Do you know that the distance between your home and your workplace can affect your health in the long run? Here’s why according to experts.
How much time you take to get to work or rather, what is the distance that separates you from your home to the place where you exercise your profession? Well not everyone knows but the home-work distance is more important than you might think in influencing your health.
To say it not a series of studies and, in particular, one search done recently by a Swedish team that has taken care of understanding the possible correlation between the kilometers one needs to travel to reach the office and the lifestyle that would derive from it and, therefore, also any Health problems that may arise over time.
Distance from home to work, pay attention to the length: you risk health problems
With a very result eloquent: the more the distance you have to travel each day to go to work, the more the risk of developing health problems increases. In particular, experts have found a greater risk of being overweight, sleeping poorly and being stressed.
An important result from the point of view of studies of this type that usually focus on the type of work (sedentary or not) and health; in this case instead we look at what happens before and after work, trying to understand what the effects of commuting are on people. The team held valuable results thanks to the Swedish Longitudinal Survey of Health which collected, between 2012 and 2018, valuable data to analyze.
They have been looked into well 13 thousand replies, both men and women aged between 16 and 64 years. For example, they were asked if they drank or smoked, if they practiced sports and how often, what type of work they did and if they suffered from chronic diseases or not, depression or stress.
What is the ‘perfect distance’ between home and work
It thus emerged that when the distance between the home and the workplace was more than the 3 km the commute had in many cases health issues, from lack of sleep to increased stress, up to being overweight. Those traveling more than five hours a week working more than 40 hours were even more at risk. The reason can be traced back to the lack of physical activity: the shorter journey, on the contrary, offered workers more time to devote themselves to sport. That’s why the result of the research is clear: the “perfect” distance to work and stay healthy it is 3 km, possibly by bicycle.