Working Too Many Hours is Killing Us
Literally. I'm not being hyperbolic.
We’ve all had one of those days where we feel like our job is killing us.
We’re staring at the clock, watching the seconds tick by like the world is in slow motion, and all we want to do is go home. A long day at work can sap the energy out of you for the entire week, and the relief we feel when we get home is enormous.
We consider this fatigue to be a normal part of adulthood. We’re all tired, we all suck it up and keep showing up anyway. That stress and sense of obligation is just part of life.
There’s a problem with that, though. Chronic stress at work can lead to burnout and severe problems with mental health.
To most of us, this is not a surprise. To anyone who works retail or who has a terrible boss, the idea that work can cause your mental health to tank is the definition of a no-brainer.
But what we don’t tend to think about — at least not as often as we should — is the way that chronic stress can impact our physical health.
After all; overwork kills 750,000 people every year.
Now, 750,000 looks like a big number. What’s really scary is that it’s only a fraction of the number of deaths that can be linked to everything from workplace accidents to diseases caused by chemical exposure.
The yearly number of deaths directly caused by employment around the world is actually estimated to be nearly 3 million. Almost 4 million more are severely injured on the job.
These numbers are better than they used to be. A few decades ago the statistics were markedly worse. Still, just because things have gotten a little bit better doesn’t mean we can brush off our hands and call the job done.
People are still dying at work. As long as that’s true, we’ve still got plenty of room for improvement.
So, what’s causing those 750,000 deaths in particular? There are a few different causes. Toxic fumes, injuries, and other diseases are pretty self-explanatory. I discussed some of that in an old article about oil pipelines and their impact on human health.
Some people who die at work could simply be dying of entirely natural causes — especially older individuals who are unwilling or unable to retire. A senior citizen who spends most of their time at work is simply more likely to pass away there for various reasons.
Older employees are also much more likely to suffer severe injuries from accidents, and seniors struggle to bounce back and recover as well as young people.
There’s a message in there about the cost of living and retirement benefits, but we won’t get into that today.
But what about overwork?
The study that gave us the 750,000 number specifically links these deaths to working 55 hours a week or more.
The researchers calculate that working long hours like this can increase your risk of having a stroke by up to 35%. For heart attack, your risk of death increases by 17%. If you don’t want to slog through the scientific study, here’s an article that breaks down the highlights for you.
Now, statistics are statistics.
In the real world, there are a lot of variables that go into determining your likelihood of stroke or heart disease. Age, sex, weight, genetics, if you smoke, and so on. It’s difficult to say that overwork, in and of itself, is lethal.
But it is absolutely a contributing factor. Chronic stress and fatigue can wear you down to the bone.
In the human body, there are these funky little chemicals that we call hormones.
Hormones play a heavy role in determining how we function and behave; they write the script for everything from how our emotions work, how our body processes oxygen, and even how likely we are to develop an addiction.
Hormones can be released or suppressed depending on environmental, emotional, and physical causes. Anyone who has to take hormones for health gets this.
I myself need to take a synthetic thyroid hormone because my body simply doesn’t produce enough. Without my supplement, I get sick. If I stopped producing it entirely, I would die.
Hormones are pretty important, but they walk a narrow tightrope. If they get thrown off balance we can suffer a wide range of illnesses, both physical and mental. Believe it or not, working too many hours is a prime cause of this problem.
This is partially thanks to a particularly nasty hormone called cortisol.
Like every other hormone in the body, cortisol has some very important functions. For example, cortisol plays an important role in our metabolism, and it can help to control inflammation.
It also happens to be one of the hormones that are responsible for our fight-or-flight response when we’re in danger.
You know that feeling; your hands become cold because your blood suddenly rushes to your legs, your heart rate increases, your eyes widen and time seems to slow.
That’s partially thanks to cortisol. It can literally save your life by preparing you to run or put up a fight! But if you produce too much of it over a long period of time, it can also be the thing that kills you.
