How Does Your Job Affect Your Health?

Where do you spend most of your time?

For many millennials, the answer is: ‘on the job.’ When you think about it, there are 168 hours in a week and working just one 40-hour per week job means you spend 25 percent of your time pursuing your career out in the field, in an office building, in your home office or in a combination of these settings.

And the percentage of your life dedicated to work is likely even higher for many millennials, as it is far more common for us to hold more than one job simultaneously these days.

At 25-42 years of age, Generation Y also happens to be at the very same ages in life when people are focused on building their careers. So, it should be no surprise that the environment where we spend most of our time—at work—can have a major impact on our health—both good and bad.

While you might be too busy doing your job to notice, there are many ways that the work you do is impacting your health every day.

Physically, your health is affected by how sedentary versus active you have to be to do your work. If you have a job that requires you to sit for hours behind a computer versus being out in the field lifting heavy equipment or doing lots of walking all over a hospital campus to see patients, your health can be affected in totally different ways.

For those of us with desk jobs, we can get terrible dry eye from all of the exposure to blue light from computer screens and sitting for hours on end can be just as bad as smoking some research has shown, especially if we do not take the time to walk around during the workday, or at the very least exercise outside of work.

On the other hand, jobs that require you to be more active and run from place to place can be great for your heart health, but can lead to pretty sore legs, sometimes and even injuries. Plus, such limited time that you do not get to take care of your body’s own basic needs like eating.

Take Summer Dashe and Lindsay Morrison, MD, MSCI, as examples. As a multimedia journalist when she was in her early 20s, Dashe spent most of her days chasing down stories while Dr. Morrison might see patients in multiple locations during a single workday.

Our job responsibilities and environment also can affect our minds. The stress of deadlines, being short staffed, or sadly more commonly, working in a toxic work culture with a boss or other superiors who mistreat you can deeply impact your mental health and that of your colleagues. Yet, if you work with supportive colleagues, that sense of comradery and positivity can make you mentally healthier.

As we continue to spend more of our time ‘on the job’, YMyHealth takes an inward look at both the negative and positive effects work can have on our health through the lens of fellow millennial, Summer Dashe, who is also a Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS) and Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS) patient and advocate, and from the real-life experiences of fellow millennial, Lindsay Morrison, MD, MSCI.

Negative Effects of Work on Health

Lack of access to good nutrition

If you have a job that is meeting heavy or gives you limited time because of daily deadlines or time-consuming projects, your access to healthy foods while at work may be the norm.

Dashe, who spent her 20s building her career from a multimedia journalist in the field to becoming the main anchor and Director of Storytelling at WATE-TV in Knoxville, Tennessee, and now a Communications and Visual Storytelling Lead, knows about this firsthand.

In the news business, especially for those reporting out in the field every day, Dashe and her colleagues around the country often found there was no time for lunch because they were on deadline. So, for example if they saw McDonald’s they thought, “Let me grab that.'“ Once Dashe became a news anchor and spent more time in the newsroom instead of out in the field and now in her Communications role, it became a totally different story. She could actually plan ahead, bring in her own healthy meals, and have the time to eat them.

Dr. Morrison has found the same when she is seeing dozens of patients when on call at the hospital and working in her clinic. Limited time to eat and not the healthiest options. Once finding only ice cream sandwiches readily available for her meal for the day.

Lindsay Morrison, MD, MSCI, cares for patients at Georgia Infectious Disease in Atlanta, Georgia.

Difficulty maintaining proper weight

Given a diet like that and the lack of food options in many different job settings, it’s no surprise that work can make maintaining a healthy weight a challenge. Through the years, Dashe has heard of both extremes.

Some journalists, who were working out in the field, would gain weight from eating fast food all the time. While others were so stressed out at work they would lose weight from not eating—something I have experienced in my own office-based job where some days there was very little time, if any, to eat between work deadlines and meetings. So, you would prioritize the work instead. Not a healthy move.

“Burning the candle at both ends”

Work can limit your time so much that it makes it impossible to have a healthy amount of sleep if you want to do anything else in your life outside of work. So, instead of prioritizing our sleep, we give it up; which can impact us in ways from decreasing the effectiveness of our immune system and increasing our blood pressure to reducing our ability to focus and causing problems with our memory.

For Dashe, who had her first and dream job, as a multimedia journalist at KLTV in Tyler, Texas, this meant getting up at 6am for spin classes, running all over town doing interviews, stressing out, and doing the news; and then driving back to Dallas on the weekends to party with her college friends. While she felt great at the time and this was years before her POTS and EDS diagnoses, the point is that like so many of us who are balancing multiple jobs every week, we often have to do so at the expense of resting and our health.

