New study on insomnia and working from home
Paper published in BMJ Mental Health looks at effectiveness of online programmes to tackle sleeplessness among those with blurred boundaries between work and non-work.
Working from home has been in the news a lot recently. Just this week, our sister site Infotec reported on Kent County Council’s new initiative to provide 9,000 Microsoft Surface devices to its staff to aid them in working from home more effectively.
Photo by cottonbro studio
As the new study in medical journal BMJ Mental Health says, working from home can offer greater flexibility and autonomy to staff. But there are also growing concerns that the extended availability of staff leads to a blurring of boundaries between working and non-working, which in turn negatively impacts on mental health, and has been linked to rising rates of insomnia.
A 2015 paper published in another journal, Nature Reviews Disease Primers, suggests that 30% of the population of Western industrialised regions have sleep problems and 10% insomnia. That was, of course, before the Covid pandemic and the sizeable shift to more of us working from home.
Lack of sleep is more than an inconvenience. It can impair workers’ performance so carries an economic cost. Worse, the International Journal of Cardiology has cited insomnia as a risk factor in physical and mental disorders ranging from depression and anxiety to cardiovascular disease and stroke.
The key issue is what’s called ‘rumination’, which the new study defines as, ‘the constant mental representation of work-related stressors and continued involvement with work-related content’.
So, what does the new study show?
The researchers recruited 128 participants aged 18 or over and with severe insomnia symptoms while working in blurred working and non-working conditions. Participants were then randomly assigned to one of two responses: the GET.ON Recovery online training programme or a waitlist control group. Outcomes were assessed after two and six months.
The online programme involved six sessions of cognitive behavioural therapy, each lasting up to one hour. This focused a range of techniques to help participants with ‘detachment’, which the paper defines as the ‘individual’s sense of being away from the work situation’.
Each participant – whether assigned to the online programme or not – was assessed using a version of the standard insomnia severity index (ISI) which involves seven questions answered on a five-point scale to produce a total score between 0 and 28. After six months, participants on the online programme scored on average 6.12 points below participants on the wait list.
Now, a sample size of 128 participants is not huge and the online programme saw a 44% drop-out rate after six months. What’s more, the online programme was being tested against a waitlist – that is, doing nothing – rather than some other intervention.
But the paper suggests a causal link between work-related rumination and insomnia, and a method for addressing this by learning skills in detachment. In that, it points the way to what may be ways of working from home more healthily for us all.
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