Epigenetics and the Workplace: How Stress Travels Across Generations
We often talk about stress at work as if it begins and ends with deadlines, workload, or organizational culture. While those factors do matter, they’re not the full story. Many of us are responding to stress with nervous systems shaped long before we ever entered the workforce.
This is where epigenetics can become a powerful lens.
Epigenetics explores how our environments, relationships, and experiences influence how genes are expressed, without changing the DNA itself. In other words, stress doesn’t just affect us psychologically or emotionally, but it can also leave biological impressions that shape how our bodies respond to threat, safety, and connection. And emerging research suggests that these stress responses can be passed down across generations.
So when we notice patterns like chronic overwork, perfectionism, hypervigilance, or difficulty resting, it may be worth asking not only what’s happening at work right now? but also what nervous system am I bringing into this workplace?
When Inherited Stress Shows Up at Work
In many modern workplaces, certain behaviours are quietly rewarded: being always available, anticipating problems before they arise, pushing through exhaustion, or holding ourselves to impossibly high standards. These traits are often framed as strengths.
But through an epigenetic lens, some of these behaviours may also be survival strategies.
If previous generations lived through war, colonization, forced migration, poverty, systemic oppression, or family chaos, their nervous systems adapted for survival. Heightened alertness, self-reliance, and perfectionism may have been necessary to survive.
Those adaptations don’t simply disappear because circumstances change. Instead, they can quietly shape how we show up at work today:
Feeling responsible for outcomes beyond our role or control
Struggling to rest, even when it’s encouraged
Interpreting feedback as threat rather than information
Equating worth with productivity or performance
Experiencing burnout without a clear “breaking point”
When workplaces ignore this context, individuals often internalize stress as a personal failure rather than a nervous system response rooted in history.
Healing at Work as Generational Repair
Workplaces have more influence than we often acknowledge. They can reinforce inherited stress patterns, or they can become places of repair.
When organizations prioritize psychological safety, clear expectations, rest, and relational trust, they create conditions that allow nervous systems to recalibrate. Over time, this can interrupt patterns that have existed for generations.
On an individual level, healing at work might look like:
Noticing when a stress response is old rather than situational
Practicing self-compassion instead of self-criticism
Seeking support rather than defaulting to self-reliance
Allowing boundaries to be an act of care, not defiance
Collectively, it looks like organizations questioning productivity-at-all-costs narratives and recognizing that many “high performers” are running on inherited survival energy.
Epigenetics reminds us that stress may have preceded us, but so has healing. What we practice, unlearn, and repair in our working lives matters far beyond the present moment.