HR Industry News

No sleep on Sunday? You're not alone...

— 16 April 2008 —

A poll has revealed that 84% of UK workers have trouble sleeping on Sundays as they are worrying about the week ahead.

Over half of those surveyed said that this happens every week, while one in five said it happens a couple of times per month. Interestingly, the UK is as stressed as Hungary, with 58% of Hungarian employees failing to get a proper night’s sleep on a Sunday.

Spaniards, Danes and Norwegians, however, take a much more relaxed approach and wake up feeling fully refreshed on Monday morning.

Monster, who carried out the survey, offer the following tips to help workers get through the Sunday night insomnia:

• Focus on what goes well each day, rather than workplace problems. As you fall asleep, force yourself to review something good about the day.
• Create a to-do list. Whether using an online resource or keeping tab of tasks in a spiral notebook, managing a to-do list can help you maximise your time and sleep better.
• Take a holiday. If it has been a while since your last holiday, consider taking some time off to de-stress.

Ceridian’s Paul Avis pointed out that employers can be proactive: “Employers can address a whole range of employee health issues such as sleep, nutrition, fitness, work life balance etc. through Health Risk Assessments and could use such tools to ascertain what the health challenges are for their employees. However whilst these tools are excellent at identifying risk, real behaviour change is much harder to achieve and often takes creative thinking such as the introduction of health coaching or even “duvet days”. After all, losing one day per week through presenteeism due to a lack of sleep soon mounts up!”

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