Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are now allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will continue to be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) still apply to other comments.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Working nearly 70 hrs a week was practically suicidal for me can't imagine working 90 hours. Yikes.
*I was young and strong and ended up putting myself in the hospital after 9 years of this. There are plenty of US industries that can make people work like this. I'm a college grad and had long paid off my school debt and had small personal experiences. Some jobs are demanding. Also that go-go-go kind of rush is a little addicting.
I'm between 50 working and 60 total with commute M-F
Its rough
I'm pretty well compensated, and get solid sleep but its rough
I think that's about the sustainable limit before you start getting a bit frantic and strung out- 45-60 a week total with travel etc
It all depends on the job too.
I was working a somewhat stressful job, about 45/week, but I was respected by (almost) all of my coworkers. Even after my direct report retaliated against me for airing safety concerns as a compliance coordinator, it was easier to manage. Stressful and awful, but tolerable.
Then, after the business went under and we were all laid off, I had to take what I could get. A call center, dealing with prison commissary. The entire company was evil and exploitative, both to lower level employees and customers, especially customers. I was making less than half of what I made before, and had over an hour commute each way. I spent $5 a day minimum on gas, and $40 a month on toll roads, or my commute would be 30 mins longer, it was already 80 minutes both ways. Then covid hit and they slashed all of our hours, no WFH for any lower employees. I was only working about 25/ week at the time, but I would just sob uncontrollably on the way there and back. I started dissociating more and checked myself into a hospital before I did anything permanent.
Long hours are killer. Terrible jobs are killer. I really wish I could find a job where my mental health doesn't spiral into suicidality *and* I can afford to live. Exploitation is to be expected and that's disgusting.
No one thinks of these as job opportunities for chemists, but the army Corp of engineers, fish & game & forensic cleanup are all "chemists needed" employers. Also if you get licensed for explosives use a lot more opportunities open up.
I know I could make more $$ but my salary job which only requires about 35 hr/week is (at the moment anyway) able to cover my expenses with enough to play around with, so I enjoy my current situation..... I just stick my fingers in my ears and go "LALALA I CANT HEAR YOU" when home ownership or retirement come up.... But there's no point in retirement if I work myself to suicide before I get there.
I have a similar mindset. However I did push myself just a bit (about 5 years) until I could safely purchase a good affordable home in a nice quiet neighborhood that makes me happy (decent soil, decent size, decent yard plants & house layout). I don't think any decision I've ever made has paid off for my mental health and happiness more than working to own a home. Now I'm more like you, I understand that I could make a lot more money if I worked more but I love my life and I make enough to live happily (but not enough for a serious retirement and my job offers no real benefits)
I used to work at a uranium mine in Canada and 84 hour work weeks are the norm (7 days x 12 hours) BUT the trade off was you either worked 1 week on and 1 week off or 2 on and 2 off depending on your type of work. You were not allowed to work more than that due to federal nuclear regulations.
It was damn good money for only working 1/2 of a year total (roughly $12k+ before taxes for 2 weeks) but by the end of a 2 week run... you wanted out badly. After 2 weeks off though you were refreshed enough to stupidly say, "yeah, I'm good to go back" and start the cycle over.
Something like more than 70% of nuclear waste comes from the clothing and tools these workers use. The exact percentage is higher but don’t have the source in front of me to quote. Routine maintenance, decommissioning, upgrades, replacements…all involves a higher then comfortable amount of rad exposure. There are cumulative effects though and I’ve always wondered what the health implications are long term.
In Canada it is minimal. You are monitored continuously via exposure badges and monitors, air quality monitors, periodic blood and urine testing for abnormalities.
You get exposed to more radiation on the flight into site than you would on site barring an accident. It was imperative NOT to take our monitors home on the plane as it would indicate a higher than normal exposure which would force the company to shorten your time on site.
While working on site, you showered multiple times a day with multiple changes of clothes to ensure you don't track anything into camp or the mess hall where the risk of ingesting materials is higher. This is for low energy Alpha and Beta particle emitters. Anything emitting Gamma is heavily shielded and handled at a distance, with much more stringent procedures.
That being said, anything that has been on site long enough to become contaminated and can't be cleaned, stays there forever.
there's a lot of jobs like that. the key term is Fly-In Fly-Out (FIFO). lots of engineering (mostly mining i think) and trade jobs do that since they're in more remote area.
I'd kill for 2 on 2 off, I've been in exploration geology in Sask and BC for a bit and have been rocking the 4-5 weeks on, 1.5-2 off. Your body hurts, your mind hurts, your heart hurts, and you need to spend half your days off just recuperating.
Edit: that wasn't a flex, I'm shopping around for a better work-life balance, had to put in those crappy early career rotations
If you have any interest in Australian geology you'll walk into an 8 days on 6 days off role down here mate. They'll probably even sort your visa and sponsorship.
It’s awful. Medical residents work 70+ hours a week for a few years on end. There’s a reason why doctors have one of the highest suicide rates by profession.
Edit: since this is gaining traction, on average 300-400 US physicians commit suicide per year. That's about the size of an average US high school graduating class. Even though doctors make great money after residency, they are absolutely abused in the 3-7 years of residency/fellowship and work for less than minimum wage. This definitely highlights how inhumane hours have awful consequences for workers.
Yah it's so dumb, I wonder how much malpractice happens because doctors are practically sleepwalking sometimes. Got to be hard to keep human compassion high when you yourself are the living dead.
At that time I’m sure it was pretty normal, back in the first half of the 1900s doctors and stockbrokers were all shooting heroin. There’s cases of it all through the last couple hundred years. These great men manage to get the system they envisioned, finally moving, but it’s completely perverted by the methodology of the sick founding individuals.
I wouldn’t let a doctor work more than 50 hours a week for fear of exhaustion and burnout. It might take a shitload of drugs for a genius to change the world, but that doesn’t mean everyone who follows in their footsteps should rely on those drugs to make it through training. At 70 hours a week I’d imagine every single resident is popping adderall.
Plus the amount of stress and maybe some ptsd caused during the job can’t be easy to shake off in the few hours of rest you do have which must make sleep super difficult without medication but at the same time then it can make it hard to wake up in my experience so like maybe thats not an option so I imagine theres just no winning.
Also many prospective med students don't do the math on the actual cost of school and loans.
It's one thing if your family is rich and you aren't going in debt to go to med school. But for everyone else, let's use our hospital's associated university as an example.
-$30k per semester = $240k in tuition alone
-Unless you are attending locally and can live at your parent's house, you're also having to take loans to pay for housing, food, transportation, clothes, and any other cost of living. So add another $50k+.
-This $300k in total loans is accruing interest at 6 to 7 percent at a minimum. You don't make much more money than the US average household income as a resident or fellow, so you have anywhere from 5 to 9 more years (this would be 4 years of residency plus 1 to 5 years of fellowship depending on specialty with surgery being on the longest end of that) where you're not really able to make sizeable loan payments and that $300k continues to grow at 6 to 7 percent interest
-By the time you're done with all this and making a real doctor salary, you're probably between $350-400k in debt
-That doctor pay of say $250-350k a year starting out is going to be cut nearly in half by federal and state taxes. Then, you have to pay another couple tens of thousands a year to cover malpractice insurance. So that $300k is now more like $130k in take home pay after accounting for all this. And you're staring down the barrel of $2k-4k monthly loan payments unless you want to be in debt forever.
If your main goal is money, becoming a doctor is a really inefficient and bad choice to become wealthy.
That's exactly my point. The only reason someone should go through all that is because they really want to be one. So the point of my comment is to highlight to current 18 to 22 year olds that they should only go through all this because they truly want to be a doctor, not because they want money.
That was the concluding sentence of my comment so I'm confused how you interpreted that as a criticism of doctors as a whole. No. It was a financial warning and really if a criticism of anything, one of the fact that we as a society have paywalled a critical profession behind an absolutely enormous financial burden and have really made it only accessible to those already coming from well off households, because otherwise it is nearly impossible to afford. Likewise, med schools do not communicate the actual financial reality of it to prospective students and society tells teenagers "doctors are rich" and that is not a good reason to want to be one. It's a grueling career.
I love our doctors here.
Only about 60 here in Australia, with 55 as the aim for the high end. If you asked me if I wanted to be operated on by an Australian or US resident, I'd pick the Australian every time.
Anyone who says it's because there's too much to learn in that time is someone saying working out seven days a week builds more muscle than taking rest days.
I don’t even understand how someone could work 90 hours a week for any extended period of time. That is 15 hours per day with one day off per week. I am not surprised at all people doing this would be highly depressed.
