26 July 1999

Stress Hits the Sex Lives of Britons

by Kate Melville

According to a new British survey, stress may not only be bad for you health, but it probably impacts upon your sex life too. And this is not only bad for the individual, and indeed their partners, but it may also have negative consequences for their employers.

"The results find a disturbing number of the workforce feeling over-stressed, under-valued and making some profound sacrifices in their personal lives to keep up with the rat race," said the study, published in Management Today magazine.

The magazine commissioned survey of 2,000 people showed that a third of the respondents felt that their work had a significant negative impact upon their health, with 28 percent saying their sex lives were also affected. While not actually included in the survey, it is a fair to conclude that stress probably would also have a dramatic impact upon employees having sex while at work.

More than half of the participants said they were frequently or very frequently stressed at work.

"Holidays and physical exercise are still the most common ways to ease pressure at work," the magazine said.

"However, alcohol and therapy/counseling (14.5 percent have used it to ease work pressure) also appear to play a role."

The "Price of Success" poll forecast that employers could suffer the consequences as many of the participants claimed they would look for employment elsewhere within the next 12 months because either their jobs were too stressful or because they felt their efforts went unrecognized.

"Employees are voting with their feet," Rufus Olins, the magazine's editor, said. "The research reveals that we have different expectations about the quality of our working lives from previous generations."