Is it rising petrol prices, a hangover or just the human condition? Last week three studies revealed just how morale-lowering situations vaporise our work rates.

When Wayne Hochwater, a management professor at Florida State University surveyed more than 800 full-time staff this spring, he found that even apparently unrelated matters such as misery at the pumps can send us into a productivity spiral.

“People concerned about the effects of petrol prices are significantly less attentive on the job, less excited about going to work, less passionate and conscientious,” he says. “Employees were unable to detach themselves from the stress caused by escalating gas prices.”

If it’s not the economy that’s dragging our work down, maybe it’s stress-related binge drinking. A third of us admit to having come to work with a hangover that has affected our performance, says a Norwich Union Healthcare survey of 1,000 British workers last week. Actually, a third seems rather low to me, but then I work in “media and creative”, the sector with four times the average rate of workplace drunkenness.

Maybe much of the problem is just down to being human, though. More than 6 per cent of workers meet the clinical criteria for a major depressive disorder, an article in the Journal of Environmental and Occupational Medicine said last week. This figure leaps when you add people with bipolar disorder and other forms of depression. But much of this goes untreated – the average workplace sufferer goes ten years before diagnosis, the research says.

The article adds that depression can hit workers earlier than can other chronic diseases – often in their 20s – and so affects productivity for much longer. It says that workplace depression may cost employers four times more in lost productivity than previously thought.

But please, don’t let any of this bring you (or your work-rate) down.

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