• Posted July 30, 2026

Work Stress Harming Middle-Age Sleep, Study Says

Work stress could be eating away at the sleep of most middle-aged working folks, undermining their health, a new study says.

Nearly 70% of a small group of people ages 50 to 66 experienced persistent sleep problems, even though they had no history of sleep disorders, researchers reported July 28 in the journal Scientific Reports.

Even more concerning, more than 9 out of 10 (92%) of the participants met the clinical threshold for a sleep disorder at least once during the yearlong study, researchers said.

“I was genuinely surprised by the sheer scale of sleep problems we uncovered in this otherwise undiagnosed group,” lead researcher Athanasios Tsanas said in a news release. He is a professor of digital health and data science at the University of Edinburgh in the U.K.

“Our analysis clearly demonstrates that many of these sleep and well-being issues are work-related, with overall well-being heavily dependent on sustained work-life balance,” Tsanas said.

For the study, researchers asked 45 middle-aged workers to fill out regular well-being and workplace assessments during the course of a year, as well as wearing devices to capture their physical activity and sleep.

Overall, the team collected more than 1,900 reports on well-being and workplace, and more than 5,200 days of wearable sensor data.

Results showed that 90% of participants experienced sleep disturbances, even though most averaged between 6.5 and 8 hours of sleep a night.

Disrupted sleep, rather than insufficient sleep, likely explained why many people said they felt poorly rested in their self-reports, researchers said.

Workplace experiences consistently emerged as one of the most important factors disrupting sleep, the analysis revealed.

Thus, work-related stress could be a key factor through which work affects both a person’s sleep and their overall well-being, researchers said.

“While we knew from previous evidence that sleep can influence work, and work can influence sleep, we were surprised by the extent to which our non-clinical study population were struggling with their sleep,” researcher Belinda Steffan, a fellow at the University of Edinburgh Business School, said in a news release.

“Our study highlights that sleep is a workplace health and well-being issue,” Steffan said. “Organizations and employers must consider the impact of work-related sleep problems on their workforce, focusing on workers over 50 in the context of our study, but relevant to all age groups.”

More information

The Sleep Foundation has more on sleep and job performance.

SOURCE: University of Edinburgh, news release, July 28, 2026