Job Loss Reduces Life Expectancy Health Problems
If you're unfortunate enough to lose your job, new research indicates it could ultimately shorten your life expectancy and take a toll on your health. This alarming news was presented at a recent conference hosted by the Economic Policy Institute think tank.
There's no question that losing your job is a miserable experience, which can cause health problems associated with stress and depression. Dr. Kate Strully from University of New York at Albany put a figure on this, however, claiming that previously healthy workers become as much as 83% more likely to develop health problems after losing their jobs. A shocking statistic which underlines once again the fact that stress is the cause of most health problems.
But then it gets even worse. Dr. Neal Walker of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration presented evidence that healthy workers who lost their job during the credit crunch and subsequent recession were 13% more likely to admit to having entertained serious thoughts of self-harming or even suicide.
Columbia University's Dr. Till von Wachter had the worst news, however. Male workers who have experienced the stress, shock and general trauma of losing their job will find that their life expectancy is reduced by an average of 1.5 years. According to his research, this reduction in life expectancy even holds if the person in question lost their job early on in their career. He concluded that female workers don't have the same risk.
In some respects the basic conclusions of this research are unremarkable - losing your job will inevitably make you stressed, and stress is the root cause of an estimated 80% of illness. And illness, you know, tends to kill people, so the reduced life expectancy statistic ties in with the increase in health problems. These studies have put some concrete figures on things which were self-evident, but their accuracy will be debated for years.
Job loss is one of the worst things that can happen to a professional person, on so many levels. On the practical side, you're losing your main income stream so you'll have trouble meeting your various financial commitments and paying for the necessities of life. But on the psychological level, it's devastating. Rightly or wrongly, people come to tie in their job with their personal identity to a large extent. If you lose that job, are you still you? Even though absolutely anyone can lose any job for any one of a dozen reasons, particularly given the economic turbulence of recent years, many workers feel humiliated and find their confidence and self-esteem damaged.
The recession has forced millions of people out of work throughout the world, and this upheaval provided the raw data which made this research possible. But with no apparent end in sight for economic uncertainty, we could start seeing a serious reduction in average life expectancies unless we change our mental associations with our professional fortunes. The chances are that you will lose a job at some point in your life - it is up to you to ensure that this does not affect your wellbeing so drastically that you die before your time.
