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Stressed American Workers and Vacations

The Oxford Health Plans Survey found that many Americans are involuntary workaholics. Because regular vacations are preventive medicine, as they are proven to cut down on stress-related illness and save health care dollars, annual vacations are often required by law to be available to workers.

However nearly 20% of American workers say they are too overworked to use their annual vacation time, in spite of the fact that they already have fewer vacation days than workers in other industrialized nations.

How Driven American Workers Are

• More than 30% reported that they hurriedly eat lunch while they work.

• 17% of workers surveyed reported loss of sleep because of work.

• 21% reported missing family events because of their job.

The Pressure to Overwork Isn’t Completely Self-Induced

The survey also found:

• 17% of workers disclosed that their employers have management policies making it difficult for them to take off from their job or leave work in case of emergency.

• 20% of workers felt it was necessary to go to work even if they are sick or injured.

Coronary Heart Disease

Researchers in a study of coronary heart disease (CHD) risk factors (whose findings were published in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine), analyzed the relationship between death rates and vacation frequency in over 1,200 men.   

The striking difference in death rates was most significant between the participants who never took a vacation (13%) and those who reported taking five vacations a year (26%):

• The group taking five vacations had a 33% lower risk of dying during the 9-year study period compared with the group taking no vacations.

• Even more significant, the group taking five vacations had a 40% lower risk of dying compared with the no-vacation group.

Showing Up Sick At Work

Many times workers are sitting in their cubicles, sick as a dog, but still working. Though sometimes this act is motivated by altruism, many times it is not. Now officials at the local and federal levels are taking aim at what they believe to be a major cause – the refusal of many companies to provide paid sick leave to employees.

While some workers think the company is going to fall apart without them, others simply fear being suspended or fired if they don’t show up. In a telephone survey of nearly 1,000 adults conducted by the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, more than one-third of workers said they felt pressured to go to work when sick. And coincidently, about 33% also reported that they had gotten the flu from co-worker on the job. 

Feeling pressured to work when sick is becoming more prevalent. In a recent survey of 326 human resources executives, 56% said this practice was a problem in their companies (up 17% from two years ago).

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Sources: Connection Between Your Emotional State and Health National Institutes of Health MedlinePlus Magazine Winter 2008 03/31/08 (National Library of Medicine and MedlinePlus.gov) Acute Mental Stress Has a Prolonged Unfavorable Effect on Arterial Stiffness and Wave Reflections Psychosomatic Medicine 68:231-237 2006 Job Strain and Early Atherosclerosis: The Cardiovascular Risk in Young Finns Study Psychosomatic Medicine 67:740-747 2005

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