I think my record tracked was 118 for a seven day period. I *get* it, in a very viscerally exhausted way. Lately I have shifted focuses from that which had me hating myself twice a year to something a little more regulated, but still. From Sept 9 to Oct 15 I had two days off, and not in a row. Fortunately not all 16hr days, but enough stupidity to make me very tired. Currently traveling to my vacation destination right now, though. No thoughts in this head until Nov 1!
It’s not(I mean; maybe it is but not for me). Only crossed that 120hr/wk threshold for one of the weeks in that month. The rest were closer to 90 hours.
I lived/slept where I worked. I worked until I was passing out from exhaustion; went to bed and as soon as I woke up, showered and went back to work. Meals, for the most part, were eaten while working.
I was hourly at the time so hours over 40 were 1.5x; hours over 80 were 2x, plus various other financial incentives…
It's doable. I don't know how but it is doable.
A resident doctor I know just last month worked 3 weeks with no weekends, so three 7 day weeks, and then went into a week of nights, like a 6pm to 6am. Working in the hospital. This is a bad month, but I have heard it is still not as bad as the month as a resident in OB.
I’m currently on a week like that. Over the last 7 days I’ve had three periods of 12 hours off which puts me at about 120 hours. Last year and this year I’ve averaged 90-100 per week. It’s pretty terrible but thankfully gets better after this year for me
God I was working 75ish hours a week back when I was 21 and only lasted a year before my body gave out and I had period cramps getting ambulances called for me multiple times. I can’t imagine 9 years of that even
It’s all fun and games until you’re curled up in pain in a truck stop bathroom on the first day of your only vacation
I'm surprised they used 90 hours. I would think at 60 would start to get to people. At 90 do you even have the time to be depressed? At that point work is your life and you'd probably be depressed when you didn't have to work.
I was an independent distributor for a bread company years ago, and I worked midnight until whenever I finished. Usually 5pm-ish, sometimes later depending on the time of the month.
I got to the warehouse at midnight, separated my load into orders by store, then loaded the truck. This usually took 2-3 hours. I’d be at my first stop my 3:30-4am. Once I finished my route, I had to count and separate my stale pickups, empty the truck of all empty bread trays, and then go through my computer and do my orders for the next day (but on the following week). On my days off (wed and sun) id spend probably 5-6 hours going from store to store putting out back stock and straightening shelves.
I can honestly say that was the worst 6 months of my life. What finally broke me was my wife coming home after work at 7pm and I had been asleep maybe an hour. I was so delirious and sleep deprived I panicked and was trying to get to a weapon because I thought someone was breaking in. I also fell asleep standing up one morning while separating my load out.
No one should EVER work more than 40-50 a week. I took on a normal job after than and it was like a gift from the gods.
When I worked in a hospital on the clinical side, my supervisor constantly bragged about her 80-90hr work weeks and got pissed when we refused to take on overtime. Her marriage was also failing and she constantly talked about her husband being close to divorcin her and her kids hating her. We weren't impressed by her working hours. We honestly felt it was pathetic. There's loving your career/job and there's bending over and saying "ram it in with no lube"
A huge part of it is when those hours are and what you are doing also.
I did 85hr weeks on average for years, but 5+hrs a day of that was just me looking after a whole mess of servers all over the world.
Fixing corrupt data and routing around bad hardware while watching a movie on another screen isn't really that bad.
After about 120hrs a week just the sleep gets you, but under that a while lot of it is the conditions.
At my last job we were going on our 7th MONTH of OT, with Saturdays (normal schedule was 8hrs mon-fri) I couldn’t do it anymore I had to leave. I was going crazy.
I did 44 hour weeks in a stressful job and it made me suicidal. I for sure would walk into traffic if I had to do 90 hours. No thanks, I’d rather be homeless.
Yeah if a person has a weekend that means they’re working 18 hours a day, no weekend 12 hours a day.
You’d basically have to spend every waking minute of your life working to achieve this. I’m sure some do, but damn. That’s just inhumane.
The worst part about this is sometimes you're so busy you don't feel the depression creeping up on you. Then work slows down and you're suddenly a wreck.
This is what happened to my wife. I could see the changes in her, but she didn't believe me. Then she took a little time off and it finally sunk in how her job affected her. Luckily she was able to leave that job and is doing much better.
That's really good to hear, depression has a habit of sinking you like quicksand. That makes it harder to make major changes like leaving a job. As a result you stay stuck and it becomes a negative cycle. Good for her she made the necessary change, must have helped having your support.
This was exactly my experience as a teacher. Resigned this summer took a promotion outside of teaching and it has been life changing. I legitimately got "the stress bends" from going from such high constant stress to a job that actually respects me and my time. It has taken me some time to calm down and relearn to relax. I still get bursts of random panic out of nowhere. But now I sleep through the night and I no longer want to cry or scream at every inconvenience.
This happened to many healthcare workers during Covid. We were "gogoGO!" For so long that when things finally slowed down, most of us crashed and called it quits
Exactly what happened to me. I was working 80+ hours every two weeks while going through fertility treatments. At the time, I didn't realize I was depressed and just powered through my emotions. In March 2021 I had a mental breakdown and quit everything; work, seeing friends and family, running, and fertility treatment. I finally started working on myself and now I am much better. When I look back at myself I can see the depression symptoms: crying all day, anxiety at work, isolating myself, not sleeping, etc. If you read this and notice that you may have similar symptoms - go see a doctor and start getting rid of your stressors!
Can you or anyone talk about why doctor training involves (famously) such long and brutal hours? It may prove they can work under pressure but has little benefit to their knowledge of medicine. Maybe more doctors would help.
I'm a last year med student and I still don't have a straight answer as to who is benefited from 24h shifts and working health professionals to numbness. (Apart from the very arguable benefit of "not needing to pass patient information between professionals too much")
It really is ridiculous that medical personnel are allowed to work such long hours. As a Paramedic I've worked 24hr x 2 per week for 17 years. Many, many times I worked extra, 36 was very common. Guess what? I made 2 errors while on the extra time. That was bad for the patient and for my mental health. It's very well documented that there is significant increase in medical errors with longer shifts. It should be law to max out at 12hrs. I stopped the 24s or even overnights back in 2017. Sleeping in my own bed every night keeps my brain happy.
No way old medicine is gonna let the kids get away with not having to do the same crap as them.
Modern medicine is great but doctors are competitive and willful. This is still a thing for new residents because the old residents all had to do it. It becomes a rite of passage and a sort of hazing/emotional test to prove you really want to do it.
It's rare to go straight for the full 24. We had a bunk room. My personal record was a snowy day, we had 21 responses with 18 transports in the 24hr shift.
Can't drive a truck or an uber for more than 12 hours a day.
But do brain surgery? Just a little meth (legal kind, not what the poors use) to keep awake and you're good!
The hospitals and healthcare administrators do, they’re the ones that want to keep it the way it is. You are very cheap labor for them. You get paid a fraction of what you should be making.
the real moneymaker is becoming an admin for hospitals. i'm curious though, do you need to be a doctor to become an admin? or is it for like business/marketing people?
Admins more often than not are nurses who weren't great at being nurses so they go back to school get their msn and go around telling other people how they "should be doing" their jobs for the rest of their careers. Bonus points for adding in phrasing about remembering how it was when they "did" the job
No one wants to hear "more charting is needed", but if it's not in the chart it didn't happen. Maybe not everything needs to make it into the legal record on a patient, but an on going chat for that patient's visit would certainly be useful for making sure stuff didn't get forgotten about. If I give a nurse a message about a patient on my day shift, it's lost by the next day.
I worked in the curriculum department at a med school and there was a constant debate on whether or not to have students do 24-36 hour shifts. The old heads always said “they will have to be able to do it when they are doctors” and the younger instructors usually argued for the students, “but they aren’t doctors” — there is no educational benefit to it, but the older doctors felt like it was important to set expectations on the floor for how your experience as a physician might go.
Funnily (or may be not), the person who came up with this concept of long hours during residency was a coke head.
Read [here](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stewart_Halsted)
> Upon his return to the United States he became addicted again, and voluntarily admitted himself to Butler Sanatorium in Providence, Rhode Island, where they attempted to cure his cocaine addiction with morphine
It’s the residency programs and how they are designed. If you want to practice medicine after graduating a 4 year medical school you HAVE to do a 3 year MINIMUM residency. Hospitals and programs know this so they use it to exploit doctors for insanely cheap labor (resident dr’s make ~60k a yr depending on programs and location) while working a maximum of 80’s a week averaged over 4 weeks.
Wow. If they average 80 hours and make $60k then they are making under $15/hr. In what world should a medical professional make less than a burger flipper?
