A new study shows that a stressful job isn’t only annoying, it could be really bad for your heart.
According to a new study that was published in the Journal of the American Heart Association, workplace stress can nearly double a person’s risk of developing an irregular heartbeat known as atrial fibrillation, or AFib.
This can happen even with people who haven’t previously shown any signs of the problem, they add.
This condition can lead to stroke and heart failure. According to the American Heart Association’s 2024 heart disease and stroke statistics, more than 12 million people are projected to have AFib in the United States by 2030.
The research followed nearly 6,000 workers in Canada for an average of 18 years, polling them about their daily grinds that featured “high job strain,” which was defined as “high psychological demands coupled with low control over one’s work, and effort-reward imbalance” — i.e., not getting paid well for all their efforts.
The researchers don’t exactly know why job stress can trigger AFib, but because the link was so strong, they recommended prevention strategies “targeting psychosocial stressors at work … to reduce the public health and economic burden associated with AF.”