Surviving the Workday

But you probably already knew that, right?

Is Your Job Killing You? details how what we do at work contributes (or erodes) our health:

Our work is intricately tied up with our well being, says Nortin Hadler, a professor of medicine and microbiology and immunology at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and an attending rheumatologist at that university’s hospitals. And we know that losing a job is bad for your health, not only from a financial perspective but from a psychosocial one, too. When you lose your job, you lose social ties and, often, the very structure of your life. After a major downsizing among municipal workers in Finland, the risk of death from a heart attack went up fivefold for those who lost their jobs. It’s unclear whether the same mortality trends seen in Europe persist here; studies are ongoing. Gallo says evidence in the United States has been mixed, but research has found that people who lost a job in their 50s were more than twice as likely to have a heart attack or stroke in the next decade.