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Workplace Wellness Lab delivers leading insights, ideas and information on wellness, health management, and healthy living.

Our goal is simple: Workplace Wellness Lab provides regular and better information as an important path to create healthy individual outcomes, while helping change health care in America.

By connecting the audiences that matter – consultants, corporate executives, policymakers, thought leaders, journalists, customers, and more – we establish a positive, substantive, and influential voice within the wellness industry that makes the case that:

    • Left unchecked, current trends in health spend and outcomes are unsustainable.
    • Given that half the healthcare dollars in this country are incurred by employers, well-executed preventive care health management programs in the worksite are clearly enduring and valuable, helping drive improved workplace environments and individual outcomes.
    • Industry coherence around private sector innovation to drive effective health management programs is economically vital, given what’s possible in a spend category that is arguably one of the greatest challenges in America today.

Workplace Wellness Lab comes at this challenge principally from the employer point of view: What are the credible and demonstrated best practices in preventive care to structure programs that have an enduring impact? How can the impact be made explicit, as something that is both the right thing to do and a proactive business initiative that lowers the cost of care, as experienced by both employers and employees?

And Workplace Wellness Lab goes beyond the workplace. It’s a robust platform filled with ideas and insights from those that influence how employers think about this opportunity: research organizations, non-profits, think tanks and more.

From an editorial point of view, great ideas can come from anywhere. With that philosophy in mind, we will combine our own original content with other content across the web. We organize the content, with a view to making it as simple and useful as possible.

All content will be sourced. If we found it somewhere, we’ll tell you where we got — and how to get to that site yourself.

We also welcome your comments — criticisms, ideas, and, yes, we take compliments, too! Have a thought of what you’d like to see — or see something you think others should know — drop us a line.

Thanks for visiting – and please come back again!

Transparency is extremely important to us, so we are letting you know that we may receive a commission on some of links you click on from this page. See our disclaimer.

Is stress at the office contagious?

The Wall Street Journal reported that “working with people who are stressed has both physiological and emotional effects. Perspiration produced under emotional strain releases alarm pheromones, or airborne chemical signals. When inhaled by others, these substances activate the amygdala, the region of the brain linked to emotional arousal, according to a 2009 study in PLOS One.”

The piece adds: “People who act stressed create social pressure, too. A boss who rushes constantly sparks anxiety among others who assume they should be racing around, too. Also, it is stressful to try to communicate with a co-worker who seems chronically overburdened, making co-workers reluctant to ask for help or even a moment to talk.”

So what can you do to protect yourself?

Anese Cavanaugh is the creator of the IEP Method (Intentional Energetic Presence). She offers in Inc. Magazine “Seven ways to avoid catching the stress bug” — including methods that work at the office, including:

  • “Breathe and get present to this moment, now.”
  • “Remember, you are not them. The person who's bringing the room or conversation down with their energy and stories of stress? That's them. Not you.”
  • “Watch out for story time. It's so easy to get hooked into story: theirs, yours, your mom's. It's exhausting–and stressful. Instead, take a pause, and check in. Is it true? Whose story is it? What are you buying into? What ‘charge' are you getting out of the stress? Misery loves company, and in stress, hooking someone with a story can be cathartic. Swim away.”
  • “Change your state. Focus on what you're grateful for.”
  • “Take care of yourself proactively.”
  • “Get into your body. You feel that stress coming on…Get up, move, get into your body, dance if you must, smile, and shift.”

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