Why employees with chronic pain feel shame—and how they can break free

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. If that sounds familiar, you’ve got plenty of company. About one in four U.S. adults suffer from chronic pain. The share who say they are in chronic pain either on most days or every day in the past three months is growing: It jumped by nearly 4 percentage points to 23% of U.S. adults in 2023, up from 19% in 2019. Chronic pain is not only hard on workers trying to do their jobs, but it also takes a toll on employers and the economy as a whole by costing an estimated $722 billion in lost productivity each year. As management scholars who study how people feel at work, we wanted to understand why chronic pain so often makes it impossible for employees to do their work—and even to keep their jobs. Bad for your health With this in mind, we teamed up with two other management resear