Common hassles at work are more likely than long hours, night shifts or
job insecurity to follow workers home and interfere with their sleep.
That's the conclusion of a University of Michigan study
presented at the annual meeting of the Population Association of
America.
The study analyzes two nationally representative surveys of
approximately 2,300 U.S. adults that monitored the same workers for up
to a decade. Over that time, roughly half the respondents said they had
trouble sleeping.
"Together, work and sleep take up about two-thirds of every
weekday," said U-M sociologist Sarah Burgard. "But until now, very
little research has focused on the connections between work and sleep
for the average U.S. worker."
Previous research has shown that lack of sleep can have
serious consequences ranging from traffic accidents to health problems,
chronic disease and mortality. As many as 70 million Americans suffer
from some kind of chronic sleep disorder.
But this is the first known U.S. study to clarify the link
between work and sleep quality for all workers who have unusual work
and sleep arrangements, not just rotating shift workers or medical
students. Because the surveys were prospective---following the same
people over time---the researchers were able to show that work
conditions affected sleep patterns, not the other way around. Their
analysis controlled for initial sleep quality, health, pessimism and
other confounding factors.
Respondents who felt upset or bothered at work on a frequent
basis, or had on-going personal conflicts with bosses or co-workers,
were about 1.7 times more likely than others to develop sleep problems.
"Massive changes over the past half-century have reshaped the
workplace, with major implications for sleep," Burgard said. "For many
workers, psychological stress has replaced physical hazards.
"Physical strain at work tends to create physical fatigue and
leads to restorative sleep, but psychological strain has the opposite
effect, making it more difficult for people to sleep."
Burgard and graduate student Jennifer Ailshire also explored
how work-family conflict, gender, education and job status affected the
relationship between work and sleep.
As women have entered the labor force in large numbers,
dual-earner households and single-parent families have made the
time-crunch a major factor, Burgard said.
As expected, Burgard and Ailshire found that work-family
conflicts and the presence of children under the age of three were
significant predictors of negative changes in sleep quality.
Respondents with children under the age of three were about 2.2 times
as likely to report poor sleep quality, but having young children did
not explain the association between hassles at work and sleep quality.
Surprisingly, however, they found no evidence that long hours,
or working nights or weekends---strategies often adopted by working
parents to juggle childcare and jobs while minimizing the use of
baby-sitters or daycare facilities---had a negative impact on reported
sleep quality.
In future research, Burgard plans to explore factors that
could buffer workers from negative working conditions, such as age and
a sense that one's job is useful or helpful to others. She also plans
to examine interventions that could break the link between work
conditions and troubled sleep.
Notes:
Burgard is assistant professor of sociology at the U-M College
of Literature, Science, and the Arts; assistant professor of
epidemiology at the U-M School of Public Health; and assistant research
scientist at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR).