High Workload and Caring Professions Make It Harder to Leave Work Stress at Work

Most people who have held a job know that thinking about work stresses after hours can lead to burn out, both at work and at home. New research by a team of German and American researchers, reported in the Journal of Vocational Behavior, has identified the characteristics that make it harder for employees to “switch off” from work stresses.

The researchers identified the ability to become mentally detached from work while on the job as an important characteristic that allows workers to leave stress behind at the end of the day. This ability to mentally separate from the job while still doing it is hindered by three characteristics: emotional dissonance (often experienced by those in caring professions), high workload, and a lack of clear boundaries between work and home spaces.

Emotional dissonance is a form of stress experienced often by those in caring professions, whose jobs require them to express certain emotions even if they don’t feel them (for example, a nurse needs to express sympathy even when she’s in a hurry, or a minister needs to express caring for an individual he or she does not really feel good about). Because the demands of these jobs are about how people feel, it can be very difficult to disconnect from the job while doing it.

High workload, similarly, makes it hard to detach from the job because there is little time or leisure to take a mental break.

Finally, workers whose home and work spaces are not easily differentiated (those who work at home or partly at home or who spend much of their non-work hours in work spaces), also have a more difficult time turning off work stresses.

Although most of us can not control the stresses our jobs give us, the researchers recommend that those in human services professions plan specific activities for outside of work to help us switch the work stress off and that we make it a general rule to talk about work only when we get first home and then talk about other topics for the rest of the evening. They also recommend that future research look more closely at how workers in these high stress environments can be helped.