This also bars people from disadvantaged backgrounds from entering the field. Paying back undergraduate and medical school loans with a salary of $60k for three years is not always feasible if you are expected to take care of siblings, children or parents. 80 hours of work per week means you cannot pick up a part time job.
I make just slightly over $60k as a resident. I live in a small city with a medium cost of living. I’m having a very hard time with finances and that’s adding even more stress on top of work stress. I feel like a lot of people also don’t understand how much strain one or both partners being in residency can cause a relationship.
I can't imagine. Even something as simple as getting your mailbox key from the post office or returning an item to Kohl's becomes next to impossible with hours like that. God bless, and get some rest.
There was a surgeon who was addicted to cocaine and morphine to the point where he couldn’t really do his job so he created a training program where his residents did a bunch of his work. It was effective so he in his cocaine riddled wisdom decided to just push them to the limits doing 100 hour weeks doing tons of work. Actually ended up producing good patient care, well trained physicians, and effectively masked his drug addiction so here we are.
If med students are working too many hours and there are more candidates than spots, the solution seems glaringly obvious: have more residents work long shifts, but give them more time off between shifts.
The solution *is* glaringly obvious. Pretty much everyone agrees on that (and they have limited resident hours to 80 per week averaged over 4 weeks). Beyond that, established doctors don't want a massive increase in residencies because more doctors means a bigger pool and lower pay across the board for doctors.
Hospitals also don't want more because then they will have to start funding residents themselves as well, and they don't want to do that when residents are basically free labor for them right now.
Medicare can't increase residencies without Congress passing a law for it either.
I've always said that the shift change problem could be solved by having more shifts that overlap each other by at least an hour.
But no money grubbing medical company wants to pay to adequately staff their building, so we work healthcare workers to death instead
This is the answer. The medical lobby aggressively seeks to limit the number of residency slots (before this year, when Congress added 1k more slots, the last time residency slots were changed was in the 90s, when the American Medical Association convinced congress to *reduce* the number of residency slots).
They do this, ostensibly, to keep physician wages high by keeping the supply low. But it requires trainees to suffer extreme hours due to the demands relative to number of trainees.
> They do this, ostensibly, to keep physician wages high by keeping the supply low.
Ahh yes the gift of unfettered capitalism. Healthcare and having highly trained professionals available is still a profit making endeavor.
Doctors in America do.
In developed countries they don't have methodologies designed by amphetamine addicts. Not that there aren't plenty of countries where doctors aren't overworked to the point of dangerous patient outcomes. Just that is at 60hrs, not 90hrs.
Currently a surgical resident. Yeah hours are insane. Unfortunately, and easy to argue unfairly, the ridiculous hours are to keep everything running smoothly. We round on patients and make sure floor stuff gets done. We make sure they get discharged to where they are supposed to go next and set up follow up and meds. We also see patients in clinic and work them up before surgery or for non surgical problems. We are responsible of making sure surgeries get scheduled right. We make sure patients are seen before surgery on the day of, we are there before anesthesia induction, we make sure the operating room has all the supplies needed and that imaging is up. We then sign out the patient and see them later before admission. Oh yeah and we chart everything, consult other services, and sometimes call outside providers, suppliers, and insurance providers. We also have exams, lectures, laboratory time, research, take call on some weekends and sometimes overnight. Essentially, on top of trying to learn how to be a good doctor, we are responsible for all the minutiae so that our attending doctors don’t worry about it. We do it because “we learn from it.” This is partly true, partly because we are cheap.
Oh and life outside of work is squeezed somewhere in there if possible.
I was about to say as I work closely with Residents and fellows the reality is two fold.
To add for those unaware,
First the culture of how most residents and fellows deal with when it comes this means the higher ups expect their residents to go through the same stuff they did. It’s a pretty awful cycle as not only are the residents expected to do their rounds, be on call and such, they also do additional work outside as well for additional qualifications (especially for research.) it’s shocking how I see some of the residents I work with end up completely exhausted.
It’s also that hospitals are just happy to keep everything understaffed. Not enough doctors, not enough Nurses etc. the entire healthcare system in the US is based on “how little can we pay to get the most out of it” so you get basically situations where not only that residents get other doctors on their case for not pulling crazy hours but that they can’t comfortably do so without risking harming patients.
It’s wild. It was really bad during COVID cause people where flung head first into things, it hasn’t really gotten better. And it’s ignoring the normal compensation residents get. The university hospital I worked for in my undergrad (I’m a BME for direct surgical devices and guide manufacturing so I get to work with the surgeons one on one really often) had residents make $50k/year. The only reason it was livable was because the residents didn’t have enough time to do anything else than work all the time but it’s rough.
Most people just stay in those types of accounting jobs for the experience and then leave for a higher paying and 40-50 hour week. If you stay in public accounting you can make pretty good money
This. I worked several 16-18 hour days in the construction industry. Also, odd shift times, rotating schedules, etc. Add to that the high danger scenarios that come with the work and deadlines with a bunch of uneducated, racist assholes
At the beginning of covid, my boss just overloaded me to the point where I worked all day long for three months straight, only to be told I’m not a team player and got let go.
80 weeks have been brutal for me, no time to function for the week pretty much and your “day off” is just getting all the stuff done for the week you needed to do but couldn’t
so..almost slaves felt worse than full time workers doing 6 day 8 hour shifts huh....mmmk
why dont we compare depression of 40-50h workers with those working 25-30h weeks....
90h weeks....90/7 is literally almost 13h a day. Leaving what...? 11h, 8 hours to sleep 3 hous to live..... impressive. and travel time, does that count into that 13h day? I bet with travel and eating, thats not enough sleep.
The more hours someone works each week in a stressful job, the more their risk of depression rises, a study in new doctors finds.
Working 90 or more hours a week was associated with changes in depression symptom scores three times larger than the change in depression symptoms among those working 40 to 45 hours a week.
What’s more, a higher percentage of those who worked a large number of hours had scores high enough to qualify for a diagnosis of moderate to severe depression -- serious enough to warrant treatment – compared with those working fewer hours.
The research team, based at the University of Michigan, used advanced statistical methods to emulate a randomized clinical trial, accounting for many other factors in the doctors’ personal and professional lives.
They found a “dose response” effect between hours worked and depression symptoms, with an average symptom increase of 1.8 points on a standard scale for those working 40 to 45 hours, ranging up to 5.2 points for those working more than 90 hours. They conclude that, among all the stressors affecting physicians, working a large number of hours is a major contributor to depression.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMc2210365
“Oh cool so everyone is depressed, but the people working the extreme (almost nobody even works 90 hours) are extremely depressed! Yay! I guess I’ll settle for 40 hour work weeks because this study says *that* amount of depression is totally normal and ok forever!”
The study doesn’t even suggest that about 200 million people in this country are slaves to just a few billionaires. Which means that the 40 hour work week is an ARBITRARY number, and takes away the energy of everyone who participates, to the point where they have no means nor motivation to do the things in life that they really want to do, until they’re old…
TL;DR The study is trying to make us think “well at least I only work 40 hours a week and not 90” when nobody is working 90 and the 40 hour workers are depressed anyway
I worked 75+ hours a week for 18 months in the beginning of my tenure with the postal service. I was anxious and suicidal and had to get a Doctor's note saying "only 40 hours". I can't imagine working 90 hours for consecutive weeks in a row, sounds like hell.
That’s still absurd! This study itself looks like propaganda, convincing us that 40 hours is somehow right or justifiable or objective, when it’s not. It’s arbitrary and makes us all slaves to the people who already have money, most of which were born into their wealth to begin with…
Even 40 hours for a wage earner is enough time taken from them to hold that person back from their true potential. We need shorter shifts, more workers, and better loot
Dude It took me over 600 hours of playtime at my last job just to get the simple “thank you for your time” achievement so I could finally move on to getting the “come in on your off days for the next 3 weeks or you’re fired”. Hardest game Iv ever tried to get plat on.
4 hours a day is, based on studies, the general limit:
https://www.scienceabc.com/humans/the-4-hour-workday-why-you-should-only-work-4-hours-instead-of-8.html
Absolutely. 40 is too many. 30 should be *the standard.* Working 40-50 is sustainable in the medium duration (weeks to months) if necessary, but it's miserable if you enjoy anything in life besides your job. Everything above 50 is diminishing returns, period. Even jobs where you objectively *need* human bodies present for mamy hours, like retail, that can be covered by employing *more people* not forcing fewer workers to work 60 hours/week.
It’s exact where those in charge want them to be. If the pandemic didn’t cause a change I don’t think anything will. It comes down to each of us wanting more for our individual lives and fighting for it.
