By Paul Landsbergis for the Healthy Work Campaign
An ongoing discussion in the field of work stress and health is about the role of perception of stress, and differences in how people may perceive or react to work-related stressors or “psychosocial hazards”.
We encourage this valuable discussion, and add these points:
1. Both the lived experience of workers e epidemiologic research has helped to identify important sources of stress at work, their health effects and interventions.
2. The importance of lived experience is not the same thing as individual variation in perception of or reactions to job stressors.
Unlike many workplace hazards, stress is not always clearly visible. It comes from different sources and appears in people in different ways. Stress does not cause just one symptom or disease. Because we all have different biochemical, psychological and social makeups, responses to stress may take different forms. Thus, we may miss the fact that we are responding to a common problem at work.
Not everybody reacts the same way to physical and chemical hazards either. Not everybody exposed to asbestos will get lung cancer. Not everyone exposed to repetitive motion will get a musculoskeletal disorder. Our bodies and our vulnerabilities are different.
In the past, some researchers argued that not everyone wants or needs “job control”. Therefore, job control should not be our prescription. However, “job control” is not something that is forced on people. It is a way of offering people choices – about work schedules, work methods, work rewards and more. It allows for individual differences.
Individual resilience and coping abilities matter and should be encouraged. But, resilience and coping abilities are also shaped by past lived experiences from work, social class, gender, and race/ethnicity, and should be understood in that context.
3. We may or may not be aware of job stressors and how they affect our health
Usually, we are aware of (perceive) stressful situations. We feel the psychological effects of stress (such as anxiety or irritability) or the physical effects of stress (such as heart racing, insomnia, headaches). But, sometimes, if we get used to working in stressful jobs, we may not be aware of our body’s reactions. Yet, the demands of being in a constant “on-alert” state (“allostatic load”) takes its toll on our physical and emotional health. For example, we may not be aware of the stressors causing gradual increases in our blood pressure over time.
Some people may “accept” stressful work because they feel they don’t have alternatives. After a while they may not “experience it as unfavorable”. But, it will still make them sick, including chronic conditions like hypertension, heart disease and depression. See, for example, the impact of work on the health of corrections officers, firefighters, motoristas de ônibus and other working populations with high cardiovascular risk.
4. The key issue is what do we do about the problem.
For many years, we have been promoting a Participatory Action Research (PAR) approach to job stressor prevention – where workers are involved in all stages of the research/action process, to help to define the hazards, analyze the hazards and decide on ways of reducing the hazards. It is a form of “job control” in action, action to reduce workplace hazards, and ensuring that workers’ needs are met. There are various versions of such an approach, including CPH-NEW’s Healthy Workplace Participatory Program and the HWC Work Stress Solutions for Employers. PAR programs can help make workplaces healthier — e provide workers with tools to build resilience and coping. Most of the international policy documents (ILO 2026, ITUC 2026) and national psychosocial hazard laws or regulations (e.g. Austrália, Canadá) specifically recommend or require “worker consultation/participation” in any organizational management system to identify psychosocial hazards and to design changes to the workplace.
In contrast, for many years, we have been told that stress is “all in your head” and therefore the solutions should be individual – stress management, health promotion. Focusing mainly on individual variation can distract from the important task of making workplaces healthier. Employers often encourage workers to think of stress as an individual problem, rather than focusing on root causes (working conditions).
While we react to stress in different ways, we may be dealing with the same job stressors/psychosocial hazards. Talking to co-workers and our advocacy groups (unions, COSH groups and others) is an important step towards understanding what we have in common, avoiding feeling it’s “our fault” (personal failure or weakness), avoiding stigma and self-blame, and taking action. There are a many examples of how the “lived experiences” of workers gets translated into actionable change. Worker groups and labor unions alone or in collaboration with OHS experts, can define an occupational health and safety challenge that is “psychosocial” (e.g. workplace bullying, assédio sexual, job insecurity/precarious employment, staffing and scheduling, mandatory overtime, e improving ‘job control”). Workers have organized to define the problem and to make improvements, e.g. through industry-wide campaigns (e,g, hotel workers, restaurant workers, nurses, civil aviation workers), collective bargaining, or to enact local or state-wide legislation (e.g. nurse-patient staffing ratio laws, workplace violence regulations, scheduling ordinances).