Your heart doesn’t just want vacation—it’s craving work-life balance

If you’re looking for (even more) evidence to create more of a work-life balance in your life, good news: It’s here. A study conducted by Harvard and Penn State University and published this month in the American Journal of Public Health has found that flexible work schedules can seriously reduce the risk of heart disease—and that they have no negative impacts on productivity. 

The study included over 1,500 employees at an IT company where staffers had moderate to high salaries, and a long-term care company where most caregivers were women receiving low wages. Experimental groups within each company were the subject of a work-life balance “intervention.” Their supervisors were trained to support employees’ personal and family lives, and teams attended trainings to “identify new ways to increase workers’ control over their schedules and tasks,” according to The Harvard Gazette.

As a result of mitigating “stressful workplace conditions and work-family conduct,” as co-author Lisa Berkman told the Gazette, employees who had been identified as having a higher risk of heart disease saw heart health improve. The impact was nearly twice as significant for the caregivers, who saw their risk of heart disease decrease to the levels of someone 10 years younger, compared to 5.5 years for the IT employees.

There are a lot of conclusions we can draw from this, not the least of which is that working in a stressful environment is bad for your long-term health, and that a better work-life balance with mitigated stress could potentially allow you to live longer. Previous studies have found that vacation time is crucial for reducing stress. In one two-decade study of Massachusetts women, those who vacationed less than once every six years were eight times more likely to have a heart attack or develop heart disease than women who went on holiday twice a year or more.

But vacation is just one piece of the puzzle, especially since working while on holiday is a new modern-era plague. Two-thirds of US employees admit to checking their work email on vacation, which means you can bring work stress into even the most pristine of paradises. 

The Harvard and Penn State study aimed to serve as a wakeup call for better balance long-term, co-author Orfeu Buxton told the Harvard Gazette.

“The intervention was designed to change the culture of the workplace over time with the intention of reducing conflict between employees’ work and personal lives and ultimately improving their health,” he said. “Now we know such changes can improve employee health and should be more broadly implemented.”