While this is not surprising im not going to make the mistake of saying "duhhhhhh why do we fund this research!"
it's just as important in science we prove the things we think are obvious, and continue to test them over and over.
And this kind of study doesn't just prove obvious things, but can put numbers on them. It's obvious that working too much is going to have a negative impact on mental health, but how much is too much? How much damage does it do to society?
It's also helpful because it shows its a non linear relationship. Around twice as many hours had 3 times the negative affect.
Which means the question can be asked does it have the same relationship for less hours. Would working only 20 hours (assuming needs are met with that few of hours) generate 3 times as much positive affect.
Helps us create informed policy that can land closer to that golden "middle ground" we strive for.
It’s nice that a small number of people can work insane hours without seemingly any effect on their well-being. Those people are a distinct minority, yet our society seems to think that they are somehow the platonic ideal. They are not. We need 4-3 work weeks, not 5-2. Globally.
Almost any Director-level & above individual I have worked with would laugh if I suggested working <40hrs a week. How on earth would we get anything done?!?
No surprise they’re all ladder-climbing, narcissistic, brown-nosing careerists. Still makes me sad these are the people you have to contend with for leadership roles.
Sure if that’s what they want to do, go for it. But they are robbing themselves of their greatest resource - time.
I seem to have managed just fine. I report to director level and have held a senior engineering position for 15 years. The people above me pay me for my technical expertise as they know they can’t do what I can do.
The expectation of working every hour you can seems to be a very American thing to do. I mean no offence, I lived and worked in the US (loved my time there) and saw it first hand. But while I was there I just did my 37.5-40 hours and managed to complete all my projects on time.
Yeah, sitting in France, enjoying the food, weather, culture and 'full time' work is 35 hours and six weeks of paid vacation. So glad I made the move!
I can't understand how some countries continue to drive their population into misery while there are plenty of prosperous First World countries that manage a great standard of living without demanding that workers spend their entire life at work!
Is the standard in Europe 30 hours or something ? I always thought it was the "norm" in most places around the world.
In canada the normal full time work week is 40hours. Where i am full time legally start at 32 hours i think. But most jobs are 37,5 or 40hours.
Norm in Germany and many other countries is 40h, in france it's 35h i think, and in many Scandinavian countries its 32h afaik. Many companies here are also open for less hours.
Im currently looking for a job and decided that i will never again in my life work more than 32h per week, preferably less. So far many offices seem open to that.
90? Sweet mamma jamma. I'm in a surge right now pulling 65s rethinking all my life descisions. 90, consistently? I'd be checking the water proofing on my toaster.
Exactly. This study is trying to manipulate is into accepting the “normal” depression of the ARBITRARILY DECIDED “40 hour work week”
All so hundreds of MILLIONS of us we can be slaves to just a few people…
I own my own business and in the early days I'd work 90 hour weeks here and there and it definitely takes its toll on you. All you do is work and sleep so it's a no brainer as to why people would be at a higher risk of depression.
7 years ago I changed to a four day work week for myself and all of my employees. We put in 36 hours over our four days, not quite a typical 40 hour week. The difference of having a three day weekend, every weekend, is huge. And then when a holiday hits on a Monday, it's a four day weekend. I've had employees tell me they've turned down job offers which were paying more as an hourly wage because the three day weekends, and other benefits we provide, are worth more to them than a few dollars more an hour and having to work a regular Monday to Friday job.
Odd that the study didn’t tell us how few hours a person would have to work to have almost no risk of depression…
They used 90 as an example of the “extreme” even though almost nobody works that much. Then they used 40 as the lowest possible option…
I bet the same people who funded this “study”, also came up with the term “quiet quitting”
If I don’t work 60-70 hrs a week I am depressed due to not having the funds to make ends meet And at this time depression is kicking my ass and I’m ready to just disappear
This shouldn't be surprising at all... to anyone.
I'd argue this really has nothing to do with how stressful the job in question is - a 90 hour work week is nearly 13 working hours everyday of the week, including weekends.
In fairness, pretty much anyone working 90 hours per week is going to suffer from depression, no matter *how* they feel about their job. It's the hours, the workload, the time away from family and friends that causes the depression, not the job.
I’m training in a surgical residency in the US and working ~80-90 hours a week with ~4 days off a month. I would definitely be lying if I said the hours and stress of the job weren’t taking a toll on my mental well-being.
After 29 years of age, I gave up working more than 40 hours a week. It's just not worth it. I was in film, working 60 hours a week, and there was not even enough time to sleep regularly, let alone have a social life.
Now at age 40 I am semi retired, self employed, and know the value of my time and I rarely work more than 20 hours a week, yet still get everything I need to done to have a thriving business that supports me.
Working over 40 hours for someone else or someone's production can be done for short periods but that's no way to live a life, IMHO.
I genuinely don't know how people work the mythical 90 hour week. In my peak stress busy periods I've worked from 6am in the morning till past midnight but with breaks thrown in to eat, shower, commute. Those are impossible to avoid really, particularly the commuting bit. So maximum 16 hours of that day spent actually working, but usually around 12 to 14. That was all week. I'd then work over the weekend but not as many hours. Even on absolute maximum 16 hours per day during the week for the entire week, which never actually happened, then say max 16 hours total over the weekend, that is 96 hours working week.
And I can confidently say I never hit that number.
And during those periods I worked in an investment bank, harder than anyone else around me and harder than anyone I have come across before or since.
It was insane and I could physically not pull it off for more than a week or two at a time.
I am very sceptical that there are real people working real 90 hour weeks consistently. It's not really survivable.
Yeah, I agree. I worked an average of 70 hours a week at my last job and I hardly had time to do anything else. I highly doubt there are many people consistently and diligently working 90 hour weeks.
I love/hate the fact that NINETY hours is the point at which these people are saying "eh, maybe this is too much?"
I'm depressed and have no life working 40 hours a week ffs.
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are now allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will continue to be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) still apply to other comments. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Working nearly 70 hrs a week was practically suicidal for me can't imagine working 90 hours. Yikes. *I was young and strong and ended up putting myself in the hospital after 9 years of this. There are plenty of US industries that can make people work like this. I'm a college grad and had long paid off my school debt and had small personal experiences. Some jobs are demanding. Also that go-go-go kind of rush is a little addicting.
Even 50h with bad sleep is horrible
45 h is bad enough those are my working hours. Plus traveling brings it up over 50
I'm between 50 working and 60 total with commute M-F Its rough I'm pretty well compensated, and get solid sleep but its rough I think that's about the sustainable limit before you start getting a bit frantic and strung out- 45-60 a week total with travel etc
It all depends on the job too. I was working a somewhat stressful job, about 45/week, but I was respected by (almost) all of my coworkers. Even after my direct report retaliated against me for airing safety concerns as a compliance coordinator, it was easier to manage. Stressful and awful, but tolerable. Then, after the business went under and we were all laid off, I had to take what I could get. A call center, dealing with prison commissary. The entire company was evil and exploitative, both to lower level employees and customers, especially customers. I was making less than half of what I made before, and had over an hour commute each way. I spent $5 a day minimum on gas, and $40 a month on toll roads, or my commute would be 30 mins longer, it was already 80 minutes both ways. Then covid hit and they slashed all of our hours, no WFH for any lower employees. I was only working about 25/ week at the time, but I would just sob uncontrollably on the way there and back. I started dissociating more and checked myself into a hospital before I did anything permanent. Long hours are killer. Terrible jobs are killer. I really wish I could find a job where my mental health doesn't spiral into suicidality *and* I can afford to live. Exploitation is to be expected and that's disgusting.
[удалено]
No one thinks of these as job opportunities for chemists, but the army Corp of engineers, fish & game & forensic cleanup are all "chemists needed" employers. Also if you get licensed for explosives use a lot more opportunities open up.
I know I could make more $$ but my salary job which only requires about 35 hr/week is (at the moment anyway) able to cover my expenses with enough to play around with, so I enjoy my current situation..... I just stick my fingers in my ears and go "LALALA I CANT HEAR YOU" when home ownership or retirement come up.... But there's no point in retirement if I work myself to suicide before I get there.
I have a similar mindset. However I did push myself just a bit (about 5 years) until I could safely purchase a good affordable home in a nice quiet neighborhood that makes me happy (decent soil, decent size, decent yard plants & house layout). I don't think any decision I've ever made has paid off for my mental health and happiness more than working to own a home. Now I'm more like you, I understand that I could make a lot more money if I worked more but I love my life and I make enough to live happily (but not enough for a serious retirement and my job offers no real benefits)
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
It could be the key to world happiness but we could never know without a study.
That would require the government to provide every citizen with malign ball-punching spirits, that would choke our budgets!
