The Final Taboo: Millions Of Employees Forced To Lie About Stress, UK

Main Category: Anxiety / Stress
Also Included In: Mental Health;  Psychology / Psychiatry
Article Date: 03 Nov 2010 - 5:00 PDT window.fbAsyncInit = function() { FB.init({ appId: 'aa16a4bf93f23f07eb33109d5f1134d3', status: true, cookie: true, xfbml: true, channelUrl: 'http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/scripts/facebooklike.html'}); }; (function() { var e = document.createElement('script'); e.async = true; e.src = document.location.protocol + '//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js'; document.getElementById('fb-root').appendChild(e); }()); email to a friend   printer friendly   opinions  

Millions of British workers feel forced to lie to their bosses about having to take stress-induced sick leave, research reveals.

A study by leading mental health charity Mind, released to coincide with Stress Awareness Day (3 November), finds that talking about workplace pressures remains a huge taboo.

Stress has forced one in five workers (19 per cent) to call in sick, yet the vast majority of these (93 per cent) say they have lied to their boss about the real reason for not turning up, citing everything from stomach upsets, housing problems and the illness of a loved one as reasons for their absence.

However, few employees actually want to hide their stress levels from their bosses - 70 per cent wanted to be able to discuss stress with their employers, and one third want their boss to make the first move and approach them directly when they are showing signs of strain.

Paul Farmer, Chief Executive of Mind said: Millions of people experience unmanageable stress at work, and the fact that so many people feel forced to lie about it rather than finding a solution should be a major concern for our businesses. If employees don't feel they can be honest about the pressures on them, problems that aren't addressed can quickly snowball into low morale, low productivity and high sick leave. We'd urge employers to encourage a culture of openness at work so they can solve problems now, rather than storing up problems for the future.

The Mind research also reveals that the majority of employees (62 per cent) feel their bosses aren't doing enough to look after the workplace wellbeing of their staff, which may explain why stress has made one in five workers (21 per cent) physically ill and driven a further one in 10 into counselling.

And employers who ignore the problem of stress in their workplace could be putting their businesses in jeopardy. Previous figures show that businesses are losing an estimated £8.4bn (1) through sick days caused by poor mental wellbeing.

Paul Farmer continued: Stress can be a taboo word in many workplaces, but pretending the problem isn't there only makes things worse. Looking after stress levels and promoting a mentally healthy workplace reduces sick leave, helps staff to stay productive and ultimately saves hard-pressed businesses money. In the current climate, it will be increasingly hard for businesses to prosper with an unhappy and stressed workforce, so it's vital they work with their employees to discuss pressures on staff before they escalate.

When pressure is high, managers need to spend more time on leading and managing people, not less. Taking time out with an employee can seem like an extra burden for managers with their own set of targets to meet, but supporting staff properly will reduce absence, improve performance and benefit the company as a whole. The top five lies employees use when covering up their stress are:

Stomach upset - 36%
A cold - 13%
A headache - 12%
A medical appointment - 6%
Bad back - 5%

Mind is currently campaigning to tackle workplace stress and make workplaces more mentally healthy through its "Taking care of business" campaign.

Mind's guide for employers to tackle stress

- Manage workloads among your staff. Make sure that no one is expected to deliver more than what they are capable of.

- Train managers to identify risks, recognise stress and support their staff.

- For staff working in isolation, ensure there are clear and regular lines of communication. A monthly team meeting or a regular phone catchup will keep you in contact with these members of staff and enable you to prevent problems from occurring.

- Offer stress coaching and on-the-job support. Start a mentoring scheme to help new members of staff understand your organisation faster and to support them in their role. Or you could start a buddy system which enables colleagues to support other colleagues outside the official line-management structure.

- Make sure that work environments are suitable for the task. Noise, temperature and light levels can all have a big impact on wellbeing. Could space dividers, quiet spaces or music improve your workplace?

Source:
MIND

Note: Any medical information published on this website is not intended as a substitute for informed medical advice and you should not take any action before consulting with a health care professional. For more information, please read our terms and conditions.

All opinions are moderated before being added.

Please note that we publish your name, but we do not publish your email address. It is only used to let you know when your message is published. We do not use it for any other purpose. Please see our privacy policy for more information.

If you write about specific medications or operations, please do not name health care professionals by name.

Contact Our News Editors

For any corrections of factual information, or to contact the editors please use our feedback form.

Please send any medical news or health news press releases to:

View the original article here

Read More ..

Can Dogs Teach Us A Thing Or Two About Self-Control And Keeping To A Healthy Diet?

Featured Article
Main Category: Nutrition / Diet
Also Included In: Psychology / Psychiatry;  Veterinary
Article Date: 03 Nov 2010 - 13:00 PDT window.fbAsyncInit = function() { FB.init({ appId: 'aa16a4bf93f23f07eb33109d5f1134d3', status: true, cookie: true, xfbml: true, channelUrl: 'http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/scripts/facebooklike.html'}); }; (function() { var e = document.createElement('script'); e.async = true; e.src = document.location.protocol + '//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js'; document.getElementById('fb-root').appendChild(e); }()); email to a friend   printer friendly   opinions  

Does this sound familiar: you skip lunch, then later on, find yourself gobbling a lot more cookies or pieces of cake than you know you need, but somehow find it very hard to stop: and then spend the rest of the day beating yourself up about your lack of self-control and inability to maintain a healthy diet?

