Work stress 'changes your body'

The complete article is available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7203088.stm

now after being retired due to injury I'm regaining what was loss by an unhealthy life style. I've loss a lot of weight, gave up smoking, eat better, sleep more, work out every day and generally try to keep from blowing my stack. My Dr. told me I probably regained 12yrs of life that I lost just by making these changes. I no longer feel like a rat on a wheel from the day in and day out stress.

Now if we only could get rid of that "asshat" in DC I'd feel even better.

Studies (Sorry, no link, studies were in print when I read them) showed that the most stress was felt by workers who were held accountable (responsibility) but had little or no control over the actual conditions of how they could work to address their job responsibilities.

Turns out the folks at the top got to do the delegating of duties AND set the parameters those they delegate to have to deal with to actually get the job done.

Workers who are not given the tools to get the job done best, workers who have to deal with organization that thwarts, rather then empower/enable, jobs getting done best have to deal with a shit load of unnecessary stress the boss doesn't have to endure. They are held accountable but the rules for doing the job are often designed badly by management which seems to value an adversarial relationship with workers over a cooperative one.

When so many business 'leaders' complain how rising insurance costs for employees is harming business, they never seem to look at what they may be doing that contributes to poor health among those employees. So much easier for the top to just blame the middle and bottom for the rise in health care costs.

Unregulated capitalism is a hateful thing and ultimately, much of what the decision makers do to get every penny profit they can THIS QUARTER actually ends up costing more over the longer run. The cost of workplace stress in real dollars is a good example. Good management does not occupy its self with seeing how much trouble they can give the worker bees. But greed for the immediate score on a quarterly report and some misplaced sense that good managers are bastards who exploit workers to the limit sure seems to be the lesson too many MBAs learned.

I'm pretty stressed by my job, which I am held responsible for the work, but little control over it (we even have a failure rate tracking system..your assays fail enough..you get suspended from working in the lab..tell me thats not stressful).
And it doesn't help when my boss is overheard saying "Why are the analysts (me and others like me) stressed? They don't have any take home worries"......:banghead: