Last week, my buddy emailed me about a strange occurrence.

I was eating a Kashi oatmeal bar - in my on-going attempt to eat better - I chomped down and broke off a chunk of my back tooth. The universe is trying to tell me to stick with blueberry muffins I think.

It seemed a bit odd because she’s good about taking care of her teeth; and it was even more perplexing when her dentist told her a lot of patients had been coming in with broken teeth lately.

So, I almost drove off the road when I was listening to “This American Life” over the weekend and a story about broken teeth and the recession came on.

“The biggest thing I’ve been seeing is broken teeth,” one dentist from outside of Washington DC says on the show. “Nightly grinding, clenching; and typically what happens, it’s transient, come and go, on and off. But in times of high stress, right now with the economy, everyone is under a certain level of stress. You see a lot more people having job pain and broken teeth.”

No matter how we deny stress, it gets us in the end I suppose.

My buddy is under a lot of her own job stress. Many of the people around her have lost their jobs and she works her butt off everyday doing more than her share.

Stress at work, for those of us lucky to still have jobs, is becoming a big problem. Your bosses know you’re stressed out, but few employers are doing anything about it.

“Workers who haven’t lost their jobs are under great amounts of stress and are increasingly turning to their employer for advice, treatment or assistance that goes beyond basic coverage when they get sick,” said Shelly Wolff, national leader of health and productivity consulting at Watson Wyatt. “Still, employer initiatives that effectively deal with stress are limited.”

According to a recent study by Watson Wyatt and National Business Group on Health:

Although 78 percent of employers cite excessive work hours as a leading cause of employee stress, only 21 percent of employers indicate they are taking action to address it properly.

Similarly, lack of work/life balance was cited as a leading stressor by 68 percent of employers, yet only 38 percent are taking appropriate action. Another leading cause of stress, fear of job loss, is cited by 67 percent of employers but is being actively addressed by only 41 percent of companies.

Giving workers a bit of a break and hiring some more people would help take some of the pressure off. But unfortunately, employers are reluctant to make that commitment yet.

Maybe managers are OK with toothless workers. You can still do your job.

What kind of work/stress byproduct have you been experiencing lately? My eye has been twitching. Could that be a sign?