Your back pain gets worse as you sit through a long meeting. Your wrist pain flares when you’re typing furiously to meet a tight deadline. During a busy shift at the grocery store, you feel a migraine coming on.
Bad for your health
With this in mind, we teamed up with two other management researchers, Kimberly Rocheville of Creighton University and Njoke Thomas of Boston College, to conduct a study that Academy of Management Journal published online in January 2026 and will include in an upcoming print edition.
We interviewed 66 people between 2019 and 2021. All of them said that they were in chronic pain—meaning pain that lasts for at least three months. They were all U.S. workers and at least 18 years old. They lived all over the country, in relatively more urban than rural areas. Our sample was 78% women because women tend to experience more chronic pain than men and tend to be more open to talking about their pain.
This professionally diverse group included lawyers, grocery store workers, teachers, police officers, and healthcare professionals. They experienced many different kinds of pain, such as back pain, migraines, arthritis, and fibromyalgia.
