MANY workers now feel as if they’re doing the job of three people. They are on call 24 hours a day. They rush their children from tests to tournaments to tutoring.
The stress is draining, both mentally and physically.
At least that is the standard story about stress. It turns out, though, that many of the common beliefs about stress don’t necessarily give the complete picture.
MISCONCEPTION NO. 1 Stress is usually caused by having too much work.
While being overworked can be overwhelming, research increasingly shows that being underworked can be just as challenging. In essence, boredom is stressful.
“We tend to think of stress in the original engineering way, that too much pressure or too much weight on a bridge causes it to collapse,” said Paul E. Spector, a professor of psychology at the University of South Florida. “It’s more complicated than that.”
[For more of this story, written by Alina Tugend, go to http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10...?ref=health&_r=0]
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