Work-Health Balance: Characterizing Short-Term and Long-Term Impact to Health

People who are motivated to live a healthy lifestyle face competing priorities and resources that interfere with healthy living. A key component of this challenge is maintaining what we call, work-health balance, the optimal state for one’s work stress level, and biological outcomes. The lack of balance, surpassing one’s ideal eustress level, ultimately impacts a user’s total health state given changes to the user’s lifestyle, or everyday actions, such as eating, sleeping, moving, stress, and other mental preoccupations. We first explore specifically the conflicting dynamic of a user’s psychological demands of work and the impact on the user’s biological health state. The health state is impacted both in the short-term, including changes to lifestyle events and stress levels and also in the longer-term, including in the development of chronic disease. We established a method for characterizing users’ work impact on the health state and their longer-term health potential. We conducted an N-of-1 experiment tracking user lifestyle and stress over 51 weeks to characterize how to work deadlines impact lifestyle and stress. We find a direct relationship between user work deadlines and their resulting health state. Identifying and quantifying the health state as it relates to work demands gives users insight into work and lifestyle decision-making. Also, it provides employers with considerations for incorporating work-health balance for the well-being of their employees.