Stress From Work Is Causing Young Bankers In London To Have Health Issues

Many people with high-pressure jobs justify the stress they take on by the success they will achieve, but stress is not something we should ignore as it builds up and can cause problems for us. This is true of many industries, but one of the highest stress careers of all is finance, where despite the seemingly glamorous lifestyles of big spending, many people working in it are constantly anxious and exhausted from all that the job entails. Among bankers who are below the age of 30, there has been an increase of 10% in stress-induced health issues including heart attacks and cardiac problems. Sadly, this is not an entirely new phenomenon, and after an intern with Bank of America died there were efforts to reform. However, the industry kept chugging along as usual, and there was little in the way of making life easier for those working in it. Brutal hours at offices remain the norm, and problems such as cardiac arrhythmia and myocarditis continue to rise. In addition to these health complications, drug use is also common among bankers, and this simply adds to the issues people have.

Because of the brutally long hours finance professionals typically work, sometimes extending to 14 hours a day which makes it impossible to get a decent night of sleep, it isn’t unusual for people to take drugs such as cocaine which give them the energy and confidence boosts they need to get through the day. While these seem like short-term solutions for people for workers to cope with their jobs, it ultimately makes things worse for them given the negative health impacts of taking drugs. While anecdotally many have noticed the high stress levels and deteriorating mental health of finance professionals, this has actually been quantified with a study in 2012 by the Administrative Science Quarterly. They tracked four different groups of investment bankers who were getting their starts in various banks. They looked at their mental health for the first four years of their careers, and they found that stress-induced health problems were ubiquitous among them. Even going outside of the finance industry, it has become clear that other career paths also are seeing a rise in young professionals having health problems due to stress. This has since become an issue that doctors feel needs much more research to get to the bottom of and hopefully reverse the trend.