Working Long Hours Can Damage Your Health

Working too many hours takes a toll on your health

If you work more than 40 hours a week, you will increase your risk of dementia later in life. This information comes to us from Whitehall II, a famous study of thousands of British civil servants. The study began in 1985 and proceeded through seven additional phases until it ended in 2004. [1] The civil servants were tested on a series of cognitive functions over the 19 years.

If you work 40 hours a week or less, you are probably in better health, but as your hours go up, your health and cognitive ability will go down. Once you are working over 55 hours a week, you apt to be are severely damaging your health.

A summary of the results first published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, a peer-reviewed publication of Johns Hopkins Blomberg School of Public Health, makes for sobering reading. [2]

“Long working hours have been found to be associated with…adverse health outcomes, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, subjective health complaints, fatigue, and depression. There is increasing evidence to suggest the importance of midlife risk factors for later dementia…the link between cognitive impairment and later life dementia is clearly established.”

Our “fluid intelligence,” a measure of how well we process information, begins to decline at age 20, according to the BBC. [3]  That’s why the pilots who won the famous Battle of Britain (July - October 1940) had an average age of 20. Because their training was cut from 30 months pre-war to eight months when war approached, they had to process immense amounts of information, and only their youth allowed them to do it.

Our “crystallized intelligence,” which is our ability to use our knowledge, starts to decline at age 30. By age 40, many people taking cognitive ability tests won’t do as well as they did 10 years previously. This is according to a study of 6,000 people over 40 years of age released in 2016 by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research in Australia. [4]

You may like to brag about how many hours you work every week, but maybe you should reconsider, especially if you are over 40. The optimum number of hours you should work per week is something people disagree on, as you might imagine. 25 hours is the optimal amount of time to spend working for those over 40 years of age, according to the Australian survey. 35 hours is the maximum high-performers work, says a study from Florida State University. Unfortunately, most of us can’t cut our hours back like this. Given the current challenging economic conditions, most of us will probably be working more, not less, as the future unfolds. But long hours of work create stress which creates fatigue, both of which reduce our cognitive functioning.

What is even more pernicious about longer and longer hours of work is you are sedentary for longer periods which is as damaging to your health as smoking.  According to a recent study from Columbia University Medical Center, “…employees who were sedentary for more than 13 hours a day were twice as likely to die prematurely as those who were inactive for 11.5 hours…sitting really is the new smoking.” [5]

The astonishing results of this study are something all of us should reflect upon.

Resources:

[1] Whitehall is the seat of the British government in London

[2] https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/169/5/596/143020

[3] https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20160714-is-full-time-work-bad-for-our-brains

[4] https://melbourneinstitute.unimelb.edu.au/about

[5] https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/322595

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Contributing Writer: Subject Matter Expert Charles McCain