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Beating the 3am blues

Nov 30 2005 by Brian Amble
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Why do so many of us wake up in the early hours of thew morning worrying about work?

As Ian Sample writes in the Guardian, failing to switch off from work pressure can lead to high levels of stress at home, leading to relationship problems, unhealthy changes in behaviour and hours of lost sleep, all of which have a nasty tendency to exacerbate the problem that caused them.

According to Mark Millard, a psychologist with the London-based company Organisational Stress Audit, modern living makes it harder for people to switch off…

"People working in cities, especially, now tend to work longer hours, but they also have the journey and that means they rarely get to wind down on the way home. And with mobile phones, laptops and Blackberries, work follows you everywhere you go; they erode the separation between work and home and that is going to make it harder for people to switch off," he says.

…. Millard believes there is a classic warning sign that indicates work stress is getting too much - and that is when the effects show up at home as well as in the workplace.

The Guardian | Night of a thousand sighs

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