Getting a good night’s sleep may rest on your job demands: study

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Having trouble getting quality sleep after a demanding day at work?

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The paper, published in the November issue of Sleep Health, has revealed that having a moderate amount of job demands — not too many and also not too few — can help people get a proper overnight snooze.

“The previous knowledge that demanding work degrades sleep may be overly simplistic,” said Soomi Lee, an assistant professor in the USF College of Behavioral and Community Sciences School of Aging Studies.

“The findings move beyond the previous narrative that job demands should be minimized as much as possible to protect workers’ health.”

Workers who help provide feedback about their tasks and continue to learn new things on the job contributed to a moderately demanding job, the paper found.

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Lee, who is the senior author on the paper, added that the more control an employee has over their workload, the higher the chance they will get better sleep.

Researchers also found that moderate job demands helped people stay on a regular sleep schedule and helped shorten the time it took to fall asleep.

Information from a previous study looked at the answers to five questions about their jobs – intensity, role conflict, work overload, time pressure and interruptions – and their quality of sleep. Nearly 3,000 adults took part, with an average age of 48, and was nearly even between men and women.

“Based on these findings, it will be important to examine whether and how changes over time in job demands and control are associated with changes in sleep health,” Lee added.