Rest, in vocational psychology dictionary

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Dictionary of Vocational Psychology

Rest

Amount of rest and sleep affects vocational performance, and there may also be some occupations that differentially attract those who tend to have unusual sleep patterns or not enough sleep. Some research suggests that there are also striking national differences in amount of sleep deprivation experienced by workers, with the United States being the worst offender. Reportedly, the problem of sleep deprivation is expecially problematic in new economy jobs, such as workers employed by startup dotcoms.

However, the problem of too much work and insufficient sleep is hardly a new one. There are reports that in 19th century England workers in early factories worked horrendously long days. Soldiers in the field likewise have long worked very long hours, at least during active campaigns. Likewise, during harvest time farmers would work nearly round the clock. Yet what separates the preindustrial from the industrial and postindustrial vocationally related sleep deprivation is that the more recent versions are both severe and chronic. It is possible that recent increases in diabetes in the United States and to a lesser degree in other industrialized nations is associated with this chronic sleep deprivation.

Another potential consequence of sleep deprivation is death through overwork, called "Karoshi" in Japan, but also present in the West, perhaps especially in Victorian England, where workers endured punishing hours over years of toil, to a degree that makes the modern dotcom startup worker look like they are enjoying travel on a cruise ship. It is not for nothing that the modern labor movement was born in England, nor that the writings that formed much of the basis for subsequent communist revolutions were written by Marx and Engels in England. You can get a sense of the brutality of working conditions from reading Dickens, but if you really want to sample Karoshi Western style, read Engels.

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