Does something at the office just make you want to explode? Maybe it’s not “blowing your top” you should worry about, but blowing your heart.
A new study from the Stress Research Institute of Stockholm University in Sweden has found a connection between bottling up anger at work and heart attack risk. Nearly three thousand employed men participated in the decade-long study. None had suffered a heart attack before the start of the study.
During the study, however, nearly fifty men suffered from a heart attack or died from heart disease. Many of those men had been “covertly coping” with unfair treatment at work.
What is covert coping? If you bite your tongue and let criticisms pass without speaking up, that’s covert coping. If you walk away despite feelings of hurt and anger towards coworkers or supervisors, that’s covert coping. Men who practiced covert coping at work were two to five times more likely to have heart disease or a heart attack than men who were more confrontational at work.
The bottom line: bottling up that anger — using covert coping — can have a big negative impact on your health.
Letting your frustrations show doesn’t have to jeopardize your job, either. There are appropriate ways to voice displeasure in the workplace. Give yourself a little while to calm down, then try talking to the person you have a problem with. If that doesn’t work, try talking to someone else — a supervisor, or a representative from HR.
Don’t think you can talk calmly and rationally? Try writing your thoughts out. Then put them aside for a half hour or so and reread them. You may find that the extra time has given you a chance to settle down a little — and you may be ready for that confrontation.
If fear of losing your job is the reason you stifle your feelings, that’s definitely a valid concern. However, if the choice is between being unemployed and being dead from a heart attack, which would you choose?