Summer Dashe preparing to go out and report in the field when she was the main evening anchor and managing editor of the entire news station at WPDE-TV, the ABC affiliate in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Today, she holds four different jobs within her career:
Communications and Visual Storytelling Lead, producer of a crime documentary, professor of journalism at the University of Tennessee, and a full-time POTS and EDS advocate for the thousands of people who like her are living with these chronic diseases.
Learn more about her amazing work at http://summerdashe.com/.

Limited ability to go to doctors’ appointments

Since traditional work hours also overlap with the hours most doctors’ offices are open, and many millennials work all day, it can make it nearly impossible to schedule a doctor’s appointment, let alone actually go to one. Both, Dashe and Morrison, have experienced this during building their careers. After all, when you work Monday through Friday, your only option is urgent care on the weekends, and that is not the kind of care you need most of the time.

This is major problem when it comes to keeping millennials healthy, as it prevents us from having time to get the preventive screening tests and measures that we need, seeing a healthcare provider to have them examine us and let us know we are in need of such tests, and just giving us a proper diagnosis of and treatment for symptoms that we may be experiencing.

While Dashe and Morrison have sought care during their workdays many times over the years, for them like many of us, it added on to their workdays to make them even longer, which unfortunately, can discourage millennials from seeking care. The only alternative as we all know is to use paid vacation time or go unpaid for the hours we can not work.

Constantly “having to be on”

Today’s 24-7 lifestyle and having to wear so many hats in one job also makes us constantly feel like we have to be ready at a moment’s notice to work. This lack of boundaries from receiving emails and text messages any time, can make us feel stressed, especially since it is very hard to not respond when we are trying to climb the ladder in our careers or, in some cases, just to feel secure that we are keeping our jobs.

Having a high stress level most of the time can affect our physical health by showing itself in ways such as headaches or fatigue, and can affect our mental health by impacting our moods and causing us to feel anxious or depressed.

Limiting our ability to relax and connect with loved ones

The demands of millennials’ careers today are limiting the amount of time we have available to freely relax away from work and to spend quality time with our loved ones. Both of these activities are very important for our health to help us mentally and physically recharge from stress.

By not having that time, our stress levels can stay higher for longer periods, meaning we become more likely to make poorer health decisions—like eating unhealthy comfort foods and not choosing to exercise—which put at a higher risk of a list of health problems and make us have a more negative outlook on our lives.

Positive Effects of Work on Health

Exercising your brain and becoming enriched through new experiences

Our work gives us the opportunity to constantly learn new things, think deeply to solve problems, and be strategic about completing tasks. Constantly exercising our brain can reduce our risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Our jobs give us the opportunity to have experiences in many different settings and meet people we would not have met otherwise. This helps us to grow as people and enriches our lives, which is also a boost for our mental health.

Forming social connections

The bonds we form with colleagues we meet at work and who only come across our path in life because of it can make a big difference in our mental well-being. As we spend more time working with these people and getting to know them, they often become our lifelong friends, remaining a part of our lives long after we leave the job we met them at. Research has shown that forming social connections can reduce stress and inflammation in the body.

Giving your life purpose

For the millennial generation, having a purpose in life is of the utmost importance in many of the choices we make. When your career is a fulfilling one, it gives your life purpose. Finding meaning in the work you do every day is excellent for your mental health long term.

Making health care access financially possible

Despite the amount of time we spend working, it is because of the time we dedicate to our jobs that it is possible for us to seek the healthcare we need. Our careers come with the benefit of health insurance, which is offered to us by companies at a far reduced rate compared to what we could ever possibly afford every month on our own.

At one company I worked at, my health insurance plan cost me $150 per month for medical, dental, and vision coverage. Yet, if I were to purchase that same health insurance plan as a private citizen, it would have cost me $800 a month. Our jobs benefit our health by giving us the healthcare coverage we need to go receive care to keep us healthy.

Conclusion

Every job has its pluses and minuses, but when it comes to how positively or negatively it is affecting your health, it matters. And as we get older it matters even more for our healthcare systems and nation as a whole.

Did you know that by the year 2030, 75% of the workforce will be made up of millennials?

The more we can find ways to collectively and individually make our health a priority even with limited time on our hands, and the more we can voice the importance of health to current and potential future employers, the better, longer, happier, and healthier, Generation Y will be.

Subscribe to the YMyHealth newsletter to stay up to date on everything that’s health-related for millennials!

Want more video content? Check out our Patreon!

The Impact of Careers on Millennials’ Health