Stress is on the rise, due to the recession. Emine Saner hears how to survive job insecurity, huge workloads and those very long hours

Ruth, a company consultant, used to work 16-hour days. “I would get up at 4am and be at my computer by 4.30am,” she says. “I was working six, often seven, days a week. I didn’t see my husband for months. Even when we’d go away for the weekend, I’d take a laptop. Whenever I complained I was told I wasn’t being paid to complain.”

Ironically Ruth worked for a firm which offered wellbeing at work courses for large corporations. Yet when she asked for her own hours and workload to be reduced, she was simply told to visit her GP for treatment. She coped, she says, by smoking and drinking, “completely the opposite of the ‘wellbeing at work’ message I was promoting every day”.

It came to a head when a colleague questioned Ruth’s ability to take on a project. “I was told that I wasn’t coping and wasn’t stable,” she says. She was asked to visit her GP, but her doctor agreed that she didn’t need to be signed off work, she needed her workload readjusted.

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Physical and mental health experts have long known that stress lowers immunity. But there are some surprising symptoms you need to know about.

In college Sarah Jenkins was diagnosed with a mild case of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), a condition causing gastrointestinal discomfort, bloating, diarrhea and constipation. Since then, “it’s always been manageable,” the now 31-year-old says, adding, “except when I’m under a lot of stress.”

Indeed, in the past six months as Jenkins’ personal life spun out of control, her IBS followed. During this time, she was applying to graduate school for speech pathology, taking prerequisite classes, working at two restaurants and as a tutor and trying to maintain a relationship with her boyfriend.

The result: She either was endlessly on the toilet or had constipation so bad that she could go a week or more without a bowel movement. She also had heartburn so severe she slept sitting up. “I couldn’t be intimate with my boyfriend sometimes because I couldn’t lie down,” Jenkins says.

View the full article at Forbes