This Is What Happens To Your Body When You Hate Your Job

Everyone has bad days at work, but there are signs that employees need to watch out for before a bad week at the office turns into never-ending, debilitating work stress that is ruining your health.

Too many Americans are trapped in toxic jobs, a problem employers and employees need to take more seriously. Jeffrey Pfeffer, an organizational behavior professor at Stanford who wrote the book “Dying for a Paycheck,” found through his research that poor management in U.S. companies accounted for up to 8 percent of annual health costs and was associated with 120,000 excess deaths every year.

Your body may know before you fully do that your job is to blame for your stress symptoms, sending you red alerts that you are not okay.

You can’t sleep

“A lot of times the first thing we’ll hear about is sleepless nights,” said Maryland-based clinical psychologist Monique Reynolds of the Center for Anxiety and Behavior Change. “ People report either not being able to sleep because their mind is racing or not being able to stay asleep. They wake up in the middle of the night thinking about their to-do list.”

A few restless nights is not a huge deal, but if it becomes a pattern, that may be a sign your job stress has become toxic.

“If it’s consistently related to work, that is a sign that something is off-balance,” Reynolds said.

You get headaches

Your muscles tense up to guard your body from injury. When you see the workplace as a danger zone, it keeps your muscles wound tight, according to the American Psychological Association. Chronic tension in the neck, shoulders and head can be associated with migraines and tension headaches.

“Stress creates physiological symptoms, and that manifests as pain,” said Reynolds.

Your muscles in