New paper on job demands, stress, and drug use for cognitive enhancement published in Sociological Inquiry

Chronic stress affects both health and productivity, and some people respond by using substances to keep up their performance. In this paper, we used an adapted Job Demands–Resources model and three waves of a nationwide panel of 7,705 working adults in Germany to examine how job demands and resources relate to perceived stress, and how stress relates to the use of legal, prescription, and illegal drugs for cognitive enhancement. Emotional, cognitive, and quantitative demands, work pace, and fixed-term contracts increased stress, whereas personal resources such as resilience, optimism, and self-efficacy reduced it. Stress partly mediated the effects of job demands and resources on the use of legal and prescription drugs. Illegal drug use, by contrast, was linked only directly to selected demands and resources. We argue for multidimensional prevention that combines changes to working conditions with individual-level interventions.

Read the paper: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/soin.70050