You should know that as a professional, your job takes up most of your waking hours. Have you ever stopped to think about how your work is affecting your overall health?

Certain work-related conditions and behaviour take their toll on your physical, and general well-being.

Just like any other disease, your work can cause your blood pressure to rise, and hypertension can affect your daily work routine.

How stress at work may cause hypertension

One of the common cause of Hypertension is stress. Every human encounters stress every day at home, in their relationships, family, at work, and from finances. Among all these, work or job stress is the most debilitating for most of us.

While some workplace stress is normal, excessive stress can interfere with your productivity and performance, impact your physical and emotional health, and affect your relationships and family life.

Reports show that work-related stress causes hypertension and other stress-related problems across different types of jobs.

Occupational stress index (OSI) or stress score are the tools that international organisations like Forbes use to calculate the amount of stress across several jobs and to create stress awareness among worker, also, to help in prevention and control of stress.

They should come to Kenya, and other African countries to calculate that stress, that meter would break from the pressure!

How’s your work environment

The environment of some of our workplace predisposes us to hypertension and other work-related hazards. The conditions are so bad they cause your blood pressure to rise. It can be the physical condition, in that it’s hot then it’s cold.

People are shouting at each other across the office, and unlike everyone around you, you have no headphone to guard you against their flaring emotions.

Some offices are like morgues, they are so cold! Working in a cold environment may induce constriction of blood vessels causing the blood pressure to rise.

And then you have those who do manual work in hot and humid work environments; manual works may result in excessive sweating and dilation of blood vessels that may cause postural hypotension.

Then we have work that demands very much from our physical bodies such as standing for long hours. This kind of work raises your metabolism when the workload is heavy, and work is physically demanding, leading to a rise in blood pressure.

 Hypertension is simply a state where the force of blood flowing inside your blood arteries is too high. A stressful work environment can contribute to increasing the force of blood.