Study explains why bankers need stimulants to maintain 80-hour weeks
If you’ve ever spent weeknights burning the midnight oil to help get a deal over the finish line and wondered if it was all worth it – rest assured, it’s not. Not for your physical health, not for your mental health, and – according to new research – not even for the deal.
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Bankers work long hours - that’s not news to anyone. Banks themselves are even aware of it, and have tried capping their juniors’ work hours over the years (JPMorgan is the most recent), to varying degrees of success. It’s always been justified as necessary, in the moment, to meet deadlines. Thing is, it probably isn’t.
A recent academic paper by a number of authors, headed by Lieke ten Brummelhuis of Simon Fraser University, quantified something rather well-known to anyone who has done an all-nighter – spending all night working never means a productive next day.
The academics tracked 67 employees across a number of industries in financial consulting, engineering, and biotech. They noted via fitbit how many hours the supervised professionals slept per night, their self-reported hours worked and, most interestingly, an asked their co-workers to perform analysis of their work on any given day.
The study found that working hours that dipped into sleep had a significant impact on second-day work due to the impact it had on resilience - this being a someone's capacity to basically stay focused on menial tasks. Exhausted workers were significantly less resilient and performed worse at their work than those same workers well-rested did.
The implication is that letting your work dig into your sleep is very rarely worth it. The findings could be “interpreted as working long hours having a zero net effect,” on a daily timeframe, but being detrimental for anything beyond that. Sleep will make you more productive in your day-to-day work than working into the night.
The report also "cautiously" suggests that "regularly working longer than 8-h days results in fatigue and a lack of resilience, making it difficult for employees to sustain high levels of performance over time."
The pressures to maintain a high-quality always-on work output might be why so many bankers are turning to drugs. The Wall Street Journal noted last month that Adderall - an amphetamine and popular treatment for ADHD - was rife among juniors in banks, mostly due to ease of acquisition and its immediate impact.
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