Are you sitting in your cubicle feeling like you're stuck in a traffic jam while plotting to kill your boss because she moved up the deadline for the quarterly reports? Well, first you should stop reading this and get back to work. But, after you've finished those reports and not murdered your boss, perhaps you should consider switching careers to the surprisingly relaxing world of hairstyling. The Daily Mail turned us on to a recent study conducted by researchers at The University of Wisconsin in partnership with CareerCast.com, highlighting the most stressful jobs in the world. As you might guess, these professions tend to be a little bit hairier than your average 9-to-5 and involve constant danger, life-or-death responsibilities, harsh, constantly changing environments, and persistant deadlines. Firefighters, soliders, reporters, corporate executives, police, and taxi drivers all have it pretty bad, the study says.
It comes as little surprise, then, that the professions with the least amount of stress not only offer routine-heavy, emergency-lite environments, but tend to be free of deadlines, overbearing bosses, and burning buildings. Tailors, professors, and, yes, hairstylists may essentially do the same work day after day, year after year, but it seems their controlled, comfortable surroundings offer them the sort of peace so many of us want. Plus, these jobs typically offer more control and less reporting back to a head honcho. We definitely see the appeal of being a master of your own domain (a classroom, your salon chair, your shop, or whatever else).
Have you ever dabbled in — or dedicated yourself to — any of these fields? While hairstyling sounds like fun, we'd personally be pretty stressed if the responsibility of someone's hair happiness rested on our shoulders scissors. And a professorship? Don't even get us started on correcting all those misplaced you'res. (Daily Mail)
Photographed by Tracey Wang