- Remote work is associated with disruptions in sleep, such as having a hard time falling asleep and staying asleep.
- A healthy sleep routine has enormous health benefits. It can improve immunity, the ability to learn skills, and improve feelings of well-being.
- For people who work from home, these tips will help create separation between work and relaxation areas, leading to better sleep and an improved overall sense of well-being.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, one-third of American families have reported working more remotely now than ever before. And there is good reason to believe that this has had an effect on our sleep.
Research has shown that, for the most part, remote work’s effect on sleep has been negative. Remote work is particularly associated with disruptions in sleep, such as having a hard time falling asleep and staying asleep.
Why is sleep important?
Before getting into remote work’s effects on sleep, it is important to note why sleep is so important. Sleep is important because a healthy sleep routine can:
- Reduce inflammation
- Improve immunity
- Improve learning skills
- Improve mood
- Improve longevity and feelings of well-being
Getting good sleep, in other words, doesn’t just improve the way we feel: it also helps keep the body healthy and can even increase our odds of living longer.
Thus, the incentives are clear!
Studies show remote work is associated with disruptions in sleep.
One may think that the traditional 9-5 modality of work is peculiarly unconducive to sleep. Many people consider themselves ‘night owls,’ and simply feel better during the late hours of the night.
Especially in comparison to remote work, where you can set your schedule according to your peculiar biological needs, it seems to be just common sense that remote work would be better for maintaining a healthy sleep schedule.
And yet, this simply isn’t what the scientific literature bears out.
Before the pandemic, researchers state that only 33 percent of people reported sleep disturbances more than twice per month. After the pandemic hit, this increased up to 70 percent!
Now, this could be due to confounding factors, such as the pandemic-related stress most people have experienced. But the researchers go on to state that remote work is more likely the primary factor in this decline.
Specifically, working from bed at home is problematic for sleep health. And there are a few scientific reasons that this is the case. Mostly, it is the blurring of lines between our place of work and our place of rest.
Setting up an office in one’s bedroom might sound like a good idea at first. But then, what tends to happen is that one begins to work later into the evenings. And because of this, workers are exposed to “blue light” emitted from their screens at close proximity to bedtime.
Research shows that visual exposure to blue light within an hour of bedtime can significantly lengthen the time it takes to fall asleep and the quality of your sleep. In these cases, even getting 8 hours of sleep a night is nullified due to those 8 hours being of poorer quality.
Why is this? Melatonin is a hormone your body produces to signal to your body when it is daytime versus nighttime. Light exposure suppresses melatonin, which therein tells your body that it is daytime.
What do these signals really mean? In simple terms, if your body thinks it is daytime, you will not feel the need to go to sleep. If your body thinks it is nighttime, you will feel the need to go to sleep.
When we are exposed to blue light in too close proximity to bedtime, our body sends hormonal signals indicating that it is still daytime. Therefore, under such circumstances, our body fails to make us feel tired enough to go to sleep.
Blue light and hormones are only one major factor playing a role in this, however. Another is posture.
When we work from home, we tend to let our posture slip more readily than we do when working outside of our home.
Yet, maintaining good posture is crucial for sleep health. Bad posture leads to pains that can make it difficult to get into a comfortable position before bedtime, making falling asleep more challenging.
Furthermore, bad posture can impair the respiratory system in ways that also impede sleep. In particular, slouching or hunching our backs while we sit or stand can depress our diaphragm, which diminishes our breathing capacity if done chronically.
Breathing problems are highly correlated with sleep disruptions, such as sleep apnea. If you can’t breathe when you are asleep, waking up in the middle of the night becomes inevitable.
Tips for remote workers looking to improve their sleep.
Each of the negative effects remote work has on sleep does not need to affect all remote workers. There are tangible science-based methods all remote workers can adopt to curtail the negative implications of remote work on sleep.
- Turn off all electronic devices at least 30 minutes before going to bed – 1 hour before being even better!
- Only use your bedroom for sleep and relaxation, not work.
- Avoid working from your couch or bed.
- Make time to exercise. Research shows that regular exercise reliably improves sleeping habits.
- Make your room pitch black for bedtime. Even small amounts of artificial light have been shown to disrupt sleep.
- Keep your room cool (i.e., between 60 and 67 degrees F.)
- Avoid caffeine and other stimulants at least 6 hours before bedtime.
- Limit alcohol consumption – in general, but especially close to bedtime.
Conclusion
Remote work – and in particular, working from home – readily produces sleep disruptions. However, making the right adjustments can make you the exception to this rule. And given how beneficial chronic high-quality sleep is to our health, well-being, and productivity, it is worth taking the requisite steps to develop such habits.
