Work stress and health behaviours: a work—life balance issue

Early work on spillover (discussed in Chapter 3) suggested that work may impact on the non-work domain in terms of time, strain and behavior (Staines, 1980). For example, it may affect the time people have available for family and friends, it may lead them to experience strain even when they are not at work or it may influence their behavior when at home. All of these aspects of spillover have the potential to affect the extent to which individuals engage in healthy and unhealthy behaviors (such as physical activity, healthy eating, smoking and drinking alcohol). Inactive employees may be physically inactive in their private lives, overworked employees may have less time to exercise or cook healthy meals or may place less priority on health practices when under stress (Griffin et al., 1993). Alternatively, health behaviors may be used as methods of coping (Ingledew et al., 1996). For example, people may drink alcohol or smoke in order to regulate their feelings of arousal as a result of the strains of work. These possibilities were seldom considered in the early spillover research. However, in recent years, with the expansion in health psychology research, there has been growing interest in the role of health behavior as a potential mechanism whereby stressors may impact on health outcomes such as cardiovascular disease (Steptoe, 1991).