Feel like your job is killing you? Your work might not be lethal, but it could be taking an unseen toll on your health.

Medicine increasingly recognizes the link between stressful jobs and a host of medical problems, from tension headaches and stomach distress to hypertension and heart disease.

Nor is it always those high-profile signature jobs — air-traffic controller or police officer — that wreak the most havoc. Any job can cause stress if workers feel they have little control over the situation or are unrecognized for their efforts, experts say.

In the current work environment, the problem has grown worse, says Dr. Linda Therkildsen, chief of staff at Westview Hospital in Indianapolis.

"It seems like it's a progressive epidemic related to the workplace and the uncertainties out there," she says.

Surveys consistently reveal that half or more of American workers feel stressed. One quarter cite their jobs as the major stressor in their lives, according to a Northwestern National Life survey. Three-quarters believe workers today face more on-the-job stress than a generation ago, Princeton Survey Research Associates found.

Mary Jungemann, an English teacher at Southport High School in Indianapolis, has seen the shift. After a 13-year hiatus from teaching, a career that tends to be on most-stressful-job lists, Jungemann returned five years ago.

"There are so many more demands now than there used to be," says Jungemann, 48. "The energy level you have to maintain to teach is phenomenal. ... It's an exhausting job."

High-stress jobs can be jobs where people receive little praise, no matter how hard they work. They can be jobs that require constant vigilance. Or they can involve high levels of responsibility and low levels of control.

"In the end, it all comes back to the same idea of an increased amount of responsibility with a decreased amount of time and energy to deal with it," says Dr. Geoffrey Fortner, a staff psychiatrist at Community Hospital North in Indianapolis.

Short-term stress primes the body to react, arousing the nervous system and producing bursts of hormones that speed up the heart rate and breathing and hone the senses.

If the stress persists, the body remains continually activated, which can lead to a constantly increased heart rate, gastrointestinal distress, headaches or neck and back tension.

Long-term stress can result in consistently elevated blood pressure at work, which does not show up in the doctor's office, says Dr. Peter Schnall, clinical professor of medicine at the University of California at Irvine. Studies suggest that as many as 25 percent of workers suffer from hypertension at the office without realizing it.

"This is a silent, asymptomatic disease," Schnall says. "Every workplace should have machines in the work areas where people can check their blood pressure."

Some people in stressful jobs find ways to handle the stress. Others do nothing, content to blame the problem solely on things beyond their control, says Dr. Stephen Bogdewic, professor of family medicine at the Indiana University School of Medicine.

"There's a trap of seeing things in the work environment as inherently stressful," Bogdewic says. "The critical thing is it's not one thing or the other. The environment and the individual, they both have responsibility."

Still, Schnall notes, constant exposure to stressful elements in the workplace add up.

"Anytime you work long hours and have noxious work conditions," he says, "it's a double whammy."