TITLE:
Stress Management Based on Trait-Anxiety Levels and Sleep Quality in Middle-Aged Employees Confronted with Psychosocial Chronic Stress
AUTHORS:
Marion Trousselard, Dominique Steiler, Angelique Lebreton, Pascal Van Beers, Catherine Drogout, Josiane Denis, Mounir Chennaoui, Frédéric Canini
KEYWORDS:
Anxiety; Work Stress; Sleep; Stress Management
JOURNAL NAME:
Psychology,
Vol.5 No.1,
January
26,
2014
ABSTRACT: A stress management program using cardiac coherence was implemented
after an organizational downsizing. The study was conducted in nine voluntary
workers in order to evaluate the efficiency of the program. 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
are related to each other in a bidirectional way: increased anxiety is
associated to poor sleep and stress reduction improves both anxiety and sleep.
On the basis of these results, we suggest that trait-anxiety can be used as an
indicator of which employees should be given priority for stress management
intervention. We will 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.