Stress Management Based on Trait-Anxiety Levels and Sleep Quality in Middle-Aged Employees Confronted with Psychosocial Chronic Stress

Copyright © 2014 Marion Trousselard et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Com-mons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, pro-vided the original work is properly cited. In accordance of the Creative Commons Attribution License all Copy-rights © 2014 are reserved for SCIRP and the owner of the intellectual property Marion Trousselard et al. All Copyright © 2014 are guarded by law and by SCIRP as a guardian. A stress management program using cardiac coherence was implemented after an organizational down-sizing. The study was conducted in nine voluntary workers in order to evaluate the efficiency of the pro-gram. A baseline evaluation was conducted on psychological variables (anxiety, perceived-stress, well-being and sleep), endocrine assessments (urinary cortisol excretion, alpha-amylase and salivary concen-trations) and physiological recordings (sleep and heart rate variability). The low number of participants was due to the intrusive approach in collecting physiological and endocrine variables. The program con-sisted of ten sessions of cardiac coherence training during a 3-month follow-up period. At the end of the training sequence, subjects were once again exposed to the same evaluation battery. A decrease in per-ceived stress and a subsequent increase in well-being were observed. Sleep quality improved as suggested by the results of the subjective and objective measurements. For the entirety of the results, improvement