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When you work in an office, you have to remain productive despite continual 
interruptions. After a while, responding to questions, texts, calls, and emails 
becomes less annoying as you develop the habit of calmly picking up where 
you left off. 

However, new research from Switzerland finds that this calm is only 
superficial. 

Continual interruptions at work lead to an unconscious increase in the stress 

hormone cortisol. 

The study finds that although we may ​think​ continual interruptions do not 
bother us, they affect us on a physiological level. 

The study appears in the journal P

​ sychoneuroendocrinology​. 
Reasons for the study 
A recent study by Stiftung Gesundheitsförderung Schweiz, Job Stress Index 
2020, reveals that a
​ lmost a third​ of Swiss office workers experience 
workplace stress. 

Concerned about the health effects of chronic stress — which may include 
exhaustion alongside other adverse outcomes — a multidisciplinary team 
from the Mobiliar Lab for Analytics at ETH Zurich embarked on a mission to 
find ways to detect and remediate workplace stress. 

The team hopes to develop a machine learning-based tool that can detect 
stressors before they become a chronic problem. 

“Our first step was to find out how to measure the effects of social pressure 
and interruptions — two of the most common causes of stress in the 
workplace,” says psychologist Jasmine Kerr. 

The other team members are mathematician Mara Nägelin and computer 
scientist Raphael Weibel. All three are doctoral candidates at ETH Zurich. 

Weibel comments: 
“Most research into workplace interruptions carried out to date focused only 
on their effect on performance and productivity. Our study shows for the first 
time that they also affect the level of cortisol a person releases. In other 
words, they actually influence a person’s biological stress response.” 

A day at the office 

Kerr, Nägelin, and Weibel recruited 90 individuals — 44 females and 46 males 
between 18–40 years of age — willing to participate in experiments lasting 
just under 2 hours. The research team paid each participant 75 Swiss francs 
for taking part. 

Setting the stage for these tests, the researchers converted the ETH Zurich 
Decision Science Laboratory into three simulated office spaces, each with 
multiple workstation rows. Every workstation had a computer, monitor, chair, 
and a kit with which the “worker” could collect saliva samples for the 
researchers. The samples were analyzed to assess individuals’ levels of 
cortisol. 

In each session, 10 individuals were placed in one of the offices at a fictional 

insurance company, with the three groups exposed to three different levels of 
stress. 
All participants took part in typical office tasks, including typing up 
handwritten documents and arranging client appointments. During the 
sessions, they were questioned six different times regarding their mood. 
Portable devices measured their heartbeats as the researchers tracked 
cortisol levels in their saliva samples. 

Stress arrives 
During the experiment, actors portraying company HR personnel were 
introduced to each office group. 

For the first group, the control group, the HR personnel presented a sales pitch 
dialog. 

The two other groups were exposed to stress. They were informed that the HR 
personnel were seeking candidates for promotion. 

The workers in the first of these groups continued to go about their work 
uninterrupted, except to provide saliva samples. The second group was 
interrupted by chat messages from superiors with urgent requests for 
information. Both of the stress groups reported that their sessions were 
challenging. 
According to Nägelin, “participants in the second stress group released 
almost twice the level of cortisol as those in the first stress group.” 

Surprisingly, individuals in the second group did not ​feel​ particularly stressed, 
even though their increased cortisol levels told a different story. 

In fact, individuals from the continually interrupted group reported feeling less 
stressed and being in better spirits than the first, uninterrupted stress group. 

The researchers hypothesize, according to the study, that “psychological 

stress response seemed to be blunted by work interruptions.” 

Therefore, the study paradoxically suggests that while interruptions negatively 

affect us physiologically, they may actually help psychologically by providing 
brief respites from workload stress.