Implementación de Tecnología para La Gestión del Estrés en El Entorno Laboral

Estudio de Caso de Éxito: Implementación de Tecnología para La Gestión del Estrés en El Entorno Laboral (2017)

 Introduction

Stress is defined as the physical and mental responses of the body and adaptations to real and perceived changes and challenges in life. Stress is, for many, considered as the silent disease of the 21st century. However, it was not officially classified as a disorder or alteration to take into account differently to anxiety until the 5th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) by the American Psychiatric Association published on 1 October 2016.
Nowadays society faces the great challenge of adapting to a continuous rate of change, connected to a large number of internal and external stimuli that, poorly managed, can become important daily stress triggers, with the physical and mental consequences that all of this involves in and out of working time. To this effect, there are several challenges that companies and governments must face when it comes to promoting health and well-being. Actually the increase of pathologies, such as stress, anxiety, and/or depression, have led to financial losses up to €136 million in companies reaching percentages of more than 75% of workers in the European Union who suffer daily stress being already more than 20% the working age population that suffer serious health problems, such as the chronic stress syndrome known as burnout [1].
In this sense, and due to the multifactorial nature of stress, other factors such as poor rest, physical inactivity, overweight, and obesity are increasingly present in today’s companies, aggravating and increasing the risk of suffering cardiovascular diseases, immunological, as well as chronic diseases susceptible to reduce the quality of life of the individual [2,3,4], which affects not only at an individual level, but also at social and professional levels [5]. In this regard, and according to data from the European Heart Network, Spain is in the top ten European countries with a more sedentary lifestyle among adults; 42% of those over 18 say they do not do any physical activity during the week, against 6% in Sweden or 7% in Finland. In addition, data from the European Foundation for improving living and working conditions confirm that Spaniards spend an average of 1720 h a year at work [6].
Among the factors that currently have the greatest potential to become stressors, understood as stress triggering situations, could be any direct or indirect, external or internal stimulus (physical, chemical, acoustic or somatic, or sociocultural), that favors a disruption in the dynamic equilibrium of the organism (homeostasis) we can find environmental factors (work, family, work meetings, corporate culture, climate, environment, etc.) as those related to lifestyle (level of practice of physical activity, eating habits, and emotional management, among others) [7].
On a psychological level, a recent study detected through univariate and multivariate statistical analysis of the risk prediction score of cardiovascular disease (CVD), and of the general welfare of WHO, that a combination of general risk factors and organizational factors contribute to increase the risk and well-being of CVD, with a direct and inversely proportional relationship between work stress and the welfare index [8]. In addition, a study carried out with a sample of 2991 German and Chinese students where a lifestyle for positive mental health (PMH) and mental health problems (MHP) was analyzed through the Positive Mental Health Scale and a version of 21 items on the scale of anxiety, depression, and stress, obtained as results the importance of following a healthy lifestyle to improve psychological well-being and develop fewer mental health problems. Factors such as BMI, frequency of physical and mental activities, frequency of alcohol consumption, smoking, vegetarian diet and the irregularity of social rhythm were considered in this study to consider the lifestyle of the subjects [9].
Physiologically, the exposure to one or several stressors’ stimuli triggers the response of the sympathetic nervous system (SNS), activating the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis in charge of releasing the hormone corticotropin (ACTH) that acts directly on the pituitary gland to secrete adrenocorticotropin, thereby increasing the levels of cortisol, cortisone, epinephrine, and norepinephrine into the blood. This chain reaction provoked by a stressor stimulus is responsible for increasing the levels of brain and blood glucose, heart rate (HR), and blood pressure, among others (Figure 1) [9].
Figure 1. Neuroscience applied to stress control.
It is important to comprehend the physiological process that triggers stress to better understand the type of strategies that will be necessary to be implemented in stress management. Additionally, the response of our body to various stressors corresponds to a “mechanism of escape” whose magnitude of enrollment; both neuroendocrine and physiological depend on the duration and specific needs of the body. Its implementation not only involves a high energy expenditure, but also the release of hormones and substances that generate an over-excitation of the nervous system, which, maintained over time, can lead to an intensification in cellular aging, oxidative stress, inflammation of tissues, and cardiometabolic problems, among others [10].
To know the levels of stress in the body from a physiological point of view there are two non-invasive methodologies: the measurement of cortisol levels through saliva [11] and the recording of heart rate variability (HRV) understood as the variation between two consecutive beats: the greater the variation, the greater the parasympathetic activity [12] through devices recording the HR.
Studying the heart by HRV (Figure 2) provides us with a vast amount of information about our body. From beat to beat, heart rate is constantly changing to meet the needs of life. HRV means the variation in time between consecutive heartbeats. It is universally accepted as a non-invasive marker of autonomic nervous system (ANS) activity. A variety of physiological phenomena affect HRV, including:
Figure 2. HRV means the variation in time between consecutive heartbeats.
  • Inhalation and exhalation, control of breathing
  • ANS adjustments
  • Hormonal reactions
  • Metabolic processes and energy expenditure
  • Physical activity, exercise, and recovery from physical activity
  • Movements and changes in posture
  • Cognitive processes and mental load
  • Stress reactions, relaxation, and emotional reactions