Chronic over-production of cortisol stresses the heck out of your heart. You can wind up with everything from digestive issues, problems with your immune system, high blood pressure, and even diabetes.
People with anxiety disorders often deal with this exact problem already. Being under constant stress increases our production of cortisol, and it can build up in the body over time.
It gets even worse when you’re not able to get a good night’s sleep.
The more hours you work, the less sleep you get. We all know this from personal experience.
What you might not know is that sleep deprivation can carry horrific consequences for your long-term health. We’re talking about immune system dysfunction, heart disease, diabetes, and depression to name just a few.
When you combine it with the high cortisol levels caused by workplace stress, it makes the problem about a thousand times worse.
That’s a slight exaggeration, but not by much. I personally suffer from chronic insomnia; I often experience some of the side effects of sleep deprivation.
They aren’t fun.
Depending on how many days I go without a good night’s sleep, I can struggle with anything from mild fatigue to disorientation. When I’m going through a really bad week, I can even experience hallucinations, dissociation, and lost time.
Thankfully those last three are quite rare for me, but they can happen.
It can be confusing when your brain is addled from lack of sleep. There have been times when I was putting my dog’s harness on, and then I blinked, and suddenly I was standing at the corner of the street.
I don’t remember anything in between. I don’t remember opening the door, walking down the driveway or down the road.
For obvious reasons, that’s incredibly dangerous.
Going a couple of days without sleep is enough to disconnect you from reality. The brain just does not function properly without a healthy amount of sleep, and severe sleep deprivation can trigger symptoms comparable to psychosis.
But even less severe deficiency of sleep, especially if it’s going on for a long time, can be enough to wreck you. Your reflexes, judgment, and problem-solving abilities go out the window.
Not a good recipe for being on the ball at work. And if you have a long commute, well… I hope you don’t fall asleep at the wheel.
When we’re overworked we fall into a vicious cycle.
We’re sleep-deprived, so we’re not performing at our best. We get more stressed out. Stress and anxiety make it harder to sleep, so the sleep deprivation gets worse. On and on it goes.
And all the while, our heart is being stressed, our immune system is buckling, and our body can’t function the way it’s supposed to. God forbid we get sick on top of everything.
Sounds like a very typical week these days, doesn’t it?
Well, it shouldn’t be the norm — and I’ll give you one good reason why. Stress-induced cardiomyopathy, or Broken-Heart Syndrome.
When your heart is under stress, whether it be from a genetic disease or long-term overproduction of cortisol, it becomes weaker.
We’re familiar with how diet-related heart attacks happen; plaque-filled arteries can’t pump blood effectively, blockages occur, and the heart can’t cope. But what we don’t often consider is that stress, on its own, can also be enough to trigger one.
Remember earlier when I mentioned that cortisol is one of several stress hormones we produce? Another one is called adrenaline.
When we’re startled or given terrible, shocking news, our bodies produce a burst of adrenaline to kick-start that fight or flight response. Unfortunately, adrenaline also triggers the heart rate to increase rapidly.
You have a long-running buildup of cortisol, lack of sleep, chronic stress and then suddenly something crazy happens at work? A weakened heart may simply not be able to keep up.
There’s that increased risk of death from heart attack rearing its ugly head, but that wasn’t the only increased risk that the study highlighted.
What about stroke?
Strokes are a common cause of death and long-term infirmity. I’ve lost people to them, and I’ve got friends who survived them. I’m sure most people know somebody who has suffered a stroke, or will go on to have one later in life.
Most of us are taught from childhood to recognize the symptoms of a stroke so that we know to get help straight away. Drooping facial muscles, slurred speech, sudden numbness, or an inability to use one side of the body — these are common signs.
Strokes are caused by blood clots, and they’re very similar to the mechanism of a heart attack. The brain’s blood supply is blocked, and that can cause tissues in the brain to start to die.
This process can happen within minutes of the blockage. That’s why strokes seem to come out of nowhere.
There are a lot of things that increase your risk of developing blood clots and having a stroke. Can you guess one of the factors?
That’s right. Elevated cortisol and adrenaline from stress.
