You leave office at 9pm on a Friday – however your last email is logged at 3am. You accept conference calls on weekend, wake up in frosty sweats over approaching due dates – even during sleep you talk in business language. By Monday morning, you seem as though you’ve spent the entire weekend slouched over their laptop, wired on espresso. It’s hard to believe you ever left the office or simply had time to spend relaxing weekend.
Why is it that people just simply can’t spend relaxing weekend?
Over the globe, the innovation to make work accessible 24 hours a day is adding towards anxiety. The American Institute of Stress assessments work stress costs the US economy about $300 billion in lost productivity consistently. As per exploration by Expedia, just 53% of workers come back feeling rested after they’ve spend relaxing weekend.
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In the UK there’s Saturday syndrome, the puzzling inclination of employees to fall sick in their free time – thought to be the outcome of anxiety withdrawal. In the US there’s the 60-hour working week – a practice known to double the risk of a heart attack. In Japan they’ve even created a word for the issue; karoshi, or death by burnout.
For standard office employees like Samantha King, a project manager in the financial services industry in London, even the demonstration of kicking back has ended up unpleasant. “If you don’t have a Facebook status or Instagram post – hashtag doing this, hashtag doing that – if you stay away from social media for half a day, people are like ‘are you OK?’”
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Yet, for each groaning partner struggling through Monday. There’s the high-powered superstar who breezes in looking absurdly fresh – even with a much greater workload. Why is it that, while a few people excel, others can’t spend relaxing weekend?
“When you bring work-related stress home with you, you’re keeping that physiological response activated. If that continues – well, it’s not good for you,” says Jennifer Ragsdale, a psychologist at University of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
For a considerable length of time, research has analyzed the relative behaviour of weekends. These are spent getting up to speed with work to those lying in an obscured room or going sailing. But this may overlook the main issue, says Ragsdale. “Two people experiencing the same thing, they are going to react to it in different ways.”
Bouncing back
The subject of bouncing back from stress initially aroused Ragsdale’s enthusiasm back in 2011. When she saw recuperation gap among her companions, she’s been endeavoring to reach to it’s bottom from that point onward.
For her study, 183 employees from different businesses reacted to online surveys on a Sunday evening. In which they specify how they’d spend relaxing weekend – and how they felt accordingly. Exercises were arranged into either low exertion (taking a shower) or business related (personal paperwork, replying to emails).
Next, the same employees were tested to decide their enthusiastic nature. They were given a rundown of positive (enthusiastic, interested) and negative (distressed, upset) sentiments, and asked to report how they’d generally feel.