14 DAY TRIAL // Erika Sandow, a social geographer currently working with Sweden’s Umeå University, says that long commutes need be held accountable for more than simply forcing people to waste significant amounts of time traveling to and from work.
Long story short, this specialist maintains that, according to her most recent investigations on the matter at hand, long commutes are bound to severely impact on an individual's overall wellbeing.
What Erika Sandow means to say is that medical conditions such as high blood pressure, chronic stress and heart disease can all be attributed to long commutes.
Therefore, spending too much time trying to get to work and then back home can be argued to negatively impact on one's life expectancy, sources explain.
Because of their being more likely to both suffer with said medical conditions and be overweight, people whose job goes hand in hand with long commutes are bound to take more sick leave than those who happen to live closer to the place where they work, Erika Sandow further says.
Just in case anyone was wondering, it appears that commuting can prove detrimental to one's health once a person starts traveling at least 30 miles (about 48.3 kilometers) to work on a daily basis.
Erika Sandow reached her conclusions concerning the health risks associated with long commutes following her comparing the medical records of 2,744 people who had to travel over long distances in order to get to work with the health records of 56,955 people who worked fairly close to the place where they lived.
Interestingly enough, it appears that long commutes affect women more than they affect men.
The researcher speculates that this is because, unlike men, women more often than not also have household responsibilities to worry about.
Because of this, the stress they experience is bound to be greater than it is in the case of men.