Can work make you healthier?

Say goodbye to lunch at your desk, lifts to the sixth floor, driving to work, and crisps and fizzy drinks from the vending machines. Instead some of us will be saying hello to mindfulness at lunchtime, yoga and Pilates class, healthier menus, cycle to work schemes and subsidised gym memberships. Work? Healthy? It appears that yes, it can be!

When we think of work, what springs to mind is the stress and frustration of meeting deadlines, the anxiety of competing with colleagues and/or the eight hours a day of sitting at a desk staring at a screen, all the while providing ourselves with a constant supply of tea or coffee to keep ourselves from flagging.

None of this is good news for our bodies. Excessive sitting has been strongly linked to poor health. ‘Compared with people who sit the least, those who spend most time in a chair have a 112 per cent higher risk of developing diabetes, a 147 per cent higher risk of suffering cardiovascular ‘events’ such as strokes and a 49 per cent increased risk of death from ‘any cause’. And caffeine isn’t great for us either, according to the Mayo Clinic: ‘Consuming 500-600mg of caffeine a day may lead to insomnia, nervousness, restlessness and irritability.’

A new study by meditation app Anamaya has revealed that ‘the environment we work in is one of the biggest contributors to stress levels’. They found that ‘cases of anxiety and stress are on the rise and taking their toll on our careers – in fact, other than being poorly, stress and depression are listed as the top reason people take time off work.’ So how can work possibly be healthy?

Setting the right environment
Workplace Challenge, a national programme from County Sports Partnership Network, funded by Sport England, aims to engage workplaces in sport and physical activity. In the recently launched eight-week challenge My Team 2015, participants ‘are encouraged to use Workplace Challenge’s online activity logger to record all their physical activity alongside colleagues and friends in other workplaces. The aim is to inspire even more workers to get active,’ says Lee Mason from the County Sports Partnership Network. You and your colleagues can get involved here.

Changing a few habits
The Government also hopes to make the country fitter and healthier by making some changes to our work habits. ‘More than half the UK population works and people spend up to 60 per cent of their waking lives at work, yet the workplace is underused as a health-promoting environment,’ says Ceri Jones from the British Heart Foundation, which has helped draw up and co-fund the programme along with Sport England and health officials.
‘A new Department of Health-funded workplace wellness campaign wants offices, factories and call centres to become bastions of healthy living. Under the scheme, called Well@Work, workers are being offered up to £200 to do ‘alternative therapy’ courses, where they learn how to stretch and are encouraged to pedal rather than drive into work.’

More mindfulness
Meditation app Anamaya’s research shows that ‘being less stressed tops the polls of number one life change we wish to make’ yet ‘UK residents only get 8hrs of relaxation each month’.
Graham Doke, founder and narrator of the app and ex-city lawyer, comments: ‘The majority of us have experienced how, at one point or another, the stress of our work life can be brought back home with us on an evening. If not addressed, this stress can have a detrimental impact on our lives. When you look at the US and UK firms that have introduced mindfulness in the workplace, the results are overwhelming and show that simply taking 5-10 minutes out during your work day to focus on mindfulness, relaxation or to meditate, can have some truly remarkable results.’

Anamaya give us their top five ways to incorporate mindfulness in the workplace:

1. Increased awareness of your emotions
Office politics, rivalry, jealousy and competitiveness can all have a major impact on your work experience.  When executed properly, meditation and mindfulness training can increase awareness of emotions and the awareness of other’s emotion – helping you to control your reactions and be more aware when people are trying to provoke.

2. Manage anxiety levels
Anxiety is proven to be an inhibiter of good performance, and it produces a self-feeding cycle of greater anxiety and stress. Awareness of your anxiety leaves you able to deal with the emotion itself, and clears the way to better performance.

3. Ease the pressure
People claim they ‘work best under pressure’, and managers often feel they get the best from their team by being aggressively demanding. However, neuroscience shows that stress, pressure, reaction to aggression all produces a negative reaction in our brains. Anyone who thinks they operating best under pressure is simply not thinking straight! Meditation reduces the activity of this part of the brain and means we can think clearer.

4. Problem solving
Meditation can change the structure of the brain, particularly the pre-frontal cortex – this change is measurable with MRI scans and leaves the meditator able to modify their behaviour. One of the most empowering changes that mindfulness can bring is the ability to be less fearful and more willing to approach a problem than previously.

5. Work/life balance
In the modern environment of instant information, instant reaction, and 24/7 availability, it is difficult to achieve any kind of balance. In this ‘always on’ culture, where it has become increasingly difficult to switch off thanks to technology, employers are now much more obligated to ensure their employees’ health and wellbeing is maintained.