PILLOW TALK
Dr Mark Bryan, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Social and Economic Research, based at the University of Essex, who conducted some of the Understanding Society research on sleep, said that one important factor in whether people slept well was job satisfaction. “People who are completely dissatisfied with their job – and this may be because they are fearful of losing that job, or cannot find another one in a contracting jobs market – sleep badly and for shorter hours. An economic upturn may generate better sleep patterns if people become happier at work.”
FOG OF DROWSINESS For now, however, workers wade through a fog of drowsiness, with all its concomitant effects. “Our research, conducted in 2009 (when the UK entered recession for the first time since 1991) shows that working long hours affects people’s sleep quality and increases the number of people sleeping very short durations,” he said. Working long hours, with the accumulation of physical fatigue which accompanied that, was no guarantee of sleep. In fact, the opposite was true. “Long hours jobs tend to be those with more responsibility, so poor sleep may be attributed to sheer workloads, and it is higher qualified people who tend to be those putting in the long hours.”
Working women were particularly hard hit by poor sleep, he said, and not, as one might assume, because they were juggling paid jobs with childcare responsibilities – although many are. “A large proportion of women in our study who worked long hours did report bad sleep quality
“ Working long hours affects sleep
quality and increases the number of people sleeping very short durations
and we thought this might be because of their other responsibilities. But women with childcare responsibilities tend not to be able to work long hours so these were actually women with non- dependent children.” Dr Bryan’s research confirms recent findings
in the Financial Times on the sleep deficit. A survey by Philips, the Dutch healthcare and electronics company, of respondents in five countries, found that the average manager was sleeping 19 per cent less than the ‘ideal’ eight hours, according to the newspaper. Forty per cent of those questioned blamed the state of the global economy for their insomnia. Americans were more likely than other nationalities to lose sleep through work stress, with 30 per cent citing it as the reason they wake up at
SPRING 2011 SOCIETY NOW 11 ”
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