Background : Nursing is a stressful job and the resulting stress can affect nurses' life expectancy and caring behavior.

Aim: To determine the relationship between job stress, life expectancy and caring behaviors of nurses working in teaching hospitals of Zahedan University of Medical Sciences in 2020.

Methods: The present study is a descriptive-analytical study with a research population including all nurses working in teaching hospitals affiliated to Zahedan University of Medical Sciences. Using the conveniencestratified cluster sampling method, giventhe sample size, 178 nurses were included in the study. For data collection, a four-part questionnaire was used, that included demographic information, Nursing Stress Scale (NSS), Miller Hope Scale (MHS), and Caring BehaviorsInventory (CBI). Alpha Cronbach's coefficients of the questionnaires were calculated as follows: NSS questionnaire (a = 85%) - MHS questionnaire (a = 81%) - CBI questionnaire (a = 98%). Data were analyzed using multivariate linear regression statistical test by SPSS v16 software, and the significance level was considered 0.05.

Results: The findings showed that 59% of the samples had high job stress, 92.1% nurses had high life expectancy and 91.6% had good caring behavior. Findings also showed that job stress has a significant relationship with the type of hospital (P <0.023), the number of nurses' children (P <0.028), and their job satisfaction with their profession (P <0.016). There was a significant relationship between life expectancy and employment status (P <0.003) and work experience (P <0.001). Nurses'caring behavior had a significant relationship with nurses' workplace in the hospital (P <0.042). There was no statistically significant relationship between job stress and life expectancy (pvalue> 0.59) and caring behavior (pvalue> 0.14).

Conclusion: This study was designed to determine the relationship between job stress, life expectancy and caring behavior and demographic factors affecting each of these main variables. The results showed that most nurses have severe stress and several factors such as the type of hospital, the number of children and job satisfaction play an important role in stress. Life expectancy is desirable for most nurses and factors such as employment status and work history play an important role in its occurrence.

Keywords: Life expectancy, caring behavour, job stress