**Author details**

*Occupational Wellbeing*

*3.3.3 Implications*

occupational groups.

**4. Conclusion**

Within the limitations of the current study, results suggest that both frontline and tactical officers display dysregulated cortisol patterns that are associated with their higher-risk occupational duties in comparison to the general population (see also [10]). This places officers at higher risk of negative health outcomes (e.g., greater rates of mental illness and cardiovascular disease) [21, 45]. Furthermore, the subjective stress reported by officers differs by subspecialty and may inform intervention strategies aimed at mitigating officer stress and assisting with the

Of note, the top rated operational stressors for both frontline and tactical groups were fatigue, paperwork, and not enough time available to spend with family. These subjective factors may significantly drive the elevated diurnal cortisol patterns across the entire day observed in comparison to the general population. If this relationship is true, these same stressors are often found or can be applied to a vast number of occupations, and it can be inferred that the presence of these stressors would potentially have the similar impact and associated health risks for other

While the stress response is beneficial from an evolutionary standpoint, chronic activation associated with occupational duties results in an excessive CAR profile, placing the worker at higher risk for negative health outcomes. High-risk occupations provide a framework for analyzing the effect of different stress exposure on physiology. While previous research has found that different risk- subspecialties of policing display increased cortisol patterns in line with increasing risk, followup analyses of subjective stress measures of the same groups found an opposite relationship, with lower-risk subtypes reporting higher levels of operational stress despite lower CAR profiles. Differentiating relationships provided an opportunity to explore the nuances of occupational stress profiles, and explanations of several other factors that also have impact (e.g., exercise and public image concerns). Results may inform tailored interventions to reduce both objective, physiological stress profiles (i.e., CAR response) and subjective self-reported stress profiles

The authors would like to acknowledge and thank the Health Adaptation Research on Trauma (HART) Lab research assistants and volunteers in who assisted in the data collection, coding, and cleaning. Thank you to the agency who collaborated with us to make the data collection possible, and to all the police officers who

regulation physiological stress, specifically CAR profiles.

among high-risk occupational subspecialties.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

**Acknowledgements**

participated in the study.

**Conflict of interest**

**124**

Jennifer F. Chan and Judith P. Andersen\* University of Toronto Mississauga, Mississauga, Canada

\*Address all correspondence to: judith.andersen@utoronto.ca

© 2020 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
