How much sleep do you get each night? The answer may be impacting your brain health and job performance. New research shows that getting too much or too little sleep has an impact on the amount of time employees take off from work.
The study, which was conducted in Finland and published in the journal Sleep, found that getting too little sleep could impact work attendance. It also determined that getting too much sleep could lead to an increased risk for sick days, according to the Huffington Post. The study examined the context of looking at sleep as it relates to work disability.
The study followed 3,760 women and men between the ages of 30 and 64, watching them for a period of seven years. Participants self-reported the amount of sleep they received.
Researchers found that workers stayed home 4.6 to 8.9 days more when they got either less than five hours or more than 10 hours of sleep per night. It was also found that a certain amount of time spent sleeping could mean fewer absences. For women, 7.6 hours of sleep had the least risk of sick days, and 7.8 hours led to the smallest risk for men.
In addition to the health risks noted for receiving too much or too little sleep, it was determined that solving employee sleep difficulties could lead to fewer absences by 28 percent.
"Despite the well-known links between sleep duration and health, work disability has been little examined, and this was the first nationally representative study focusing on the association between sleep duration and subsequent medically certified sickness absence as an indicator of work disability," lead researcher Tea Lallukka, Ph.D. of the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, told the Huffington Post in an email.
Click here to read more about our sleep support supplements.