• 70 percent of all illnesses, physical and mental, are linked to stress (U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, 2000)

 

• Job-related stress is a major contributing factor in a wide range of diseases and disorders

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• 83 percent of workers suffer from work-related stress (American Institute of Stress 2019)

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• US businesses lose up to $300 billion yearly as a result of workplace stress

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• Depression leads to $51 billion in costs due to absenteeism and $26 billion in treatment costs

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• Work-related stress causes 120,000 deaths and results in $190 billion in healthcare costs yearly.

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• Stress causes around one million workers to miss work every day

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• Workplace stress and associated mental ill-health is a fact that every employer and employee lives with on a daily basis

 

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Effects of job stress:

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Job stress carries a price tag in the US industry estimated at over $300 billion annually as a result of:

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•   Accidents

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•   Absenteeism

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•   Employee turnover

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•   Diminished productivity

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•   Direct medical, legal, and insurance costs

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• Workers compensation awards as well as tort and FELA judgements  

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Understanding stress:

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Stress is the way the body responds to a demand. It affects everyone. People under stress react with the fight or flight response. This is an ancient response based on fear, which prepares the body for potential danger. Stress can be life saving in some situations.

 

Yet, chronic stress, those same life-saving responses in your body can suppress immune, digestive, sleep, and reproductive systems, which may cause them to stop working normally. People under chronic stress are prone to more frequent and severe viral infections, such as the flu or common cold.  Stress affects the entire system and is produced in seconds; it increases blood pressure, heart rate, and respiratory frequency.

 

Basically, every cell in the body reacts to the increase in stress hormones that accompanies the fight or flight response, even if you’re not in real danger. When these changes are experienced on a daily basis, they act as seeds for diseases such as hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, stroke, digestive problems, anxiety, depression, and in the long term, immune problems and chronic diseases such as cancer.

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