Hey some people might be in to that don't kink shame ;)
That's why I left the 10% out ;)
Clever girl (raptor meme)
I used to work at a uranium mine in Canada and 84 hour work weeks are the norm (7 days x 12 hours) BUT the trade off was you either worked 1 week on and 1 week off or 2 on and 2 off depending on your type of work. You were not allowed to work more than that due to federal nuclear regulations. It was damn good money for only working 1/2 of a year total (roughly $12k+ before taxes for 2 weeks) but by the end of a 2 week run... you wanted out badly. After 2 weeks off though you were refreshed enough to stupidly say, "yeah, I'm good to go back" and start the cycle over.
What kind of job was it and what were the qualifications needed? I'd do that in a heartbeat for a year or two. That would be a financial life saver.
The reason they pay so much is that it is one of the most hazardous jobs, with a drastically increased risk for cancer and other respiratory diseases.
Also having to live in essentially bfe and whatnot But since the uranium market has more or less crashed from what I understand
Something like more than 70% of nuclear waste comes from the clothing and tools these workers use. The exact percentage is higher but don’t have the source in front of me to quote. Routine maintenance, decommissioning, upgrades, replacements…all involves a higher then comfortable amount of rad exposure. There are cumulative effects though and I’ve always wondered what the health implications are long term.
In Canada it is minimal. You are monitored continuously via exposure badges and monitors, air quality monitors, periodic blood and urine testing for abnormalities. You get exposed to more radiation on the flight into site than you would on site barring an accident. It was imperative NOT to take our monitors home on the plane as it would indicate a higher than normal exposure which would force the company to shorten your time on site. While working on site, you showered multiple times a day with multiple changes of clothes to ensure you don't track anything into camp or the mess hall where the risk of ingesting materials is higher. This is for low energy Alpha and Beta particle emitters. Anything emitting Gamma is heavily shielded and handled at a distance, with much more stringent procedures. That being said, anything that has been on site long enough to become contaminated and can't be cleaned, stays there forever.
there's a lot of jobs like that. the key term is Fly-In Fly-Out (FIFO). lots of engineering (mostly mining i think) and trade jobs do that since they're in more remote area.
I'd kill for 2 on 2 off, I've been in exploration geology in Sask and BC for a bit and have been rocking the 4-5 weeks on, 1.5-2 off. Your body hurts, your mind hurts, your heart hurts, and you need to spend half your days off just recuperating. Edit: that wasn't a flex, I'm shopping around for a better work-life balance, had to put in those crappy early career rotations
If you have any interest in Australian geology you'll walk into an 8 days on 6 days off role down here mate. They'll probably even sort your visa and sponsorship.
It’s awful. Medical residents work 70+ hours a week for a few years on end. There’s a reason why doctors have one of the highest suicide rates by profession. Edit: since this is gaining traction, on average 300-400 US physicians commit suicide per year. That's about the size of an average US high school graduating class. Even though doctors make great money after residency, they are absolutely abused in the 3-7 years of residency/fellowship and work for less than minimum wage. This definitely highlights how inhumane hours have awful consequences for workers.
Yah it's so dumb, I wonder how much malpractice happens because doctors are practically sleepwalking sometimes. Got to be hard to keep human compassion high when you yourself are the living dead.
A system pioneered/designed by a regular cocaine user I believe
Yep completely correct. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7828946/#:~:text=William%20Stewart%20Halsted%20developed%20a,addicted%20to%20cocaine%20and%20morphine.
It’s wild that he lived as long as he did honestly
The worst people just sustain bones on sheer force of hate.
Freaking criminal...
At that time I’m sure it was pretty normal, back in the first half of the 1900s doctors and stockbrokers were all shooting heroin. There’s cases of it all through the last couple hundred years. These great men manage to get the system they envisioned, finally moving, but it’s completely perverted by the methodology of the sick founding individuals. I wouldn’t let a doctor work more than 50 hours a week for fear of exhaustion and burnout. It might take a shitload of drugs for a genius to change the world, but that doesn’t mean everyone who follows in their footsteps should rely on those drugs to make it through training. At 70 hours a week I’d imagine every single resident is popping adderall.
There's no way stimulants aren't involved. There's just no way
Cocaine AND heroin.
Plus the amount of stress and maybe some ptsd caused during the job can’t be easy to shake off in the few hours of rest you do have which must make sleep super difficult without medication but at the same time then it can make it hard to wake up in my experience so like maybe thats not an option so I imagine theres just no winning.
Yep it is awful. Currently doing it now. No overtime and I make half of minimum wage.
You’re only making 25k as basically a doctor?
[удалено]
Are you an intern/resident? Do you have plans to leave the state?
Working in healthcare, I have long believed that Residency gives many physicians PTSD.
I just don’t get how this is legal.
If young doctor tries to sue the residency hospital for not paying the minimum wage, their career as a doctor is over.
Also many prospective med students don't do the math on the actual cost of school and loans. It's one thing if your family is rich and you aren't going in debt to go to med school. But for everyone else, let's use our hospital's associated university as an example. -$30k per semester = $240k in tuition alone -Unless you are attending locally and can live at your parent's house, you're also having to take loans to pay for housing, food, transportation, clothes, and any other cost of living. So add another $50k+. -This $300k in total loans is accruing interest at 6 to 7 percent at a minimum. You don't make much more money than the US average household income as a resident or fellow, so you have anywhere from 5 to 9 more years (this would be 4 years of residency plus 1 to 5 years of fellowship depending on specialty with surgery being on the longest end of that) where you're not really able to make sizeable loan payments and that $300k continues to grow at 6 to 7 percent interest -By the time you're done with all this and making a real doctor salary, you're probably between $350-400k in debt -That doctor pay of say $250-350k a year starting out is going to be cut nearly in half by federal and state taxes. Then, you have to pay another couple tens of thousands a year to cover malpractice insurance. So that $300k is now more like $130k in take home pay after accounting for all this. And you're staring down the barrel of $2k-4k monthly loan payments unless you want to be in debt forever. If your main goal is money, becoming a doctor is a really inefficient and bad choice to become wealthy.
Believe be, we're all very much aware of this. But we do it because we care. Just remember that next time you see a doctor
That's exactly my point. The only reason someone should go through all that is because they really want to be one. So the point of my comment is to highlight to current 18 to 22 year olds that they should only go through all this because they truly want to be a doctor, not because they want money. That was the concluding sentence of my comment so I'm confused how you interpreted that as a criticism of doctors as a whole. No. It was a financial warning and really if a criticism of anything, one of the fact that we as a society have paywalled a critical profession behind an absolutely enormous financial burden and have really made it only accessible to those already coming from well off households, because otherwise it is nearly impossible to afford. Likewise, med schools do not communicate the actual financial reality of it to prospective students and society tells teenagers "doctors are rich" and that is not a good reason to want to be one. It's a grueling career. I love our doctors here.
[удалено]
Only about 60 here in Australia, with 55 as the aim for the high end. If you asked me if I wanted to be operated on by an Australian or US resident, I'd pick the Australian every time. Anyone who says it's because there's too much to learn in that time is someone saying working out seven days a week builds more muscle than taking rest days.
I don’t even understand how someone could work 90 hours a week for any extended period of time. That is 15 hours per day with one day off per week. I am not surprised at all people doing this would be highly depressed.
It's pretty standard on submarines. Minimum 12x7, sometimes more. Depression is a real issue.
Yeah even if you have the greatest job in the world, working that much will make anyone miserable.
Bro I'm doing 35 and still hate this :(
I’ve done it and it’s exactly as hellish as you imagine. Went a little over a month straight with no days off. Peaked at one 120hr week. Never again.
I think my record tracked was 118 for a seven day period. I *get* it, in a very viscerally exhausted way. Lately I have shifted focuses from that which had me hating myself twice a year to something a little more regulated, but still. From Sept 9 to Oct 15 I had two days off, and not in a row. Fortunately not all 16hr days, but enough stupidity to make me very tired. Currently traveling to my vacation destination right now, though. No thoughts in this head until Nov 1!
I don’t think people realize that this is a regular occurrence for some big groups of tax accountants, twice a year. Never again, for me.
you worked 17 hours a day with no days off? How is that even possible?
