Over the past couple of decades, there has been an explosion of scientific research into how the workplace impacts our emotional health and our relationships, both at work and outside of it. The findings paint an alarming picture of how deeply work has penetrated into our lives and minds and the damage it is doing, often without us being aware of it.
This Is Your Life on Work
The number of people experiencing intense work stress in today’s workplace has been at the highest levels recorded for the past five years. In a 2024 American Psychological Association poll, 43% of workers reported high stress, and 67% reported symptoms of burnout. No surprise, then, that thriving at work was also at an all-time low.
Intense stress and burnout are serious conditions that pose equally serious threats to your physical health and emotional well-being. They include increased risk of cardiovascular and gastrointestinal disease, diabetes, respiratory infections, anxiety, depression, alcohol and substance abuse, suicide, and general mortality.
Activities that pose such severe risks to health and well-being typically come with a warning label. Work does not.
Our health and well-being aren’t the only things that work has hijacked; the current workplace also compromises our ability to do our jobs well. Studies find that excessive work demands cause us to make significantly more mistakes, to be less efficient and productive, and to unwittingly self-sabotage in ways that increase our stress and exhaustion and add to the strain we already feel.
Our work also impacts our personal time and family lives in far more ways than we realize. We dramatically underestimate the extent to which we bring home stresses and tensions from our jobs and how this work invasion causes conflict within our most cherished relationships.
You might have noticed that difficult days at work are often followed by arguments and conflict at home, but you probably haven’t realized how work impacts your unconscious feelings toward your loved ones. That’s why you might love your partner but feel emotionally distant from them at times and why family members’ efforts to engage you can feel irritating and inconsiderate. The transfer of stress and tension from work to home can be unrelenting; studies find that when you are overly stressed from work, your partner can develop symptoms of burnout.
Work even hijacks our thoughts. A consistent finding is that the more stressful and distressing your day is, the harder it will be for you to stop thinking about work in the evening, no matter how desperate you are to switch off. You’re trying to enjoy alone time or time with friends and family, but your mind keeps bombarding you with replays of worries, hurts, and irritations from your workday. No matter how many times you drag your focus back to the present, you end up stewing about work again a few minutes later.
Even if we can switch off at night or on the weekend, we are still not free of work’s negative influence. Another body of research discovered that work impacts how we spend our leisure time—and not in a good way. The more intense the workday, the more exhausted we are when we get home, the more likely we will be to spend the evening relaxing, binging shows, and doomscrolling. That might seem like a fine way to recover from an intense day at work, but studies have confirmed that we then are likely to wake up the next morning lacking vitality and still feeling worn out.
Work has hijacked other aspects of our self-care as well. For example, most cancers are treatable when caught early, and half of the adults who have cancer in the United States are diagnosed as a result of their annual checkup. Yet, in a recent survey, 23% of adults said they skipped their annual medical checkups because they conflicted with work hours.
Other studies have found that high work stress makes us more likely to eat unhealthy foods and to skip exercising, and less likely to stay on top of basic tasks such as cleaning, bill-paying, grocery shopping, and household repairs. The drops in self-care often accumulate so significantly they can meet the definition of self-neglect such that we would qualify for a home aide were the condition not entirely self-imposed. Today’s workplace is so unhealthy that it’s causing functional people to stop functioning outside of work almost entirely.
In today’s workplace, work stress operates like a pinball machine. It shoots out and hits one domain of our lives after another, exacerbating stress in each domain it touches, dinging from work to our personal lives and back again. The vicious cycles keep stress in play for a long time, and it is such overexposure that is causing the rise in burnout.