WASHINGTON — Job insecurity doesn’t just make you anxious and worried. It can also make you fat.
“For some people, they use food as a coping mechanism, so they get into eating more junk food. And that manifests as a number of disorders that we found in our study,” Professor Jagdish Khubchandani, at Ball State University’s College of Health, told WTOP.
In the study of more than 17,000 people who participated in the National Health Interview Survey, researchers found that individuals reporting job insecurity were more likely to be obese, smoke, have short sleep duration and not engage in regular physical activity.
The study also found a surprise about job insecurity. People in the prime of their careers are most likely to feel it.
“This generation of people in the 45- to 64-year-old group is now facing too many challenges. There is new technology. The labor market has changed. And these people are not the ones who got the highest amount of continuous training,” Khubchandani said.
The study found that over a 12-month period, about 33 percent of all respondents reported job insecurity. Men were 14 percent more likely than women to report serious job insecurity.
Women who were job-insecure reported higher rates of asthma, diabetes, work-life imbalance, worsening general health in the past year and pain disorders, including migraine and neck pain.
Men who were job-insecure were more likely to miss more than two weeks of work in the past year, and suffer from severe chest pain, ulcers and hypertension.
Job insecurity is also often something people imagine, and is not grounded in reality, Khubchandani said.
“That happens with some people with certain personality types. Those people who are always anxious, they are overachievers and perfectionists, and sometimes the threat is not real,” Khubchandani said.
