Stress May Hamper Worker Performance and Health (& rebuttal article)

Yes, this is just anecdotal, but I believe there is more to this than an either/or debate.
My husband took high blood pressure medicine for years. And he often complained about the stress at work.
Within a month of changing jobs to an organization that was less stressful, his blood pressure went down and he no longer needed the blood pressure medication.

 

From the 14 September article at news@JAMA

Some bad news for workers facing stress on the job and elsewhere in their life, suggested by 2 studies published this week: stress may contribute to an increased risk of heart disease and may impair short-term memory.

Workers who encounter substantial demands at work and have little control over their situations have an elevated risk of developing heart disease compared with individuals who don’t have to face such psychological stress in the workplace, according to results of  an analysis published in the Lancet yesterday…

..

Stress may also impair an individual’s performance, a study published in PLOS Computational Biology suggests. The researchers found that exposure of rats to stress in the form of blasts of sound alter the firing of neurons in the prefrontal cortex. These changes in firing impair the ability of rats to retain short-term memory, hampering their performance in a maze task. Animals under stress completed the task only about 65% of the time compared with 90% of the unstressed rats.

The rebuttal

Don’t Blame Your Employer If You Are Feeling Stressed By Your Job

From the 18 September 2012 article at Medical News Today

Work stress, job satisfaction and health problems due to high stress have more to do with genes than you might think, according to research by Timothy Judge, professor of management at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business. This information has been published two days after a separate study suggesting that work stress increases an employee’s risk of heart attack by 23%.

The lead author of “Genetic influences on core self-evaluations, job satisfaction, work stress, and employee health: A behavioral genetics mediated model,” published inOrganizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Judge studied nearly 600 twins – some identical, some fraternal – who were raised together and reared apart. He found that being raised in the same environment had very little effect on personality, stress and health. Shared genes turned out to be about four times as important as shared environment.

Related articles

• Stress breaks loops that hold short-term memory together (scienceblog.com)
• Stress Breaks Loops that Hold Short-Term Memory Together (neurosciencenews.com)
• Stress breaks loops that hold short-term memory together (eurekalert.org)
• Stress breaks loops that hold short-term memory together (sciencedaily.com)
• Job Stress Linked To Heart Disease Risk (medicalnewstoday.com)
• Expert Explains Why Workplace Stress Is Killing All Of Us (businessinsider.com)
• Stress-Induced Impairment of a Working Memory Task: Role of Spiking Rate and Spiking History Predicted Discharge (ploscompbiol.org)
• Workers at Fukushima feel the pressure of blame (newscientist.com)
• How Stress Makes Us Lose Sight of Our Goals (livescience.com)
• Being bossed around at work ‘raises risk of heart attack by 23%’ (dailymail.co.uk)