Your Jerk Co-Workers Are Ruining Your Relationships

The dude in the cubicle next to you is a jerk. You know it, everyone around you knows it, and the only person who doesn’t seem to know it is your equally jerk boss.Look at them: Breezily chatting about last weekend’s golf game while co-worker passes off all the work on you, and boss yells at you for not getting it done in 10 minutes, and tells you you aren’t a “team player.”So what do you do? You go home after working an 8 or 9-hour day (good lord – some people work 12+ hour days with these losers!) and moan and complain to your family, and make them irritated with you. And then they’re stressed, and go to their offices and are miserable, and so on and so on, like some sick, twisted chain reaction.A new study published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior confirms all of this. The researchers looked at 190 workers and their also-employed partners, and found that: “Employees who experience such incivility at work bring home the stress, negative emotion and perceived ostracism that results from those experiences, which then affects more than their family life – it also creates problems for the partner’s life at work,” Merideth J. Ferguson, Ph.D., assistant professor of management and entrepreneurship at the Baylor University Hankamer School of Business and study author, said in a statement.Really that’s just a fancy way of saying: Congratulations, jerks! You just negatively affected nice person’s relationship and/or marriage. Awesome.All of this is stressful! And stress is horrible! It causes acne, and sleep problems, and teeth grinding, and wrinkles! Not to mention that a study found that negative relationships (i.e., meanies at work) can lead to more than a 10 percent increase in your body mass index (BMI) and waist circumference.MORE: How Your Fremenies Can Make You FatOk. Let’s not panic. What are your options?Option 1: Win the lottery so you never have to work again.Option 2: Meditate like there’s no tomorrow to get those stress levels down.Option 3: Channel your inner Bill Clinton and work on your political skill. (Say what you want about the man, but he breezes through most situations as cool as a cucumber.)Option 4: Look for a new job. Although let’s be honest, mean, loser co-workers tend to turn up like a bad penny, no matter where you go.Mostly it all comes back to stress management. That’s easier said then done sometimes, but you owe it to youself to at least try. A few stress-relief tricks will help you get through the day and sleep better at night, and your partner will feel the positive effects.In other words: Don’t let the jerks win.QUIZ: Find out how stressed you are, and learn how to manage it