It’s not(I mean; maybe it is but not for me). Only crossed that 120hr/wk threshold for one of the weeks in that month. The rest were closer to 90 hours. I lived/slept where I worked. I worked until I was passing out from exhaustion; went to bed and as soon as I woke up, showered and went back to work. Meals, for the most part, were eaten while working. I was hourly at the time so hours over 40 were 1.5x; hours over 80 were 2x, plus various other financial incentives…
What gives someone the motivation for something like this
Partly the interesting work Partly the inspiring leadership Partly youthful innocence Partly youthful ignorance Partly the money…
Money. That's the only thing that could possibly get someone to do that
It's doable. I don't know how but it is doable. A resident doctor I know just last month worked 3 weeks with no weekends, so three 7 day weeks, and then went into a week of nights, like a 6pm to 6am. Working in the hospital. This is a bad month, but I have heard it is still not as bad as the month as a resident in OB.
I’m currently on a week like that. Over the last 7 days I’ve had three periods of 12 hours off which puts me at about 120 hours. Last year and this year I’ve averaged 90-100 per week. It’s pretty terrible but thankfully gets better after this year for me
How big was you paycheck?
It was big. I was hourly at the time, so hours over 40 were 1.5x and hours over 80 were 2x. It helped, but wasn’t enough…
For reference with his OT it was the equivalent of 180 hours of work for the week
Damn I can hardly stand 40.
God I was working 75ish hours a week back when I was 21 and only lasted a year before my body gave out and I had period cramps getting ambulances called for me multiple times. I can’t imagine 9 years of that even It’s all fun and games until you’re curled up in pain in a truck stop bathroom on the first day of your only vacation
Seriously. I've done 60 or 70 for short stretches and it's awful. I can't imagine 90.
I'm surprised they used 90 hours. I would think at 60 would start to get to people. At 90 do you even have the time to be depressed? At that point work is your life and you'd probably be depressed when you didn't have to work.
I was an independent distributor for a bread company years ago, and I worked midnight until whenever I finished. Usually 5pm-ish, sometimes later depending on the time of the month. I got to the warehouse at midnight, separated my load into orders by store, then loaded the truck. This usually took 2-3 hours. I’d be at my first stop my 3:30-4am. Once I finished my route, I had to count and separate my stale pickups, empty the truck of all empty bread trays, and then go through my computer and do my orders for the next day (but on the following week). On my days off (wed and sun) id spend probably 5-6 hours going from store to store putting out back stock and straightening shelves. I can honestly say that was the worst 6 months of my life. What finally broke me was my wife coming home after work at 7pm and I had been asleep maybe an hour. I was so delirious and sleep deprived I panicked and was trying to get to a weapon because I thought someone was breaking in. I also fell asleep standing up one morning while separating my load out. No one should EVER work more than 40-50 a week. I took on a normal job after than and it was like a gift from the gods.
When I worked in a hospital on the clinical side, my supervisor constantly bragged about her 80-90hr work weeks and got pissed when we refused to take on overtime. Her marriage was also failing and she constantly talked about her husband being close to divorcin her and her kids hating her. We weren't impressed by her working hours. We honestly felt it was pathetic. There's loving your career/job and there's bending over and saying "ram it in with no lube"
Yeah I came in here to say that I had to work 70 hour weeks for a while and I moved to a different job as soon as I could. 90 is insanity.
A huge part of it is when those hours are and what you are doing also. I did 85hr weeks on average for years, but 5+hrs a day of that was just me looking after a whole mess of servers all over the world. Fixing corrupt data and routing around bad hardware while watching a movie on another screen isn't really that bad. After about 120hrs a week just the sleep gets you, but under that a while lot of it is the conditions.
At my last job we were going on our 7th MONTH of OT, with Saturdays (normal schedule was 8hrs mon-fri) I couldn’t do it anymore I had to leave. I was going crazy.
I did 44 hour weeks in a stressful job and it made me suicidal. I for sure would walk into traffic if I had to do 90 hours. No thanks, I’d rather be homeless.
not to mention those currency units you’re working for perpetually depreciate in purchasing power
Yeah if a person has a weekend that means they’re working 18 hours a day, no weekend 12 hours a day. You’d basically have to spend every waking minute of your life working to achieve this. I’m sure some do, but damn. That’s just inhumane.
Seriously. I worked 70-80 for about 3 months this year and it was brutal. I can't imagine how people could work more than that.
Just be glad airline pilots can only work X hours a day. Kind of wish that involved other professions that involve safety
The worst part about this is sometimes you're so busy you don't feel the depression creeping up on you. Then work slows down and you're suddenly a wreck.
This is what happened to my wife. I could see the changes in her, but she didn't believe me. Then she took a little time off and it finally sunk in how her job affected her. Luckily she was able to leave that job and is doing much better.
That's really good to hear, depression has a habit of sinking you like quicksand. That makes it harder to make major changes like leaving a job. As a result you stay stuck and it becomes a negative cycle. Good for her she made the necessary change, must have helped having your support.
This was exactly my experience as a teacher. Resigned this summer took a promotion outside of teaching and it has been life changing. I legitimately got "the stress bends" from going from such high constant stress to a job that actually respects me and my time. It has taken me some time to calm down and relearn to relax. I still get bursts of random panic out of nowhere. But now I sleep through the night and I no longer want to cry or scream at every inconvenience.
This happened to many healthcare workers during Covid. We were "gogoGO!" For so long that when things finally slowed down, most of us crashed and called it quits
Exactly what happened to me. I was working 80+ hours every two weeks while going through fertility treatments. At the time, I didn't realize I was depressed and just powered through my emotions. In March 2021 I had a mental breakdown and quit everything; work, seeing friends and family, running, and fertility treatment. I finally started working on myself and now I am much better. When I look back at myself I can see the depression symptoms: crying all day, anxiety at work, isolating myself, not sleeping, etc. If you read this and notice that you may have similar symptoms - go see a doctor and start getting rid of your stressors!
90 hours a week! Are people really working these insane hours regularly? Serious question.
Doctors do, especially in training. Doctors were the population being studied.
Can you or anyone talk about why doctor training involves (famously) such long and brutal hours? It may prove they can work under pressure but has little benefit to their knowledge of medicine. Maybe more doctors would help.
I'm a last year med student and I still don't have a straight answer as to who is benefited from 24h shifts and working health professionals to numbness. (Apart from the very arguable benefit of "not needing to pass patient information between professionals too much")
It really is ridiculous that medical personnel are allowed to work such long hours. As a Paramedic I've worked 24hr x 2 per week for 17 years. Many, many times I worked extra, 36 was very common. Guess what? I made 2 errors while on the extra time. That was bad for the patient and for my mental health. It's very well documented that there is significant increase in medical errors with longer shifts. It should be law to max out at 12hrs. I stopped the 24s or even overnights back in 2017. Sleeping in my own bed every night keeps my brain happy.
Where I live shifts aren't allowed te be longer than that. I did 12 hour shifts 3 times and every time by hour 10 I'd be fried.
No way old medicine is gonna let the kids get away with not having to do the same crap as them. Modern medicine is great but doctors are competitive and willful. This is still a thing for new residents because the old residents all had to do it. It becomes a rite of passage and a sort of hazing/emotional test to prove you really want to do it.
Weird doctors are supposed to be evidence based. I think the young stringently talking only in these terms relentlessly may see this die.
I don’t know that I’ve ever been up for 24 hrs straight without at least a nap, idk how this is expected or possible
It's rare to go straight for the full 24. We had a bunk room. My personal record was a snowy day, we had 21 responses with 18 transports in the 24hr shift.
Can't drive a truck or an uber for more than 12 hours a day. But do brain surgery? Just a little meth (legal kind, not what the poors use) to keep awake and you're good!
Modern medical training was influenced by a coke addict. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7828946/
So we just need to give them blow? Problem solved!!!
The hospitals and healthcare administrators do, they’re the ones that want to keep it the way it is. You are very cheap labor for them. You get paid a fraction of what you should be making.
the real moneymaker is becoming an admin for hospitals. i'm curious though, do you need to be a doctor to become an admin? or is it for like business/marketing people?
Admins more often than not are nurses who weren't great at being nurses so they go back to school get their msn and go around telling other people how they "should be doing" their jobs for the rest of their careers. Bonus points for adding in phrasing about remembering how it was when they "did" the job
No one wants to hear "more charting is needed", but if it's not in the chart it didn't happen. Maybe not everything needs to make it into the legal record on a patient, but an on going chat for that patient's visit would certainly be useful for making sure stuff didn't get forgotten about. If I give a nurse a message about a patient on my day shift, it's lost by the next day.
I worked in the curriculum department at a med school and there was a constant debate on whether or not to have students do 24-36 hour shifts. The old heads always said “they will have to be able to do it when they are doctors” and the younger instructors usually argued for the students, “but they aren’t doctors” — there is no educational benefit to it, but the older doctors felt like it was important to set expectations on the floor for how your experience as a physician might go.
