health and Human Services, along with Mohammad Siahpush, a professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, developed an index to measure social and economic conditions, using census data on education, income, poverty, housing, and other factors. What they found by examining data from 1998 to 2000 was that the affluent live 4.5 years longer than the poor (79.2 years versus 74.7 years). And according to Singh, this longevity gap is widening over time.32 The affluent are less likely to get almost every disease out there except for cancer, and when they do get cancer, they’re much more likely to survive.33 They are less likely to have accidents or wind up disabled, and their babies are twice as likely to survive as those born into poor families.34
Rich people even suffer less than poor people before they die. In one study, researchers interviewed the surviving family members of 2,604 men and women aged 70 or older who had a net worth of $70,000 or more when they died. They found that the individuals with the highest net worth were 33 percent less likely to have suffered from pain in the year before they died. They were also less likely to have experienced depression or shortness of breath. These differences persisted even after researchers took into account the subjects’ age, sex, ethnicity, education, and preexisting medical conditions. Why is this so? Researchers postulated that those with greater financial resources may express their symptoms more assertively and demand better care. They may also have greater access to services that health insurance might not cover.35
Of course, these disparities pose one of those chicken/egg conundrums. Are rich people able to earn more money because they’re healthier? Are poor people financially disadvantaged because they’re sick? Or do the wealthy just have access to better preventive health and exotic treatments because they can afford to pay for them?
You might argue that access to premium health care explains the divide, but studies show this is not the case. When offered the same health-insurance benefits, people higher up in a company’s pecking order are healthier than those lower down.36 Some health officials believe it’s because social inequality itself is the killer. People of lower socioeconomic status may feel like they have less control over their lives and worry more about their basic needs, which activates the body’s stress response.
You might be stressed because you just declared bankruptcy, your stocks went down, you got demoted, you’re unemployed, or you can’t afford to get food on the table. But even if none of these things are true, you could still be stressed at the very idea of them. The body can’t differentiate between perceived financial stress (fear that you’ll wind up flat broke) and real financial stress (you really are flat broke). Either way, the stress response becomes chronically activated, and this can translate into disease.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. While you may not be able to change your financial status overnight, you can change how your mind responds to money worries.
Happy Workers Are Healthy Workers
Unsurprisingly, work environments that avoid shaming employees, encourage creativity, allow flexibility, and foster positive interoffice relationships have also been linked to better employee health. Those with effective employee wellness programs that are linked to financial incentives, such as Safeway, get bonus points for improving health outcomes in their workers.37 But it’s not just about making sure the workplace avoids shame and chooses healthy food for the cafeteria. There’s also evidence that, while work stress can literally kill you, doing work you love just might save your life.38
Finding your professional bliss can be medicine for the mind, and the body responds with better health and more happiness. Happiness researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky, author of The How of Happiness, asserts that people who strive for something significant personally and professionally are happier than those who don’t have strong dreams and aspirations. She says, “Find a happy person, and you will find a project.”
Studies show that the process of working toward a goal and participating in challenging and stimulating work experiences is as important as actually achieving what it is you desire.39 Committed pursuit of goals gives us a sense of mission, of pursuit, of being part of something bigger than ourselves, and studies show that this increases our sense of control over our lives, which is known to affect the health of the body.40
When your work involves pursuing goals that are personally resonant for you, it boosts your self-esteem as you start checking off the baby-step goals that get you closer to your big dream; it lifts you up and motivates you to keep on plugging away, doing what you love, even when the pursuit of these goals may require tedious tasks, risk-taking, and uncertainty. Pursuing goals also adds meaning and structure to our lives, keeping us on task, ensuring that the world will be a better place because we were in it. Striving to leave a legacy or pursue a calling increases happiness, which leaves the body flooded with health-inducing hormones that strengthen the immune system, relax the cardiovascular system, and deactivate the stress response.
Keep in mind that when I talk about “work,” I’m talking about whatever you spend the majority of your day doing. For some, this is a paid position. Others might not get paid, but still work their butts off raising children, caring for ailing parents, or volunteering, and these jobs can be every bit as stressful as any profession, with equally negative effects on the body. They can also bring just as much meaning and purpose to your life, resulting in positive effects on the body.
The key is to remember that how our minds feel as we go about our day—how relaxed, happy, and fulfilled we are—gets translated into the physiology of the body. Way too many people subscribe to the TGIF mentality that leads them to dread Mondays, breathe a sigh of relief on hump day, and then drink way too much all weekend before putting their heads down and grinding away again at a job they don’t enjoy. Or they quit a job they love to stay home with the kids, only to resent what they gave up, which leads to its own kind of stress.
