For some people, work is their salvation in times of crisis, but for many of us work is our crisis. Does the thought of work make you sick or depressed? Just thinking about work sends stress surging, according to a University College London study showing that the stress hormone cortisol is highest just before work. No wonder Monday morning is the most common time for a heart attack.

If you dread work and spend hours clock-watching, cyber-surfing for dream jobs or saying “I hate this” or “Tahiti looks nice”, you may have a dose of the vocation virus. Do your health problems miraculously go into remission on holidays, only to return with work? My patients suffering from these occupational hazards have found that dropping pills for their health problems doesn’t work as well as dropping their job or their attitude to work. Could a radical jobotomy help your health?

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) said love and work are the two essential aspects of a well-adjusted person. Enriching work can keep us sane, just as the wrong work can drive us insane. The Russian novelist Dostoevski (1821-1881) remarked, “Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go stark, raving mad.”

After analysing patients I sadly lost to heart attacks and cancer, I realised the strong role their draining worklife had played in their demise. It had literally sucked the life out of them, not unlike the 19th century French novelist Honoré de Balzac’s observation that “an unfulfilled vocation drains the colour from a man’s entire existence”. If only they had undertaken a sincere job autopsy and overhaul while they were alive, things may have been different.

The price of a pay cheque

Long hours, workplace conflicts, unclear roles and unreasonable demands are leading many to question the price of their pay cheque. Maggie Hamilton, author of Love Your Work, Reclaim Your Life, said her work woes motivated her to explore the work dilemma: I had become suffocated by the stress, the deadlines and the fatigue.”

Work stress is a common contributor to health problems, says Professor Graham Burrows, Chairman of Mental Health Foundation of Australia (Victoria): “Fifty per cent of people in general hospitals are there directly as a response to stress.”

According to a review by S. Michie and S. Williams in Occupational and Environmental Medicine 60 (January 2003), the top factors causing work stress and related illness are “long hours worked, work overload and pressure, and the effects of these on personal lives; lack of control over work; lack of participation in decision making; poor social support; and unclear management and work role”.

Stress, which can be triggered by a multitude of factors such as excessive pressure, poor communication, chaotic organisation, bad working relationships or physical strain, increases your heart rate, blood pressure and muscle tension.

The karoshi epidemic

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, almost half a million people experience a work-related illness annually. Research in 2004 by The Australia Institute found that Australians are suffering higher-than-usual levels of work-related anxiety, heart disease, depression and stress. NSW Labor Council’s occupational health and safety watchdog, Mary Yaager, warns, “Australian employers are literally working their staff to death, with on-the-job stress, violence and fatigue edging their way up to become major causes of workplace fatalities.”

Working yourself into an early grave is a well-documented phenomenon in Japan, where it’s known as karoshi. Since 1969, the National Defence Council for Victims of Karoshi has estimated 10,000 workers die from overwork each year in Japan and a recent survey found that 40 per cent of all Japanese workers fear they will work themselves to death.

We’re not immune in the laidback lucky country, either. According to Clive Hamilton, director of The Australia Institute and author of Growth Fetish and Affluenza, “While Australians often think of themselves as living in the land of the long weekend, they are now working the longest hours in the developed world and are at risk of working themselves sick.”

Even with an excuse, Australians aren’t apt to slack off, with only 39 per cent of full-time employees taking their full annual leave in 2002, a pitiful entitlement of four weeks compared with Germany’s six weeks and the European average of five weeks. (However, we appear to be luckier than those living the American dream, with 2003 US Department of Labor statistics stating that their average annual leave is only eight days — the stingiest in the industrialised world.)