When Work and Sleep Battles, Work Wins

When work and sleep battles, work always wins. There are a lot of advantages to earning more money, but getting a good night’s sleep may not be one of them.
It turns out that, in general, the more money people make, the less they sleep. That’s been true for decades in the United States and in other countries as well. On average, adults earning the highest incomes – around $98,000 for a family of four – sleep 40 minutes less than people in the lowest income families. And among short sleepers; those who are in the bottom 10% of nightly rest – high income people are overrepresented, according to the government survey that sleep researchers trust most.
When work and sleep battles, you know that work turns out victorious. Sleeping too little is really bad for your health. Researchers have demonstrated that, for most people, sleeping less than six hours a night results in cognitive impairment. Poor sleep is also associated with a number of other health problems, and an increased risk of dying in a car accident.

In general, the factor that seems the most closely tied with how much sleep people get is how much they work. When work and sleep battles… More hours of work tend to crowd out sleep. People who work two jobs sleep the least of anyone, according to a recent study, and are most likely to be in the bottom 10% of sleepers, sometimes called “short sleepers.” When work and sleep battles it out, the winner remains work.
Consider the Great Recession: Americans slept the most during 2009, 2010 and 2011, when unemployment was high. That probably wasn’t because stress was low or attitudes about sleep were healthier, it was because fewer people were working. Or this fact: Retired people sleep more than working age people, even though the biological need for sleep actually declines in old age.

Mathias Basner, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school, who has studied short sleepers.

The major determinant of short sleep is actually Work, people who work a lot of hours, they are much more prone to be short sleepers.

Other activities that appear to be disproportionately displacing the time of short sleepers: commuting, television watching at night and personal grooming in the morning, according to Mr. Basner’s work. If you’re trying to sleep more without cutting back on work hours, Mr. Basner recommends avoiding TV before bed, spending less time getting ready for work and living closer to your workplace.

All of the findings I’ve just described come from a survey called the American Time Use Survey. Government researchers ask a set of Americans to account for every minute of a single day, and the resulting answers give a portrait of how people spend their time. When work and sleep battles…

That the rich sleep less is the dominant theory. Yet a recent analysis from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention seems to cut against these longstanding findings on sleep. In a chart published some time ago in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, researchers found that people earning less than the federal poverty level were more likely than any other income group to say they slept less than six hours. The striking chart prompted several news articles describing sleep as a “luxury good.”

When work and sleep battles, work wins. That data came from a different survey, called the National Health Interview Survey, which asked people to estimate how much sleep they get in an average weekday. And that methodology may help explain why it differs from so much of the existing literature. In the time-use survey data, people have to account for every minute of the previous day — meaning memory is fresh and everything has to add up. But in the N.H.I.S. survey, people just had to estimate an average, a method that is less likely to give an accurate result, several sleep experts said.

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