David Hummels
Succeeding in school and in your career takes hard work. But is it possible to work too hard? Sure, we’ve all felt stressed out and overburdened during an exam week or when personal and work and school obligations build up (You might remember “Wake up, you need to make money!” from Twenty One Pilots’ hit song, “Stressed Out”). But are there any real or lasting consequences for your health in pushing yourself too hard?
This is a difficult question to answer in rigorous research because some people are fortunate to enjoy unusually large reserves of energy and good health. You probably know someone who seems able to push themselves to superhuman lengths and never tires out or read stories of Elon Musk working 80-100 hours per week. This means that when we make comparisons across people, the ones with the most robust health are often also the ones able to work the hardest.
Together with our Danish colleague, Jakob Munch, we used unique data from Denmark that tracked the work and health of every Danish worker over two decades. In this research, we could adjust for the natural tendency of some workers to be healthier than others and use what economists call a “natural experiment.” Suppose a firm dramatically increases its sales in a short period of time. It doesn’t have the opportunity to hire enough new workers so all existing workers put in significantly longer hours and work more intensively every hour on the job. What happens to a worker in such a firm?
Well, first, we find that working hard really does pay off financially. But we also find a significant downside -- as these workers put in longer hours, they begin to suffer elevated health risks. They become much more likely to begin using anti-depressant medications and drugs to prevent heart disease, and they are more likely to become hospitalized for severe stress and depression, heart attacks, strokes and liver diseases (an indicator of alcoholism). These adverse health outcomes are worsened in three cases: for older workers, for workers who were already putting in long hours before sales increases and for workers who report having low control over their jobs.