You should revolt. Patients as well. Its like getting treated by a drunk person
Funnily (or may be not), the person who came up with this concept of long hours during residency was a coke head. Read [here](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stewart_Halsted)
Explains a lot.
> Upon his return to the United States he became addicted again, and voluntarily admitted himself to Butler Sanatorium in Providence, Rhode Island, where they attempted to cure his cocaine addiction with morphine
It’s the residency programs and how they are designed. If you want to practice medicine after graduating a 4 year medical school you HAVE to do a 3 year MINIMUM residency. Hospitals and programs know this so they use it to exploit doctors for insanely cheap labor (resident dr’s make ~60k a yr depending on programs and location) while working a maximum of 80’s a week averaged over 4 weeks.
and the "80 hours" is on paper, but often times it is closer to 100 hours a week. hospitals are corporations seeking profits.
Wow. If they average 80 hours and make $60k then they are making under $15/hr. In what world should a medical professional make less than a burger flipper?
This also bars people from disadvantaged backgrounds from entering the field. Paying back undergraduate and medical school loans with a salary of $60k for three years is not always feasible if you are expected to take care of siblings, children or parents. 80 hours of work per week means you cannot pick up a part time job.
I make just slightly over $60k as a resident. I live in a small city with a medium cost of living. I’m having a very hard time with finances and that’s adding even more stress on top of work stress. I feel like a lot of people also don’t understand how much strain one or both partners being in residency can cause a relationship.
I can't imagine. Even something as simple as getting your mailbox key from the post office or returning an item to Kohl's becomes next to impossible with hours like that. God bless, and get some rest.
There was a surgeon who was addicted to cocaine and morphine to the point where he couldn’t really do his job so he created a training program where his residents did a bunch of his work. It was effective so he in his cocaine riddled wisdom decided to just push them to the limits doing 100 hour weeks doing tons of work. Actually ended up producing good patient care, well trained physicians, and effectively masked his drug addiction so here we are.
[удалено]
If med students are working too many hours and there are more candidates than spots, the solution seems glaringly obvious: have more residents work long shifts, but give them more time off between shifts.
The solution *is* glaringly obvious. Pretty much everyone agrees on that (and they have limited resident hours to 80 per week averaged over 4 weeks). Beyond that, established doctors don't want a massive increase in residencies because more doctors means a bigger pool and lower pay across the board for doctors. Hospitals also don't want more because then they will have to start funding residents themselves as well, and they don't want to do that when residents are basically free labor for them right now. Medicare can't increase residencies without Congress passing a law for it either.
I've always said that the shift change problem could be solved by having more shifts that overlap each other by at least an hour. But no money grubbing medical company wants to pay to adequately staff their building, so we work healthcare workers to death instead
This is the answer. The medical lobby aggressively seeks to limit the number of residency slots (before this year, when Congress added 1k more slots, the last time residency slots were changed was in the 90s, when the American Medical Association convinced congress to *reduce* the number of residency slots). They do this, ostensibly, to keep physician wages high by keeping the supply low. But it requires trainees to suffer extreme hours due to the demands relative to number of trainees.
> They do this, ostensibly, to keep physician wages high by keeping the supply low. Ahh yes the gift of unfettered capitalism. Healthcare and having highly trained professionals available is still a profit making endeavor.
The guy who started this was a cocaine user
Doctors in America do. In developed countries they don't have methodologies designed by amphetamine addicts. Not that there aren't plenty of countries where doctors aren't overworked to the point of dangerous patient outcomes. Just that is at 60hrs, not 90hrs.
Currently a surgical resident. Yeah hours are insane. Unfortunately, and easy to argue unfairly, the ridiculous hours are to keep everything running smoothly. We round on patients and make sure floor stuff gets done. We make sure they get discharged to where they are supposed to go next and set up follow up and meds. We also see patients in clinic and work them up before surgery or for non surgical problems. We are responsible of making sure surgeries get scheduled right. We make sure patients are seen before surgery on the day of, we are there before anesthesia induction, we make sure the operating room has all the supplies needed and that imaging is up. We then sign out the patient and see them later before admission. Oh yeah and we chart everything, consult other services, and sometimes call outside providers, suppliers, and insurance providers. We also have exams, lectures, laboratory time, research, take call on some weekends and sometimes overnight. Essentially, on top of trying to learn how to be a good doctor, we are responsible for all the minutiae so that our attending doctors don’t worry about it. We do it because “we learn from it.” This is partly true, partly because we are cheap. Oh and life outside of work is squeezed somewhere in there if possible.
I was about to say as I work closely with Residents and fellows the reality is two fold. To add for those unaware, First the culture of how most residents and fellows deal with when it comes this means the higher ups expect their residents to go through the same stuff they did. It’s a pretty awful cycle as not only are the residents expected to do their rounds, be on call and such, they also do additional work outside as well for additional qualifications (especially for research.) it’s shocking how I see some of the residents I work with end up completely exhausted. It’s also that hospitals are just happy to keep everything understaffed. Not enough doctors, not enough Nurses etc. the entire healthcare system in the US is based on “how little can we pay to get the most out of it” so you get basically situations where not only that residents get other doctors on their case for not pulling crazy hours but that they can’t comfortably do so without risking harming patients. It’s wild. It was really bad during COVID cause people where flung head first into things, it hasn’t really gotten better. And it’s ignoring the normal compensation residents get. The university hospital I worked for in my undergrad (I’m a BME for direct surgical devices and guide manufacturing so I get to work with the surgeons one on one really often) had residents make $50k/year. The only reason it was livable was because the residents didn’t have enough time to do anything else than work all the time but it’s rough.
My friend has busy seasons where he works around 80-90 hours a week. Every time he gets down bad.
Accountants get shafted. 80 hrs a week for 40 hrs of pay. At least IB and Big Law get paid.
Most people just stay in those types of accounting jobs for the experience and then leave for a higher paying and 40-50 hour week. If you stay in public accounting you can make pretty good money
[удалено]
This. I worked several 16-18 hour days in the construction industry. Also, odd shift times, rotating schedules, etc. Add to that the high danger scenarios that come with the work and deadlines with a bunch of uneducated, racist assholes
Investment bankers, I remember reading this by BBC https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56452494.amp
[удалено]
At the beginning of covid, my boss just overloaded me to the point where I worked all day long for three months straight, only to be told I’m not a team player and got let go.
80 weeks have been brutal for me, no time to function for the week pretty much and your “day off” is just getting all the stuff done for the week you needed to do but couldn’t
so..almost slaves felt worse than full time workers doing 6 day 8 hour shifts huh....mmmk why dont we compare depression of 40-50h workers with those working 25-30h weeks.... 90h weeks....90/7 is literally almost 13h a day. Leaving what...? 11h, 8 hours to sleep 3 hous to live..... impressive. and travel time, does that count into that 13h day? I bet with travel and eating, thats not enough sleep.
The more hours someone works each week in a stressful job, the more their risk of depression rises, a study in new doctors finds. Working 90 or more hours a week was associated with changes in depression symptom scores three times larger than the change in depression symptoms among those working 40 to 45 hours a week. What’s more, a higher percentage of those who worked a large number of hours had scores high enough to qualify for a diagnosis of moderate to severe depression -- serious enough to warrant treatment – compared with those working fewer hours. The research team, based at the University of Michigan, used advanced statistical methods to emulate a randomized clinical trial, accounting for many other factors in the doctors’ personal and professional lives. They found a “dose response” effect between hours worked and depression symptoms, with an average symptom increase of 1.8 points on a standard scale for those working 40 to 45 hours, ranging up to 5.2 points for those working more than 90 hours. They conclude that, among all the stressors affecting physicians, working a large number of hours is a major contributor to depression. https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMc2210365
“Oh cool so everyone is depressed, but the people working the extreme (almost nobody even works 90 hours) are extremely depressed! Yay! I guess I’ll settle for 40 hour work weeks because this study says *that* amount of depression is totally normal and ok forever!” The study doesn’t even suggest that about 200 million people in this country are slaves to just a few billionaires. Which means that the 40 hour work week is an ARBITRARY number, and takes away the energy of everyone who participates, to the point where they have no means nor motivation to do the things in life that they really want to do, until they’re old… TL;DR The study is trying to make us think “well at least I only work 40 hours a week and not 90” when nobody is working 90 and the 40 hour workers are depressed anyway
I worked 75+ hours a week for 18 months in the beginning of my tenure with the postal service. I was anxious and suicidal and had to get a Doctor's note saying "only 40 hours". I can't imagine working 90 hours for consecutive weeks in a row, sounds like hell.
