Coffee or Booze on Your Break?

Coping with stress and anxiety is difficult, no doubt about that as many of you can agree. We are, by the nature of our culture, social creatures who go to work, do our jobs, interact with our co-workers and supervisors, return home and prepare for another day. Some of us, however, have more problems coping with the daily grind than others and whether it's because of social anxiety disorder or the particularly harsh and stressful demands of our jobs, too many people seek comfort in all the wrong substances.

The coffee break was first instituted by companies that discovered the pick-me-up effect of caffeine, or so I'm told. It wasn't really intended to give workers a break so much as to wake them up to return to their work a bit refreshed. For some workers, coffee just hasn't been doing enough and they choose the solace of old John Barleycorn before they go to work or on their coffee break.

A survey of 2,800 adults in 48 states found that some of the respondents often drank before they went to their workplace. The researchers from SUNY Buffalo, NY, who published their findings in The Journal of Studies on Alcohol, estimated that 1.8 percent of workers actively engage in drinking an alcoholic beverage prior to going to work. The lunch hour, of course, was the most likely time for drinking to occur and they estimated that 7 percent of workers drank then.

The most likely fields to have daytime drinkers were sales, entertainment, sports, media and maintenance. All of these fields, in my opinion, are high stress, even maintenance because these workers often bear the brunt of everyone else's displeasure on any given day. Maybe that's why the maintenance worker on the TV series "Scrubs" is perpetually trying to put one over on his least-favorite resident.

I once had a job where I interacted with a sales force during the day and one of the most talented, successful salesmen never left the office sober, nor did he return from lunch sober. He pleaded with people to go have a "quick one" before he boarded his train home, drank in the bar car on the train and I can only imagine what happened when he got into his car at the station. He finally was fired for being drunk on the job. It was an inglorious end to a very successful career.

Related Topics: Take Charge of Your Stress, Working Solutions to Stress


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