If grabbing your trainers and heading out for a run is your way of coping with a stressful week at work, you are not alone.

According to England Athletics, more than six million adults in the country ran at least once a week in 2021, and around two-thirds cited reducing stress as a reason for running.

Running is a valuable way to help us deal with stress, including from our jobs.

Our research investigated how taking part in “parkrun” – a weekly organised mass 5km run held globally – affected employees from a range of organisation sizes and types. It shows that running can help us to manage the expectations, frustrations and pressures of contemporary work more effectively.

Research suggests that one in seven people experiences mental health problems associated with work.

And research also shows that work lives are becoming more intense – people face the expectation to get more done at work and to do it more quickly.

This may make us feel as though we are never quite good enough and it sets us up for failure. Repeated failure can translate into a feeling of failure.

All this erodes one’s sense of purpose in life. This means that work can not only be physically and mentally exhausting, but also damaging to the sense of self.

There is no doubt that workplace culture needs to change. In the meantime, though, our research has shown that running can help address these feelings.

Running can offer a sense of community and an identity beyond our work selves – a valued sense of self over which we have control.

A different self

The people contacted in our research emphasised that having the identity of a runner, and the associated feeling that they were part of a running community, gave them a sense of self and of value.

This contrasted strongly with their feeling that work was either leaving them feeling insignificant or was corrupting who they really wanted to be.

Second, our research on how running can help managers deal with workplace issues suggests that running builds resilience. In particular, it can help us with our ability to cope with failure.

Running comes with its own risks of failure. For example, there is a good chance of injury – but this is always a possibility and so one learns how to manage it, perhaps by running a shorter distance or accepting slower times as we recover.

What is more, if runners exercise as members of a group, failure is encountered collectively. Injuries happen, targets are missed. Failures are common and normal. This may neutralise, or at least reduce, the negative feelings that come with failure.

Exposure to failure can help us examine our emotions about it and cultivate a tolerance of failure, which can arguably then be transferred back to our work.

Don’t go too far

But our research has also warned that too much running – especially when accompanied by social media and the use of performance tracking apps –can fuel the desire for constant achievement and competition.

Runners can be easily beguiled by a sense of achievement, duped into a need to run further, faster or more often than others in their community – that is friends and colleagues or a person’s online community. In this context, running can reinforce the disciplining tendencies of contemporary work.

An over-reliance on running – whether for escape or for relaxation, especially when – as is inevitable – injury occurs, risks accelerating the corrosive sense of never being quite good enough that characterises contemporary work and life.

So, running can result in significant rewards. Besides the more obvious physical health benefits, it can enable people to find an identity that fits with who they want to be, and to feel a sense of belonging to a community of like-minded runners. But take care – do not let it consume you.

• Professor Kate Black is head of education at Northumbria University, Newcastle, in the United Kingdom and Dr Russell Warhurst is associate professor in management at the same institution. This article was first published in The Conversation