Go to Health podcast: Is your job hurting your mental health?

New Zealanders are reporting increasing stress at work. Photo / File

In this summer podcast series, each week the New Zealand Herald and Newstalk ZB's Go to Health podcast will look at a different health issue. Today, it's the effect of modern work expectations on our mental health. Hosted by Frances Cook.

It's all too easy to slip into the habit of working harder and harder, drawing your sense of worth and accomplishment from dealing with an increasing amount of pressure in your job.

But it's a balancing act that can only go for so long before something has to give. An increasing number of New Zealanders are facing exactly that problem.

Last year's Wellness in the Workplace survey, put together by Southern Cross and Business NZ, documented a spike in workplace stress levels during the past two years.

The biggest factor for the people they surveyed was being overloaded by work.

A recent survey by Seek also backs this up. It found one in three New Zealanders feel stressed out by their job, and can't stop themselves bringing work home at the end of the day.

Our working life is a huge part of how we spend our life in general, so maybe it shouldn't be a surprise that if you keep this up for too long, there can be serious consequences.

I called Helena Cooper-Thomas, organisational behaviour professor at AUT, for the latest episode of the Go to Health podcast.

We talked about whether people are more stressed by work than they were in the past, signs of stress, and how to deal with it.

For the interview, listen to the podcast.

If you have a question about this podcast, or an idea for the next one, come and talk to me about it. I'm on Facebook here Instagram here and Twitter here.

Don't forget to subscribe to Go to Health on the Apple podcasts app, or I Heart Radio, to make sure you never miss an episode.