A healthy work-life balance has become increasingly difficult to achieve. With longer working hours, expectations of constantly "being on," and blurred boundaries between work and life, workers across the world are experiencing spillover effects of workplace stress onto the home front. This negative spillover has been shown to have adverse effects on mental health, family relationships, work productivity and job satisfaction.
In Singapore where there are more stressed workers than the global average , more and more Singaporeans are feeling mentally and/or physically exhausted by the end of the day. The "epidemic" of work-life imbalance is driving concerns about how it might affect physical health. "To date, most research on the effects of work-life imbalance are based on self-reported measures of subjective health such as headaches, sleep degradation, loss of appetite, fatigue," Assistant Professor Andree Hartanto said.
"While subjective health indications show that people are suffering from stress and negative work-to-life spillover effects, physiological changes in the body, especially changes to the heart, are sometimes missed as some of the symptoms are silent and asymptomatic." "This is worrisome as the leading cause of death in the world are caused by cardiovascular diseases. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 17.
9 million people die from cardiovascular diseases each year. "This is why we decided to conduct a study, specifically to investigate the health .
