Working late, ‘volatile hours’ in young adulthood can lead to depression, illness later: Study
What time you work early in adult life could impact your health decades later. Late and “volatile” work schedules may lead to depression and illness down the road.
That’s according to a new study in PLOS ONE that looks at how a young adult’s work schedule can influence well-being in middle age. Researcher Wen-Jui Han, a New York University Silver School of Social Work professor, used data on more than 7,000 people in the U.S. who were part of the nationally representative National Longitudinal Survey of Youth in 1979, looking across three decades from when they were 22 to see if their work schedules influenced the sleep patterns and physical and mental health they experienced in their 50s.
“With the rise of the U.S. service economy and technological progress, researchers are taking a closer look at the impact of erratic work hours on the health of employees — nurses who make rounds into the predawn hours, burger flippers with irregular shifts, and software engineers who stay ‘in the zone’ long past midnight,” an NYU News article on the study reported.
In young adulthood, just over a quarter of participants worked stable standard hours — akin to a 9-to-5 schedule — while 35% worked close to standard hours. An NYU news release about the study said that 17% of them at first worked standard hours in their 20s, “later transitioning into volatile working patterns: a combination of evening, night and variable hours.” Meanwhile, 12% first worked standard hours, then their work hours began to vary. The final 10% worked little if at all during that time.
Han found that when she compared those who usually worked standard daytime hours during their working career with those who worked more volatile schedules, the latter “slept less, had lower sleep quality and were more likely to report depressive symptoms at age 50. The most striking results were seen in those who had stable work hours in their 20s and then transitioned to more volatile work hours in their 30s,” the release said. “This effect size was significant and similar to that of being educated only to below high school level.”
The study suggests that transitioning from an early, standard schedule to a volatile one between ages 22 and 49 “was consistently, significantly associated with the poorest health, including the fewest hours of sleep per day, the lowest sleep quality, the lowest physical and mental functions and the highest likelihood of reporting poor health and depressive symptoms at age 50.”
“Work is supposed to allow us to accumulate resources. But for a lot of people, their work doesn’t allow them to do so. They actually become more and more miserable over time,” Han told NPR. She said she’d like her research to be a conversation starter about how to “provide resources to support people to have a happy and healthy life when they’re physically exhausted and emotionally drained because of their work.”
The study notes, too, that “positive and negative impacts of work schedules can accumulate over one’s lifetime.”
Who has more chaotic schedules?
In the study, Black Americans more often had volatile work schedules than other groups. “Work that is supposed to bring resources to help us sustain a decent life has now become a vulnerability to a healthy life due to the increasing precarity in our work arrangements in this increasingly unequal society,” Han said in a written statement. “People with vulnerable social positions — females, Blacks, low-education — disproportionately shoulder these health consequences.”
While the study found an association between volatile schedules and poor health later, it could not prove the work schedules caused the poor health. But it’s not the first study to link inadequate sleep to chronic disease, including cardiovascular disease and diabetes. A 2022 review of previous studies published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine said the risks associated with chaotic or nontraditional schedules include metabolic syndrome, accidents and certain cancers.
Schedules and impact on sleep
Harvard Health has published stories on “shift work disorder,” noting that “mounting evidence, including several new studies, paints a worrisome picture of the potential health fallout of nontraditional shift work schedules that affect 15% to 30% of workers in the U.S. and Europe, including factory and warehouse workers, police officers, nurses and other first responders.”
The disorder, per the article, primarily affects those with rotating shifts or who work overnight or early-morning shifts. Those folks often have trouble falling and staying asleep. “That’s because shift work disrupts the body’s normal alignment with the 24-hour sleep-wake cycle called the circadian rhythm,” per Harvard Health.
Another study in the journal SSM Population Health looked at the impact of work schedules in the retail and food service sectors, which often “change from day-to-day and week-to-week, often with little advance notice, posing a potential impediment to healthy sleep patterns.” Looking at data from more than 16,000 hourly workers in those industries, the study compared the impact of strange work hours to “two well-known predictors of sleep quality: having a young child and working the night shift.”
Those researchers, from University of California San Francisco and Harvard, concluded that “the strength of the associations between most types of unstable and unpredictable work schedules and sleep quality are stronger than those of having a preschool aged child or working a regular night shift. Chronic uncertainty about the timing of work shifts appears to have a pernicious influence on sleep quality, and, given its prevalence for low-wage workers, potentially contributes to stark health inequalities by socioeconomic status.”
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