Reuters study shows that vacations are good for your health!

Find it hard to catch your breath when an email arrives from your boss? Skipping lunch (again) because of an impossible deadline? Nixing that weekend getaway because you haven't met your quota?

Time for Vacation?According to a study released this morning in the European Heart Journal, you may as well forget the romantic getaway and pre-book your bed in the cardiac ward. Your work-related stress may be slowly killing you.

"This is the first large-scale population study looking at the effects of stress measured from everyday working life on heart disease," said Tarani Chandola, an epidemiologist at University College London, who led the study. "One of the problems is people have been skeptical whether work stress really affects a person biologically."

What makes this study important is the cause and effect link of work-related stress and bad habits to long term health. Stressed workers were studied over a 12-year period and had numerous signs of poorly functioning cardiac systems, including higher than normal levels of cortisol (the fight or flight hormone).

The study found that chronically stressed workers under 50 had a whopping 68% chance of developing heart disease. Surviving a bungee jump has better odds...

So, for 48-50 weeks a year your boss runs your life. And like most North Americans you buzz right past the 40-hour work week and enter the work addiction stratosphere most of those weeks.

When's the last time you took a vacation? A real vacation where you lived for days on end, unplugged from the office, your boss and his insane deadlines? Can you even remember what it feels like to be completely unplugged?

This kind of study reminds me of the early 1970s when researchers started telling us smoking was like suicide practice. It's taken 30 years and millions of lost lives and dollars in healthcare for most of us to figure out they were right.

Wonder when we'll get a clue and start mandating time away from the office.

Do you have a vacation planned soon? If you ask me, now's a perfect time to hang the "Closed for Vacation" sign.

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