However, when you feel free to be creative in your work, enjoy autonomy and respect, have clear goals and measures of achievement, are well supported by your co-workers, believe that your work is in line with your integrity, know that what you’re doing helps other people, have a sense of mission and purpose, express your unique gifts in your work, get paid well, and spend enough time away from your work to pursue other activities, you’re less likely to experience work stress and more likely to be optimally healthy.
Creativity and Health
It may seem peripheral to you to mention creativity as a factor in your health. Who ever heard of prescribing a hobby as preventive medicine or treatment for a disease? But scientific evidence shows that creative expression can elicit relaxation responses that counterbalance stress responses.
Sadly, being creative gets a bad rap in our society. From the time we’re children, we are indoctrinated into thinking that science, math, and business are more valuable than art, music, theater, and writing. What our society seems to have forgotten is that being creative is not only fun; it’s good for your health. Keep in mind that when I talk about expressing yourself creatively, I use a very loose definition of the word “creativity.” I’m not limiting creativity to the arts. In some cases, your form of creative expression might be painting, dancing, playing an instrument, or writing poetry. But you may also express your creativity by scrapbooking, flower arranging, photography, gardening, interior decorating, blogging, knitting, hula-hoop dancing, singing in the shower, or brainstorming business ideas. You might express yourself by writing the perfect e-mail, developing a curriculum for Sunday school, cooking a gourmet meal, crafting music playlists on your iPod, salsa dancing, or generating ideas for new products at work. You might create workshops, design jewelry, or bake the perfect cupcake.
Whatever you do, flexing your creative muscles is as important to overall health and happiness as is flexing your biceps. The link between creativity and health has been well established, so anything that allows you to be more creative in your life benefits the physiology of your body and mind.41 Creative expression releases endorphins and other feel-good neurotransmitters, reduces depression and anxiety, improves your immune function, relieves physical pain, and activates the parasympathetic nervous system, thereby lowering your heart rate, decreasing your blood pressure, slowing down your breathing, and lowering cortisol.
Health benefits of creative expression include improved sleep, better overall health, fewer doctor visits, less use of medication, and fewer vision problems. Creativity decreases symptoms of distress and improves quality of life for women with cancer; it strengthens positive feelings, alleviates distress, and helps clarify existential and spiritual issues; it lowers the risk of Alzheimer’s disease, reduces anxiety, and improves mood, social functioning, and self-esteem.42
When we unleash the creative process, we tap into subconscious processes that help us heal—and thrive. Expressing yourself creatively exercises the right side of your brain, and doing so not only affects the body—it affects your emotional state, leading to greater happiness. And as we’ll discuss in Chapter 7, it’s a well-documented phenomenon that happy people are more likely to be healthy.
The health benefits of creativity are incredible—that’s just how creative expression affects the individual! Creativity also affects your work life, your relationships, your sexuality, your spirituality, and your mental health. As art therapist Marti Hand teaches, expressing yourself creatively also promotes social peace by enhancing compassion, tolerance, kindness, harmony, expansion, growth, collaboration, respect, and healing. Even seemingly unrelated benefits may arise as the result of expressing yourself creatively, such as improved fertility.
While your creative life can be a potent source of physiological relaxation, it can also be a stressor if you’re feeling creatively thwarted. One of my patients had been writing a novel in her head for years, but because she was so busy at work, her novel went unwritten. Every day, she felt stressed about the fact that she might die one day without ever writing her book. Creativity only heals you if you make the time to prioritize it. So don’t forget about expressing yourself in your own way.
We all have a song within us longing to be sung as only we can sing it. As poet Mary Oliver writes, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Rx for Job Stress
If you’re feeling stressed about work or money, don’t despair. You don’t necessarily have to turn in your resignation letter or win the lottery in order to counteract the stress response. But you do have to have a serious heart-to-heart with yourself about how these issues might be affecting your health.
If you’re committed to preventing disease or healing yourself from illness, be brave enough to tell yourself the truth. If you’re concerned about how these stressors might be affecting your body, all is not lost. There’s hope. You may be able to prevent disease or reverse illness by making positive changes aimed at bringing more relaxation into your body. If you’re powerless to change your professional life, you still have the power to counteract at least a percentage of the negative effects of the stress response on your body with techniques clinically proven to activate the body’s physiological relaxation response and improve your health. (I’ll be discussing these health-inducing techniques in Chapter 8.)
But until then, know this: Stripping off the masks we wear in order to impress other people, appear more “professional,” cover up our imperfections, and protect ourselves from getting hurt can work wonders when we’re on a quest for optimal health. Being unapologetically who we are—not just at work, but at home, in the schoolyard, at church, wherever—soothes the mind, halts the stress response, induces the relaxation response, and heals the body. Authenticity, in work and in life, can be medicine for the body.
