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Are you one of the millions of people all over the world who are affected by excessive sweating, or hyperhidrosis? It can literally rule your life, affecting the places you go, the things you do, and also what clothes you wear.

Nowhere else is this more of a problem than when you are at work. No matter what your job, suffering from excessive sweating in the workplace can cause even higher levels of stress and leave you feeling uncomfortable and embarrassed about your problem.

Whether you’re sat at a desk all day in a thin shirt, or fetching and carrying in the warehouse in a set of heavy overalls, it can be really easy to get too hot and start to sweat.

Whats doesnt help is that when you do feel yourself overheating and starting to sweat you begin to get stressed, which can make it even worse!

You can’t concentrate on what you are doing, instead you’re probably spending more time thinking about how to avoid or conceal the problem. It can make it difficult to do your job properly or work in close proximity with others without you feeling overly self-conscious. You probably don’t need me to tell you this, after all its most likely something that affects you every time you go to work.

Just to get through the day you might have tried all sorts of methods to cover up your problem:

- t-shirts or extra layers under your work clothes

- drying your sweat patches with the toilet hand-dryer

- putting a coat or a jumper on in the office, even though it’s the middle of summer

- changing your shirt once, or even twice a day

- re-applying your deoderant during the day

So you probably spend more time worrying about your problem and trying to hide it from your colleagues, than you do focusing on your job and getting your work done.

In short, worrying about your hyperhidrosis can take over your whole day, but you’ve probably never really realised to what extent.

A study by the International Hyperhidrosis Society found that in a recent survey of adults, 62 percent find that job-related issues, such as confronting a boss or going on an interview, makes them sweat more than any other circumstances.

The IHHS also found that people who were affected by hyperhidrosis in the workplace were limited to carrying out physical duties 25% of the time, in mental and interpersonal tasks 20% of the time, in time management 17% of the time, and in work output 11% of the time.

Excessive sweating not only affects how you feel at work, but also how you are perfoming at work, and this probably hasn’t ever occured to you.

Excessive sweating is not recognised on the same level as other ailments that impact on work, but the IHHS went on to say that it can cause similar workplace performance limitations to those experienced by sufferers of depression, rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis.

You could always turn the air-conditioning up or try and avoid any manual labour, or try any number of methods to cover up the problem. But wouldn’t it be great to go to work confident in the knowledge that you didn’t have a problem, because it had been cured, naturally and permanently?

Hyperhidrosis doesn’t have a particularly high profile and the IHHS is working to change this. If you are affected, there are options open to you, you can find out more about one of these below.

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