Does your job affect your health or improve your health

Having a job provides you with a sense of identity and financial security. If you have a job you love, take pride in, and get fulfilment from, you’ll not only reap financial benefits and job satisfaction, but also enjoy better physical and mental health.

But jobs are not meant to be stress-free. Regardless of the role you fill, there will be some sort of stress that you will have to face. This could be in the form of tight deadlines, miscommunication with colleagues, long hours in the office, or even uncertainties over your job security.

All of this stress may be magnified when the economy isn’t doing well, like what has happened in 2020 due to COVID-19.

The key to ensuring that your job does not impact your health negatively is in being able to enjoy your work and to achieve a work-life balance. While some of us feel blessed that we can be with our families while working from home, others may find it difficult to adjust as we are bogged down with additional responsibilities from being at home – which in turn leads to further stress. Fortunately, there are solutions to stressful situations that can reduce the negative impact on our health.

For instance, although we may be worried about job security, we can also balance it by ensuring we are able to keep ourselves agile in the working world. This can be done by ensuring we actively maintain our professional network, pick up new skills and keep ourselves abreast on what’s going on not only in our own industry, but also in other industries that we may consider joining.  

Unfortunately, if you are in a job that is adversely affecting your health, then you may wish to consider a change in environment. Protecting your health is essential even if that could mean making a small financial sacrifice in the short-term. At the end of the day, your health is the only thing that allows you to continue working. Without it, that highly-paid job will not be available to you anyway.

If you’re unsure of the impact your work has on your health, the first step is to check to see how you feel.

As mentioned earlier, jobs may give you stress in many ways. Not all of this stress is bad. A little stress is useful if it helps push us to deliver better quality work or spur us to think out of the box and challenge norms. Too much stress can paralyse you to deliver any work and harm your long-term health.

Identifying whether your job is affecting or improving your health starts with you. You need to ask yourself how you feel and be aware of your health and signs that come with it. For example, if you have been feeling backaches from working-from-home for too long, maybe you need to look at the seating arrangement at your “home office”. Or, if you are constantly feeling dehydrated, be wary of the water intake. Take more “water” breaks – they can help you collect your thoughts and focus on the task ahead better.

By leveraging on online health assessment checks, such as the comprehensive programme offered by AIA Vitality, you can understand whether you are over-stressed, as well as consciously consider your eating and sleeping patterns and habits – which can be affected due to stress and other health problems.

If you’re not experiencing any drastic changes, then that’s a good sign. However, if you have any doubts about the health symptoms that you’ve been experiencing, speak to a doctor and make the necessary adjustments. An easy way to get yourself checked is to make a specialist appointment or download the WhiteCoat mobile app for a telemedicine consultation.

You also get to leverage on other services such as chronic disease management and specialist referrals through WhiteCoat.

While many stressors affect your health, your company can also be a champion for your well-being. If you have supportive supervisors and colleagues, you can even witness an improvement in health due to good communication and a manageable workload.

Find companies that value employee health. Some organisations provide transparency in their corporate culture, believes in setting time aside to pursue goals outside of your work, helps employees become more active and fitter, and include comprehensive insurance coverage and wellness benefits to help you improve your health too. If your supervisors are open to discussion, you can even suggest benefits like AIA Vitality to them.

While working in a company that champions your well-being is great, it is ultimately our own responsibility to take care of our health, especially in times where it is increasingly common to work-from-home or work remotely.

According to research by the American Heart Association, sedentary behaviour may even give rise to cardiovascular diseases as well as diabetes, which can be mitigated by short bursts of physical activity. For reasons like these, one must be cautious of how you spread out your work hours.

On top of receiving employee benefits like insurance and flexible hours, there still is a lot of self-care to focus on. For example: Are you taking sufficient eating breaks? Are you eating right? Are you getting up from your desk often to stretch your joints? Are you ensuring you “switch off” from your work desk? Are you getting good quality sleep? Have you considered meditation or yoga? These are just some of the things you can do to reduce burnout from work.

You can also use programmes like AIA Vitality to help you stay motivated in achieving a healthy lifestyle amidst all the work you put in for the office. Consider getting added health coverage like Medix to keep financial stressors that may come about due to any unforeseen health conditions.