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Job nature impacts lifestyle

Being in an unchallenging job with little control over what you do may make you a couch potato in your leisure time.

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Being in an unchallenging job with little control over what you do may make you a couch potato in your leisure time.

Evidence on how the nature of a person's job affects his or her leisure-time physical activity has been mixed and research has not looked at how a person's job characteristics over time might affect their lifestyle.

To look at how working in "passive jobs"-where the worker has little stress and little control-affected leisure time activity, researchers studied 4,291 male and 1,794 female British civil servants, who ranged in age from 35 to 55 years. Over a five-year period, the study participants were categorised at three different time points based on how passive their jobs were and their amount of leisure-time physical activity. Participants were categorised according to whether or not they worked in a passive job at each phase, leading to a scale ranging from 0 (non-passive job at all three phases) to 3 (passive job at all three phases).

Job passivity didn't influence how active women were outside work. But men who were in passive jobs at all three time points were 16 percent more likely to have low levels of leisure time physical activity than men who had never worked in a passive job.

The above findings prove that the characteristics and nature of the job impact our non-working life as well. The researchers recommended that that people should have opportunities to develop on the job, gain knowledge, and increase their skills.

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