Well, by studying the effect of low blood sugar on self-control in dogs, a researcher at the University of Kentucky (UK) has come up with a possible explanation: the brain needs glucose to exercise self-control, and knowing this could help us make healthier choices in our diets.

Psychology graduate student Holly Miller said "it happens to everyone", we eat more than we know we should when we are tired and low in fuel, "without fuel, you can't inhibit the bad behaviour," she added, "it's physiology".

This last remark is why Miller's work is interesting, because scientists have long assumed that self-control, as in being able to delay gratification, requires a "sense of self" and is therefore more a matter of psychology, not physiology.

The idea is that we strive to achieve this ideal self and this takes effort: we have goals and aspirations and we "work" towards them, and sometimes this means delaying gratification in order to get there. You can see how this implies that energy, or some resource, is consumed in the striving. Such a concept of self-control clearly sets us apart from our four-legged friends.

Miller began to question this view when she attended a presentation given by Florida State University social psychologist Roy Baumeister, on glucose and self-control.

In a series of experiments that he performed on stage, Baumeister tested the effect of food-restriction on energy for self-control. Human volunteers were each given a pile of radishes and a pile of chocolate chip cookies, but were only allowed to eat one of them. They were then given puzzles to solve: the ones who ate the chocolate chip cookies spent longer trying to solve the puzzles.

Baumeister concluded that having to exert self-control (which he defined in the delayed gratification sense of having to do what one should as opposed to what one wants), resisting the cookies, caused the volunteers who were only allowed to eat radishes to use up more of the resource that is needed to maintain a sense of self.

Miller agreed with Baumeister up to a point: yes, maintaining self-control consumed some kind of resource, but its depletion had little to do with having to maintain a sense of self. Why couldn't it simply be that the fuel, glucose, was consumed more quickly? In which case, wouldn't a similar experiment with dogs, show this?

Miller had already been working with dogs and there was no shortage of canine "volunteers". She completed two sets of experiments, which to onlookers must have looked like rather peculiar dog-training classes. These were reported in a paper published online in the journal Psychological Science in March this year.

In the first set of experiments one group of trained dogs was told to "sit and stay" for ten minutes, while another group of trained dogs was allowed to sit comfortably in a cage, either sitting or just staying, but without being "told" to do so (no "self-control" needed in the second group).

Both groups of dogs were then given food-related puzzles to solve (by the way, both sets of dogs were quite hungry by this stage). They had to retrieve treats from dog toys that they were familiar with (Tug-a-Jugs), except the toys had been altered so it was not possible for them to retrieve the treats.

Miller found that the dogs that had been told to exert self-control for ten minutes gave up quite quickly, in less than a minute, whereas the dogs that had not been required to exert self-control but sat or stayed in the cages kept going for more than two minutes.

These results paralleled those of Baumeister's experiment, and led Miller to conclude it was nothing to do with a sense of self, but due to a physiological process: glucose depletion.

"Dogs don't have a sense of self, or an ideal self, as far as we know," said Miller.

"Doing this type of experiment with dogs allows us to explain the results in a less complicated way," she added.

In the second set of experiments, Miller tested the results of glucose on self-control more clearly.

The dogs were again in two groups: one was given a glucose-based drink while the other was given a placebo: a sweet-tasting drink with no glucose. The dogs that had the glucose spent longer working through the puzzles.

Miller said her results showed that self-control does indeed correspond with diet, and that is why we should eat healthy foods like carrots and lean proteins that give us a long-lasting supply of glucose to keep the brain strong and help us resist unhealthy foods.

However, if you do fall off the wagon, says Miller, don't despair: just because you "break down" and eat two pieces of chocolate cake, it does not mean you are a bad person or a hopeless case, "it's purely physiological," she says, and she finds this view helps her stop beating herself up as well.

"A lot of really determined people can get down on themselves about something like this," said Miller.

"The truth is, if you push yourself to the point where you don't have any resources, you can't help it," she added, explaining that perhaps more diets would succeed if we adjusted "our eating habits so that we can fuel our self-control more effectively in the future".

Source: University of Kentucky.

Written by: Catharine Paddock, PhD
Copyright: Medical News Today
producedNot to be re without permission of Medical News Today

Note: Any medical information published on this website is not intended as a substitute for informed medical advice and you should not take any action before consulting with a health care professional. For more information, please read our terms and conditions.

All opinions are moderated before being added.

Please note that we publish your name, but we do not publish your email address. It is only used to let you know when your message is published. We do not use it for any other purpose. Please see our privacy policy for more information.

If you write about specific medications or operations, please do not name health care professionals by name.

Contact Our News Editors

For any corrections of factual information, or to contact the editors please use our feedback form.

Please send any medical news or health news press releases to:

View the original article here

Read More ..