Long working hours are bad for your heart.

 People who work long hours have an increased risk of developing an irregular heart rhythm known as atrial fibrillation, according to a study of nearly 85,500 men and women published in the European Heart Journal.   The study showed that, compared to people who worked a normal week of between 35-40 hours, those who worked 55 hours or more were approximately 40% more likely to develop atrial fibrillation during the following ten years. For every 1000 people in the study, an extra 5.2 cases of atrial fibrillation occurred among those working long hours during the ten-year follow-up.   

According to the lead researcher: “These findings show that long working hours are associated with an increased risk of atrial fibrillation, the most common cardiac arrhythmia. This could be one of the mechanisms that explain the previously observed increased risk of stroke among those working long hours. Atrial fibrillation is known to contribute to the development of stroke, but also other adverse health outcomes, such as heart failure and stroke-related dementia.”   The researchers from the Individual-Participant-Data Meta-analysis in Working Populations (IPD-Work) Consortium analyzed data from 85,494 men and women from the UK, Denmark, Sweden and Finland who took part in one of eight studies in these countries. 

They assessed the participants' working hours when they joined the studies between 1991 and 2004. Working hours were classified as less than 35 hours a week, 35-40 hours, which was considered as the standard working hours of full-time workers, 41 to 48 hours, 49 to 54 hours, and 55 hours or more a week. None of the participants had atrial fibrillation at the start of the studies.   

During the ten-year follow-up period, there were 1061 new cases of atrial fibrillation. “Those who worked long hours (55 or more per week) had a 1.4 times higher risk of developing atrial fibrillation, even after we had adjusted for factors that could affect the risk, such as age, sex, socioeconomic status, obesity, leisure time physical activity, smoking and risky alcohol use,” said the researchers.   

“Nine out of ten of the atrial fibrillation cases occurred in people who were free of pre-existing or concurrent cardiovascular disease. This suggests the increased risk is likely to reflect the effect of long working hours rather than the effect of any pre-existing or concurrent cardiovascular disease.   “A 40% increased extra risk is an important hazard for people who already have a high overall risk of cardiovascular disease due to other risk factors such as older age, male sex, diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, overweight, smoking and physical inactivity, or living with an established cardiovascular disease. For a healthy, young person, with few if any of these risk factors, the absolute increased risk of atrial fibrillation associated with long working hours is small.”   

The study does have some limitations, including the fact that working hours were only assessed once at the beginning of the study and that the type of job (for instance, whether it involved working night shifts) was not recorded.   

However, the lead author said: “The great strength of our study was its size, with nearly 85,000 participants, which makes it large by the standard of any study in this field. Obviously, monitoring of working hours over several years would be more ideal than a one-off measurement at the start of the study. However, I do not think the results would have been dramatically different with repeat measurements of working hours because people tend to keep their working patterns. In the current absence of trials with atrial fibrillation as the primary outcome in the general population, findings from observational studies such as this are particularly important in offering insights into the lifestyle determinants of this condition.”   

So what? What this study shows, yet again, is that if you force humans to exceed their design specs you get trouble. Just as evolution designed us not to have a social hierarchy (see previous study) so we were not designed to “work” more than 10 or so hours a week. Since most of us, at least nominally, work more than ten hours a week the question that must be asked is: what is “work?”    To a human being work is that which is not either socializing or otherwise enjoyable. If what we do for a living involves socializing frequently with those that we feel are part of our support system, or involves activities that we get a great deal of pleasure from, then the system does not see what we do as “work.” We are unlikely to suffer a great deal of harmful stress from these activities—however you formally classify them.   

What now? Employers should make sure that there is ample time for socializing within the workplace (I believe that working from home is inherently bad for us humans because of its solitary nature). People should be given work which they find enjoyable and fulfilling.   Many previous studies (a number of them noted in TR) have shown that companies and firms that focus on socializing and work satisfaction are far more productive and profitable than those which are focused on the bottom line, on financial targets, “billable hours,” or even “customer satisfaction.”