Hard work while fatigued is hazardous for your heart's health

Washington, June 27 : Working hard even when you're exhausted may be an admirable characteristic, but it is a virtue that could be harmful to your health, according to a new study.

The study, conducted by psychologists at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), supports a theory which suggests that fatigued individuals' cardiovascular systems are forced to work harder when they attempt to complete tasks, such as those encountered on the job or at school.

The study showed that fatigued individuals had larger blood pressure increases than rested individuals under conditions where they viewed success as both possible and worthwhile.

UAB psychologist Rex Wright, Ph.D., who led the study, believes the effects were determined by effort on the part of the study participants.

He said that when fatigued individuals perceive a task as achievable and worth doing, they increase their effort to make up for their diminished capability due to fatigue.

As a result, blood pressure tends to rise and remain elevated until the task is completed or individuals stop trying because they think success is impossible or too difficult to be justified.

"Our findings are relevant to health because of links that have been established between cardiovascular responsiveness and negative health outcomes, including hypertension and heart disease," Wright said.

"Individuals who experience chronically exaggerated cardiovascular responses are believed to be at greater health risk than individuals who do not. Thus, the implication is that chronic fatigue may pose a health risk under some performance conditions," he added.

During the study, researchers offered 80 subjects the opportunity to earn a small chance of winning a modest prize by memorizing, in two minutes, two or six nonsense trigrams. Trigrams are meaningless, three-letter sequences, such as AED.

Before the memorization period, the partcipants completed a survey that included questions about how fatigued they felt. During the memorization period, the researchers monitored the subjects' heart rate and blood pressure responses.

The data indicated that subjects who reported moderate fatigue had stronger blood pressure increases than subjects who reported low fatigue in the two-trigram condition.

"Presumably this was because the moderately fatigued subjects viewed success as relatively hard, but still possible and worthwhile," Wright said.

"Subjects who reported moderate fatigue had relatively reduced blood pressure increases in the six-trigram condition, presumably because they viewed success there as impossible or too difficult to be worth the effort."

Subjects who reported very high fatigue had low blood pressure increases in both task conditions. This was interpreted to suggest that even the easy task was too difficult for them.

"It might be argued that fatigue is of little concern from a health standpoint because people will tend to withdraw effort once they become fatigued," Wright said.

"The problem with this view is that it fails to recognize that people do not always have the luxury of withdrawing effort or perhaps the wisdom to do so.

The study is published in the July issue of the International Journal of Psychophysiology.

ANI