Are you more stressed at home than at work?

“At work, people are potentially completing tasks. They’re able to focus their attention and accomplish things, both those with low and high incomes. They’re not multi-tasking,” she said. “We tend to think that jobs are rewarding if they’re professional, but actually people with lower incomes have more stress reduction at work.”

Those with high incomes, she said, were the only outlier: Both men and women had much higher levels of cortisol at work, and both felt happier at home. But why do most people feel more stressed at home? “Well, you just have a lot more going on,” Damaske said. “Trying to get anything done is a challenge.”

The findings are particularly disturbing. Stress and elevated levels of hormones like cortisol have been associated with high blood pressure, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, obesity, inflammation and cancer, to name a few diseases. Previous research has found that cortisol can act like a contagion and spread like a virus through a family. It can even alter the DNA in children.

But before you go off and think that parents, and mothers in particular, are heartless workaholics who prefer endless hours at the office or on the job to the joys of home and hearth, consider this key point: Both men and women were a lot less stressed out on the weekend – when they were home – than on the weekdays. What does this tell you? It’s not so much that people prefer to be at work rather than at home or with kids. It’s that trying to do both in the same day is stressful. It’s the juggling that’s killing us.

“I don’t think it’s that home is stressful. When you’re home on Saturday, you’re not working. You go to the park, catch up on laundry. The day goes at a slower pace,” Damaske said. “I think it’s the combination of the two, work and home, that makes home feel so stressful to people during the work week.”

It’s something I can relate to. Once, when my husband, Tom, a military reporter, was overseas for another long stint covering the war in Afghanistan, he sent me a photo of himself in the middle of nowhere. He was sitting outside a metal box, his bunk. He was wearing a bullet proof vest, probably hadn’t showered in days and was beaming. My reaction shocked me: I was jealous. All he had to do when he woke up, I thought at the time, was go to work. And in my world, trying to manage work and kids and home and broken appliances, I felt like I was falling apart at the seams.

Tom said he hears the same from soldiers and Marines he interviews all the time: that in some ways it’s easier to be off on deployment, doing one thing, no matter how dangerous, than back in the swirl of work and doctor appointments and bills to pay and unpredictable toddlers.

And, although Damaske said their study findings are counter-intuitive, in some ways, truthfully, they’re entirely predictable. Think about it. Although gender roles have shifted far enough for women to go to work, they haven’t budged much for men to do more at home. So women not only shoulder about twice the housework and child care, they’re carrying the mental load of planning, organizing and keeping track of it all. So home, really, is just another demanding workplace. And without fair help, one that can leave you feeling mighty resentful and unappreciated after a long day at work.

“Women are happier at work because at work they are only performing one role,” Nannette Fondas, author of “The Custom Fit Workplace,” who studies the economics and sociology of work, wrote me in an email. “At home, women juggle multiple roles such as housekeeping, parenting, and the emotional work of the family. These have been called the second and third shifts by sociologists. Men certainly have begun to take on more of the second shift (child care), but they still do far less than women do. So it makes sense that women would be less stressed at work. Many men may be happier and less stressed at home because, relative to their load of responsibilities at work, the home load is light.”

Liz O’Donnell, who interviewed a host of women for her book “Mogul, Mom & Maid,” said that unrealistic expectations likely play a role in women’s relative unhappiness at home compared to work.

“Women feel pressure to be the kind of mother that is portrayed in media images – on TV shows and in ads – or to be the mother they had growing up. But that’s not a realistic expectation for the modern mother,” she said in an email. “Women today face different pressures and live different lives than the women who came before them. It’s the same for men. There is an expectation that men will perform at work and be the stalwart provider. Maybe men and women are happier in the domain where they face fewer expectations.”

So what to do?

Damaske and her co-authors argue that the best way to lower stress levels is to make the juggle more manageable. And the best way to do that is to foster creative workplace policies like Results-Only Work Environments, or ROWE, which measures employees by their performance, not when, where, how or the hours they put in. Research funded by the National Institutes of Health has found ROWE significantly lowers stress levels, improves health, mood, employee commitment and loyalty and has other benefits.

Brigid Schulte