Stress Management Based on Trait-Anxiety Levels and Sleep Quality in Middle-Aged Employees Confronted with Psychosocial Chronic Stress

A growing body of evidence indicates that downsizing and its related forms of organizational restructuring can have profound adverse effects on worker safety, health and well-being through stress.

In this study, a research laboratory, employing 160 personnel, submitted to downsizing and related forms of organizational restructuring in the following two years was contacted. A stress management program using cardiac coherence was implemented after the organizational downsizing. Nine voluntary workers were participated in order to evaluate the efficiency of the program. The mean age of the nine male respondents was 39.77 (6.45) years old with 7.9 ± 1.9 years of education above grade 7. A baseline evaluation was conducted on psychological variables (anxiety, perceived-stress, wellbeing and sleep), endocrine assessments (urinary cortisol excretion, alpha-amylase and salivary concentrations) and physiological recordings (sleep and heart rate variability). The low number of participants was due to the intrusive approach in collecting physiological and endocrine variables. The program consisted of ten sessions of cardiac coherence training during a 3-month follow-up period. At the end of the training sequence, subjects were once again exposed to the same evaluation battery.

A decrease in perceived stress and a subsequent increase in well-being were observed. Sleep quality improved as suggested by the results of the subjective and objective measurements. For the entirety of the results, improvements were higher in subjects with high vs. low trait-anxiety scoring. The pattern of results for subjects prone to a high level of trait-anxiety suggested that stress and sleep were related to each other in a bidirectional way: increased anxiety was associated to poor sleep and stress reduction improved both anxiety and sleep.

On the basis of these results, it’s suggested that trait-anxiety can be used as an indicator of which employees should be given priority for stress management intervention. The results also highlight the interest of operationally physiological recordings, used outside the laboratory, for measuring objective improvements due to this stress management intervention, as quality of sleep.

Article by Marion Trousselard, et al, from France.

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