I mentioned before that these hormones have some very important functions within the human body. Some of those functions have to do with regulating blood sugar levels and blood pressure.
Too much sugar in the bloodstream, a condition known as hyperglycemia, actually thickens the blood. This can increase coagulation, the process by which clots are formed.
Making matters worse, sleep-deprived people who work long hours simply don’t have time to cook a healthy meal every day. They grab whatever is easy, quick, and filling. Often, that’ll be something high in sugar, fat and carbohydrates, and very low in nutrition.
Pair this with high blood pressure and thinning veins, and you create a perfect storm.
What can we do about all of this? Well, for one thing, we need to change the way we think about work.
We put tremendous pressure on ourselves and each other to be ambitious, always working and striving to improve our situation. Rising costs of living and economic uncertainty lead us to stress over bills and income, making us seek second jobs or paying side hustles that eat up the time we need to rest.
Working hard is considered a virtue and taking time for ourselves is considered lazy and a sign of poor work ethic.
The thing is, science has already proven that this thinking is utterly backwards.
Studies have shown that shorter work weeks drastically improve workplace productivity, reduce stress and lower the risk of illness and premature death for employees.
Allowing employees to work from home — eliminating distraction from colleagues, providing flexibility and nixing long commutes that add hours onto your work day — also shows great benefits.
Having a gauranteed source of income also massively reduces stress and gives people more freedom to choose workplaces that suit them, rather than having to take whatever work is available.
Universal Basic Income has been tested around the world for years now.
Consistently, every test has shown increased happiness, reduced stress, better long-term employment statistics — since people have time to find good jobs, rather than jumping between low-paying ones — and a reduction in poverty.
There’s even some evidence that instances of domestic abuse and violence goes down when financial stress is no longer part of the equation. Abuse victims are more likely to flee when they have financial support and independence.
There are also greater educational outcomes, since teenagers are less likely to drop out of school early to find work.
There are a lot of things that we could do to change how things work right now; we just need to shift our focus away from judging each other, and turn our attention towards taking care of each other.
We lose an estimated 750,000 people every year due to stress and overwork.
Long hours, lack of sleep, and a bad diet are direct consequences of a culture of grinding, desperately trying to make enough money to survive. Beyond workplace accidents, chemical exposures, and awful mental health concerns, these are some of the biggest causes of work-related deaths worldwide.
Low pay and a lack of job satisfaction certainly don’t help with managing stress, either.
The most important thing to remember as a society is that we are human beings, not machines. We work to live, we do not live to work.
The way we get by in our modern world doesn’t mesh well with the way our bodies evolved to function. We’re making ourselves sick by trying to force ourselves to fit a mold that just isn’t natural.
Our existence is so much more worthwhile than long hours at a desk suggests. The world is bigger than that. Life is so, so much bigger than that, and you have the right to experience it. You have the right to enjoy the time you have.
If you feel like you’re burning out, like the long hours at work for a terrible boss are going to kill you one day, you might be right.
We only get one life to live. Doesn’t it suck that so much of it has to be spent working a job we hate out of fear of starvation? Losing the roof over our heads, losing everything we value?
Isn’t it fucked up that if we aren’t taking part in this toxic cycle, we’re treated like lazy bums who contribute nothing of value? Whether you’re out of work by choice or because you have a disability that prevents you from finding a job, you get shamed.
I think it’s bullshit that the only choices we get cause us to suffer, and potentially die before our time. We deserve better than that. We should demand better than that.
Choose life. The time we have on Earth is too short for anything else.
Solidarity wins.
I have lost track of how many times I've had to go days with little to no sleep while on deployments or other military work related issues. It certainly messes with your body chemistry, sometimes permanently. I have been out of that environment for many, many years now but I still suffer from the after effects to this day. Your anecdote about spacing out with the dog reminded me of similar instances when I was a lot younger. Pretty scary.
Cortisol (too much of, I mean) is really harmful. I lived with cortisol overload for years and it wreaked havoc on my body. Fantastic article.