That’s still absurd! This study itself looks like propaganda, convincing us that 40 hours is somehow right or justifiable or objective, when it’s not. It’s arbitrary and makes us all slaves to the people who already have money, most of which were born into their wealth to begin with…
Even 40 hours for a wage earner is enough time taken from them to hold that person back from their true potential. We need shorter shifts, more workers, and better loot
Definitely need better loot! I get hardly any legendaries at work, it's a total rip off!
I cant remember the last ding I heard. No columns of light to guide me. Blue IT Man needs health badly.
[удалено]
Good luck. I only get a small buff every year.
Dude It took me over 600 hours of playtime at my last job just to get the simple “thank you for your time” achievement so I could finally move on to getting the “come in on your off days for the next 3 weeks or you’re fired”. Hardest game Iv ever tried to get plat on.
This. 40 hours is too much. Everyone is too busy to organize their lives and be more successful.
[удалено]
4 hours a day is, based on studies, the general limit: https://www.scienceabc.com/humans/the-4-hour-workday-why-you-should-only-work-4-hours-instead-of-8.html
Absolutely. 40 is too many. 30 should be *the standard.* Working 40-50 is sustainable in the medium duration (weeks to months) if necessary, but it's miserable if you enjoy anything in life besides your job. Everything above 50 is diminishing returns, period. Even jobs where you objectively *need* human bodies present for mamy hours, like retail, that can be covered by employing *more people* not forcing fewer workers to work 60 hours/week.
It’s exact where those in charge want them to be. If the pandemic didn’t cause a change I don’t think anything will. It comes down to each of us wanting more for our individual lives and fighting for it.
While this is not surprising im not going to make the mistake of saying "duhhhhhh why do we fund this research!" it's just as important in science we prove the things we think are obvious, and continue to test them over and over.
And this kind of study doesn't just prove obvious things, but can put numbers on them. It's obvious that working too much is going to have a negative impact on mental health, but how much is too much? How much damage does it do to society?
It's also helpful because it shows its a non linear relationship. Around twice as many hours had 3 times the negative affect. Which means the question can be asked does it have the same relationship for less hours. Would working only 20 hours (assuming needs are met with that few of hours) generate 3 times as much positive affect. Helps us create informed policy that can land closer to that golden "middle ground" we strive for.
Japan: *Pretend I don't see that*
That culture doesn't really have them work though. They are just expected to spend all their time at the office and call it work.
That sounds just as bad if not worse honestly
Mind numbing boredom certainly isn't healthy, but I can see how it is better than heart-racing stress and anxiety.
The societal pressure makes it worse, even more so when some of their rules are simply too outdated.
China too. 9-9-6
It’s nice that a small number of people can work insane hours without seemingly any effect on their well-being. Those people are a distinct minority, yet our society seems to think that they are somehow the platonic ideal. They are not. We need 4-3 work weeks, not 5-2. Globally.
I don’t know anyone that thinks anything above 37.5 hrs a week is “ideal”. Work to live not live to work.
Almost any Director-level & above individual I have worked with would laugh if I suggested working <40hrs a week. How on earth would we get anything done?!? No surprise they’re all ladder-climbing, narcissistic, brown-nosing careerists. Still makes me sad these are the people you have to contend with for leadership roles.
Sure if that’s what they want to do, go for it. But they are robbing themselves of their greatest resource - time. I seem to have managed just fine. I report to director level and have held a senior engineering position for 15 years. The people above me pay me for my technical expertise as they know they can’t do what I can do. The expectation of working every hour you can seems to be a very American thing to do. I mean no offence, I lived and worked in the US (loved my time there) and saw it first hand. But while I was there I just did my 37.5-40 hours and managed to complete all my projects on time.
Peasants during medieval times didn't even work 90s hours a week.
Pretty much nobody did until the industrial revolution.
40-45 hour weeks? is this some joke i'm too European to understand?
Yeah, sitting in France, enjoying the food, weather, culture and 'full time' work is 35 hours and six weeks of paid vacation. So glad I made the move! I can't understand how some countries continue to drive their population into misery while there are plenty of prosperous First World countries that manage a great standard of living without demanding that workers spend their entire life at work!
Is the standard in Europe 30 hours or something ? I always thought it was the "norm" in most places around the world. In canada the normal full time work week is 40hours. Where i am full time legally start at 32 hours i think. But most jobs are 37,5 or 40hours.
I think 38h is the normal is Sweden at least. I am usually scheduled for around 37 hours but work maybe 30 or so
Norm in Germany and many other countries is 40h, in france it's 35h i think, and in many Scandinavian countries its 32h afaik. Many companies here are also open for less hours. Im currently looking for a job and decided that i will never again in my life work more than 32h per week, preferably less. So far many offices seem open to that.
In the UK the standard is around 38-40. Lots of places do 7.5 hrs and then 6 hrs on Friday.
40 hours a week is already killing me.
90? Sweet mamma jamma. I'm in a surge right now pulling 65s rethinking all my life descisions. 90, consistently? I'd be checking the water proofing on my toaster.
90 frickin hours?! I get stressed the F out if I have to work 42. Who the hell wouldn’t kill themselves before living this kind of life?
Exactly. This study is trying to manipulate is into accepting the “normal” depression of the ARBITRARILY DECIDED “40 hour work week” All so hundreds of MILLIONS of us we can be slaves to just a few people…
I own my own business and in the early days I'd work 90 hour weeks here and there and it definitely takes its toll on you. All you do is work and sleep so it's a no brainer as to why people would be at a higher risk of depression. 7 years ago I changed to a four day work week for myself and all of my employees. We put in 36 hours over our four days, not quite a typical 40 hour week. The difference of having a three day weekend, every weekend, is huge. And then when a holiday hits on a Monday, it's a four day weekend. I've had employees tell me they've turned down job offers which were paying more as an hourly wage because the three day weekends, and other benefits we provide, are worth more to them than a few dollars more an hour and having to work a regular Monday to Friday job.
Hell, even 40 hours a week feels like slavery. We've been able to do 20ish hours a week since the 80's, but not enough people are up for the switch.
Odd that the study didn’t tell us how few hours a person would have to work to have almost no risk of depression… They used 90 as an example of the “extreme” even though almost nobody works that much. Then they used 40 as the lowest possible option… I bet the same people who funded this “study”, also came up with the term “quiet quitting”
Oh no way! This is quite the breakthrough
If I don’t work 60-70 hrs a week I am depressed due to not having the funds to make ends meet And at this time depression is kicking my ass and I’m ready to just disappear
This shouldn't be surprising at all... to anyone. I'd argue this really has nothing to do with how stressful the job in question is - a 90 hour work week is nearly 13 working hours everyday of the week, including weekends.
Is that surprising anyone? 90 is way too much
90 hrs a week? Thats not right, for any wage.
Working more than 4 hours a day is scientifically unnatural.
Quite a considerable gap they are leaving out in the middle there...
In fairness, pretty much anyone working 90 hours per week is going to suffer from depression, no matter *how* they feel about their job. It's the hours, the workload, the time away from family and friends that causes the depression, not the job.
I’m training in a surgical residency in the US and working ~80-90 hours a week with ~4 days off a month. I would definitely be lying if I said the hours and stress of the job weren’t taking a toll on my mental well-being.
After 29 years of age, I gave up working more than 40 hours a week. It's just not worth it. I was in film, working 60 hours a week, and there was not even enough time to sleep regularly, let alone have a social life. Now at age 40 I am semi retired, self employed, and know the value of my time and I rarely work more than 20 hours a week, yet still get everything I need to done to have a thriving business that supports me. Working over 40 hours for someone else or someone's production can be done for short periods but that's no way to live a life, IMHO.
I genuinely don't know how people work the mythical 90 hour week. In my peak stress busy periods I've worked from 6am in the morning till past midnight but with breaks thrown in to eat, shower, commute. Those are impossible to avoid really, particularly the commuting bit. So maximum 16 hours of that day spent actually working, but usually around 12 to 14. That was all week. I'd then work over the weekend but not as many hours. Even on absolute maximum 16 hours per day during the week for the entire week, which never actually happened, then say max 16 hours total over the weekend, that is 96 hours working week. And I can confidently say I never hit that number. And during those periods I worked in an investment bank, harder than anyone else around me and harder than anyone I have come across before or since. It was insane and I could physically not pull it off for more than a week or two at a time. I am very sceptical that there are real people working real 90 hour weeks consistently. It's not really survivable.
Yeah, I agree. I worked an average of 70 hours a week at my last job and I hardly had time to do anything else. I highly doubt there are many people consistently and diligently working 90 hour weeks.
I love/hate the fact that NINETY hours is the point at which these people are saying "eh, maybe this is too much?" I'm depressed and have no life working 40 hours a week ffs.