Heart rate variability increases during relaxing and recovering activities and decreases during stress. Accordingly, HRV is typically higher when the heart is beating slowly and decreases as the heart beats more quickly. In other words, heart rate and HRV have a generally inverse relationship. Also, HRV changes from day to day based on activity levels and amount of work-related stress. In addition to these external stress factors, internal stress factors cause variation daily HRV levels. Internal stress factors include poor nutrition, alcohol use, illness, etc.
The principle of the method is to utilize HRV and HR reactions as a tool for analyzing autonomic nervous system activity in order to build a digital model of human physiology for recognizing different bodily states.
The human nervous system consists of central nervous system and peripheral nervous system. The latter has two major divisions, the voluntary and the autonomic systems. The voluntary nervous system is concerned mainly with movement and sensation. The ANS mainly controls functions over which we have less conscious control. These include for example the cardiovascular system, whose regulation is fast and involuntary.
The ANS is divided into sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems (Figure 3). Sympathetic and parasympathetic nerve cords start from the central nervous system and lead to different target organs all around the human body. Sympathetic and parasympathetic divisions typically function simultaneously in opposition to each other. The parasympathetic division is primarily involved in relaxation, helping the body to rest and recover. The sympathetic division prepares the body to fight by accelerating bodily functions, and is also associated with stress.
Figure 3. Autonomic nervous system controls different target organs via parasympathetic and sympathetic nerve cords. The parasympathetic nerve controlling the hearts is called the vagus nerve.
With stress reactions, the human body tries to cope with the demands of the surrounding environment. Positive stress gives energy “to get the job done”. Negative stress causes negative emotions and reactions. Physiologically, the response to positive and negative stress is similar. As a result of the stress reaction, the ANS is activated and stress hormone production starts along with an increased rate and force of contraction of the heart [13]. The magnitude of the neuro-endocrine response reflects the metabolic and physiological demands required for the behavioral activity [14].
Therefore, although there is an ongoing debate of the exact definition of stress in the scientific literature, stress can be physiologically characterized by reduced recovery of the neuroendocrine reaction [14] and sympathetic dominance of the ANS function, whereas recovery is characterized as parasympathetic dominance.
In this study we will focus on HRV as an objective indicator to know the reactions to stress during the workday, as well as the quality of recovery of the nervous system (NS) during work, outside of work and at night. Its validity has been proven in several studies, both in the sports field with a focus on the study of high-performance training and in the workplace that concerns us [15,16,17,18,19]. In addition, a recent review of the literature on physiological biomarkers related to the study of stress in the workplace, concluded that the correlation between cortisol and work stress are less clear than those found with HRV [20].
In particular, the number of studies in which HRV has been used has been increasing in recent years. The most relevant findings show how acute stress correlates with a decrease in HRV during sleep [21] and during the day [22], finding a strong relationship between the decrease in HRV and work stress [5,12,18,23,24].
In order that the measurements made are accurate in a different environment to sports or medicine, much more accustomed to monitoring, it is necessary to take into account the technology to be implemented according to the characteristics of the population to be studied. Currently, there are several easy-to-use, mobile heart rate monitors that keep data of the intervals between beats (RR intervals) during the workday. Scientists to analyze HRV in sports science, medicine, and other fields of research have used commercial devices, such as heart rate monitors and activity clocks [25]. Recent studies have validated the HR recording devices in relation to different electrocardiogram systems with results that offer high reliability in the registration of RR interval series for the analysis of HRV similar to those offered by electrocardiography (ECG) equipment [26].
Among the new technologies applied in the workplace for HRV monitoring, we find the Body Guard 2 device of the Firstbeat® philanthropy as one of the best options at the scientific level [15,16,17,18,19,20], since it also provides information about the quality of recovery of the records obtained.
In this sense, the quality of recovery is one of the key variables to take into account in stress management and not only the level of daily reaction to it. It should also be noted that the quality of recovery in the executive sector not only gives the duration and quality of sleep. The characteristics of the executive profile make it necessary to acquire personalized strategies that can help them to combat stress during the workday, outside the working day, and during the night, independently of the areas and activities that they have assigned and the variability of them. To this effect, studies indicate that HRV has been used to monitor the effort and recovery in sports such as judo or basketball [27,28], as well as after performing submaximal exercise [29]. However, there are few studies that analyze our target population specifically during the night to assess the quality of recovery; although there are studies carried out with Finnish workers (n = 16.275) that correlate a practice of high physical activity with lower percentages of stress during workdays and during one’s work, as well as a balance of stress. Also positively related to a lower BMI with better recovery during sleep [30], the correct design of healthy strategies within the workplace, sustainable over time, could help the quality of recovery of workers within and out of work.
For everything described above, the aim of this study has been to describe the physiological burden of stress and the quality of recovery in a population of senior managers during the workday analyzed during three different time zones: work, after work, and night.
As a secondary objective, we mark the relocation of the use of high-performance technology for the objectification of parameters related to health management and stress in executive positions of high responsibility in a business environment.
Our hypothesis is that the physiological load derived from a low-quality recovery during the 24 h working day negatively influences the increase in the physiological load that results from stress in the manager in the medium-long term.

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