“See if the job will be bad, that they should pay you to do it,” said Argentine singer-songwriter Facundo Cabral. But, in reality, paid employment, in addition to the obvious economic benefits that it entails, is also good for our psychosocial health. Of course, according to a recent study by researchers from the universities of Cambridge and Salford, a single day’s work is enough for us to take care of our mental well-being , to increase our self-esteem and the feeling of social inclusion. Those eight hours a week would be the recommended dose for optimal well-being – of course, the recommended dose for our pocket and to pay the bills will hardly correspond to a day of work.
The authors of this new study, published in the academic journal Social Science and Medicine , analyzed the relationship between changes in the number of hours individuals worked and their mental health and well-being. To this end, they had the participation of more than 71,000 Britons, between the ages of 16 and 64, between 2009 and 2018. Over that nine-year period, as the hours of work they did changed, they were asked , to assess their mental health, about their anxiety problems and whether they had difficulty sleeping.
They found that those who went from being unemployed or working at home as a housewife to paid employment for eight hours a week reduced their risk of mental health problems, on average, by 30%. That figure corresponds to men; In the case of women, to reach that percentage, they had to work a little more, a total of twenty hours.
Working more does not improve our well-being
In contrast, the researchers found no evidence that working longer than eight hours provided more psychosocial benefits for the person. Thus, the full-time standard – from 27 to 40 hours per week – would not, according to the study, provide greater advantages to our mental health and, therefore, the most effective dose of work – always thinking only about our well-being, and leaving On the one hand, the current account – it would be only one day a week, since working more makes very little difference.
Sociologist Brendan Burchell, co-author of the research, explains that “we have effective dose guidelines for everything from the vitamin C we need to ingest to sleeping hours to help us feel better, but this is the first time we’ve done that to ourselves. ask about paid work ” .
Burchell recalls that “unemployment is often detrimental to people’s well-being, negatively affecting identity, status, use of time and the feeling of inclusion in society ” and that now, after this study, “we can to get an idea of how much paid work is needed to obtain the psychosocial benefits of the job ”. “And it is not many hours,” he says.
The labor revolution of AI, big data and robots
It is believed that, in the coming decades, we could see artificial intelligence (AI), big data and robots replace us in many of the jobs. Daiga Kamerade, another of the authors of the study, suggests that if in this hypothetical future marked by these technologies there are not enough positions for all those who want to work full time, it will be necessary to reformulate the current rules. “This should include the redistribution of working hours, so that we can all get the mental health benefits that a job provides, even if it means that we all have much shorter workweeks,” explains the researcher.
Within the framework of this future they propose, the team of researchers offers very creative alternatives that will sound very good to more than one person: from five-day weekends to working only a couple of hours a day , increasing the annual vacation from weeks to months and even have two months off for each month worked.
Likewise, the authors of the study argue that this reduction and redistribution of working hours could contribute to an improvement in the balance between personal life and work life and an increase in productivity , among other benefits. Of course, they warn that, to avoid the increase in socioeconomic inequalities, the reduction of working hours should affect us all.
“The traditional model, in which the population works around 40 hours a week, was never based on whether the work was good for people. Our research suggests that micro-jobs provide the same psychological benefits as full-time jobs , ”stresses sociologist Senhu Wang, co-author of the study.
But not just any type of work is worth it, the quality of this is “crucial” , he warns. “Those positions in which employees are not respected or are subject to insecure or zero-hour contracts do not provide the same welfare benefits and are not likely to do so in the future,” he concludes.
