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Do you give your all to your job but get little praise in return? A study of workplace stress suggests that throwing yourself into work that you love, but not receiving any rewards for it, is a toxic cocktail for biological stress.
Leander van der Meij, now at Eindhoven University of Technology, in the Netherlands, and his colleagues discovered this by analysing people’s cortisol levels. This hormone is released in times of stress, helping prepare the body for “fight or flight” by increasing blood sugar levels and slowing down digestion, for example.
Such stress responses can be helpful in the short-term, but chronic stress can lead to health problems, such as infections and diabetes. To find out if certain workplace conditions might cause this kind of damaging stress, the team analysed hair samples from 172 volunteers. It is possible to deduce cortisol levels