Le stress au travail vs le stress du travail

Sonia Lupien is the founder and director of the Centre for Studies on Human Stress and a full professor of psychiatry at Université de Montréal, and she held a Canada Research Chair on human stress. Le stress au travail vs le stress du travail (in English, Stress at Work vs. the Stress of Work) was published in French by Éditions Va Savoir in November 2023, in its collection Vivre avec le stress. The title names two different problems. Stress at work comes from external stressors. The stress of work comes from the way the work itself asks the brain to operate, and in Lupien's account it is that way of working which creates mental overload, a precursor to burnout. She traces how work stress built up through historical shifts, from the Industrial Revolution to women entering the workforce and the arrival of new technologies, and names four triggers of stress: novelty, unpredictability, a low sense of control and a threat to the ego. Her argument is that where you work matters less than fragmented attention. Deep work lowers stress, she says, and a structured hybrid schedule that alternates shallow and deep blocks raises productivity while lowering it.

The distinction is the whole book in one preposition. Au travail, at work, is the stress that arrives from outside. Du travail, of work, is the stress built into the job's way of using your mind. Speaking on Radio-Canada's Tout un matin in December 2023, Lupien put the second kind at the root of mental overload, and called that overload a precursor to burnout.

That is why the debate about offices and home offices misses her point. In her telling, the problem is fragmented attention, and the answer is structure: deep work to lower stress, and a hybrid schedule that alternates shallow and deep blocks on purpose. Lupien also wrote Par amour du stress, which has its own page on HourLife.