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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.

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Two key efforts for workplace wellness programs: Helping employees and businesses manage mental health and chronic disease. Might they be related?

We've previously noted the potential benefits of yoga on various chronic disease management efforts, highlighting a study titled “Yoga training modulates adipokines in adults with high‐normal blood pressure and metabolic syndrome”

MedPage Today reports that “New findings reinforce the connection between diabetes and anxiety while advancing knowledge around diagnostic and treatment possibilities. According to data from the Standards of Medical Care in Diabetes 2018 published by the American Diabetes Association, psychosocial interventions can significantly reduce A1C, with a mean reduction of 0.29%, not to mention directly improving mental health and quality of life.”

The post notes a 2016 study published in Psychoneuroendocrinology and titled “Executive functioning and diabetes: The role of anxious arousal and inflammation.”

The authors note that “individuals who perform poorly on measures of the executive function of inhibition have higher anxious arousal in comparison to those with better performance. High anxious arousal is associated with a pro-inflammatory response. Chronically high anxious arousal and inflammation increase one’s risk of developing type 2 diabetes.”

The study continues: “On the basis of our results, we propose several avenues to explore for improved prevention and treatment efforts for type 2 diabetes.”

For well-run workplace wellness programs, some guidance might come from the American Diabetes Association.

MedPage writes: “In the nearer term, the ADA standards suggest anxiety and depression screening at the initial visit and thereafter periodically and when changes in behavior, life circumstances, or the disease itself trigger the possibility of mental health changes.”

“‘Key opportunities for psychosocial screening occur at diabetes diagnosis, during regularly scheduled management visits, during hospitalizations, with new onset of complications, or when problems with glucose control, quality of life, or self-management are identified,' the standards state.”

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