---
title: "Stress at work — what causes it?"
slug: stres-w-pracy-co-go-powoduje
date: 2025-02-17
readTime: 2
excerpt: "Nearly one in three Poles says that excessive job responsibility is what keeps them in a permanent state of stress. Find out more about the real causes of work stress."
url: https://smashandfun.pl/en/blog/stres-w-pracy-co-go-powoduje
language: en-US
---

# Stress at work — what causes it?

> Nearly one in three Poles says that excessive job responsibility is what keeps them in a permanent state of stress. Find out more about the real causes of work stress.

Nearly one in three Poles (26.85% of those surveyed) say that excessive job responsibility is the main reason they live in a state of stress. Another 23.81% of Polish workers admit that the length of the working day also affects how stressed they feel.

## The four most common causes

When researchers dig into "what makes you stressed at work?", the answers cluster into four buckets — and they are not the ones managers usually expect.

- **Lack of control over the schedule.** Not the workload itself — the inability to influence when and how the work happens. People work harder than they think they can, as long as they get to choose the cadence.
- **Misaligned expectations between manager and team.** What a manager calls "a normal request" can be received as "this is going to ruin my evening" — and the gap is rarely discussed openly.
- **No recognition.** Workers can absorb a surprising amount of pressure if they feel seen. Take that away and even modest workloads start to feel crushing.
- **Constant context switching.** Slack, email, meetings, urgent calls — every interruption costs about 15 minutes of recovery time. Stack ten of those a day and you have a full unproductive workday on top of the actual job.

## What none of this is about

Notice what is missing: salary, working from home vs office, age, type of industry. These show up in surveys, but as secondary factors. The four causes above show up at the top of every study, in every country.

That is good news in a way: the fix is rarely "leave the job". It is usually "fix one of the four".

## What does this mean for the body

Long-term stress at work is not just a feeling. It changes the body's baseline. Cortisol stays elevated, sleep quality drops, the immune system weakens, and the muscles of the upper back and neck stay in a low-grade contraction even at rest. Many people only notice this when they finally take a real two-week break — and feel a kind of lightness they had forgotten existed.

In the next article we look at the consequences of long-term work stress in detail.