Study of Stress at Work- Isabella Montague

          Emma Seppala, a scientist at Stanford, did a study about the effects of stress and why people work so hard to the point that they are risking their health. She said that when people stress out and work over time at their job, it can be very harmful to one's health. It can also be harmful for work performance and that extra time spent on the job is hardly ever used efficiently, even though it is always thought that in order to be successful one has to overwork themselves. But why do we overwork ourselves so much? Emma Seppala suggests that it is so that we can brag. Everyone wants to be able to say that they are stressed and have a strenuous job, taking pride in looking like your working hard, even if overworking isn't actually beneficial to work productivity in reality.

http://news.yahoo.com/stanford-scientist-says-wear-stress-153500264.html

          I think that Seppala has a point. Many of us are guilty of mentioning how much homework we have or how many all-nighters we've pulled for school, as if trying to one-up each other on how stressed and exhausted we are, when the truth is so many of us don't get enough sleep, and it is really harmful for our health. School comes with so much unnecessary stress, and there isn't much we can do about it but take a deep breath and put everything into perspective. I think it is interesting how people overwork themselves nowadays to show they can when in the Gilded Age and the Progressive era, people were fighting to work less. Labor unions were formed by workers who thought they deserved more rights and better working conditions, such as better work sanitation, less work hours, and vacation days. We have come a long way since then, but it seems that many are still working too hard in order to feel they are successful and to keep our jobs.

Isabella Montague 5th period