Today is National Stress Awareness Day (NSAD), organised by the International Stress Management Association (ISMA) and it seems that in these challenging economic times, for the sake of our health, we all need to worry less and chill out.
According to recent research by AXA, stress levels have doubled in the last four years and companies are only just waking up to this fact and starting to address the problem. IMSA define stress as: “The adverse reaction people have to too much pressure.”
The theme for 2011 is “Wellbeing and Resilience at Work.” Stress is a major issue not just because people who experience it may have to take time off work, which impacts the economy, but a new study suggests that people who are happy and content live longer than those who are presumably miserable (and stressed).
Researchers involved in the study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences asked 3850 people aged between 52 and 79 to describe their feelings as: happy, excited, content, worried, anxious or fearful, four times in a 24-hour period.
The aim of the study was to monitor ‘positive affect’ that is states of happiness, peacefulness and excitedness and ‘negative affect’ that is the opposite of positive affect, such as anxiety. The researchers then tracked deaths over the following five years.
The findings revealed that 7 per cent of those reporting the least happiness died compared with just 3.6 per cent of those with the highest levels of happiness. Figures were adjusted for other factors such as income, gender, depression and health.
Those who said that they were happy were still 35 per cent less likely to die than those who said they were least happy, even after the adjustments. The researchers said that although the study does not prove categorically that happiness leads to longer life, it does point to a link between happiness and survival.
National Stress Awareness day will be marked by various events across the country. Details can be found on IMSA’s website along with online resources such as contact details for stress advisers, stress-busting games and videos.
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