If your 2024 resolution involves getting healthier, chances are you've vowed to sign up for a gym membership or start eating more nutritious foods. But you may want to make changes at work, too.
It perhaps shouldn't be shocking that the place where you spend 40ish hours a week affects your health. But when I looked to the studies, I was nonetheless surprised to learn just how much your job influences well-being, both mental and physical. The good news, I learned, is there are things both bosses and workers can do to make offices healthier. Here are a few:
Managers, give your employees more control over their time and tasks, as it's linked to better well-being. Recognize good work, whether among your direct reports or peers. Workers who don't feel appropriately appreciated may be at higher risk for heart disease, research shows. Employees, if you can, proactively make suggestions about how the workplace can run better and ask for assignments that interest you. Talk to your co-workers. Social support in the workplace can bring powerful benefits, from better mental health to increased longevity.
From2015 to 2016, an international outbreak of the mosquito-borne Zika virus caused a public-health panic. But in the near-decade since, the virus has mostly faded from our collective attention—which, Olga Khazan writes in the Atlantic, highlights the problems with our boom-and-bust approach to public health.