Eighty-hour weeks: what they do to relationships and the body

Friday, 10.40 pm. A message lights up the phone screen: “The little one wanted you to read her a story. I told her tomorrow.” Below it, another, sent half an hour later: “You know you said you’d be working tomorrow too.”

The person reading this is not indifferent. Quite the opposite — they work this much precisely because they care: about their family, their clients, their patients, the team that would not make the deadline without them. Once this project, this specialist training, this acquisition is over, things will be better. That is what they thought last year, too. And the year before.

Eighty-hour weeks are not rare in the professions I look at in this group of posts: doctors on call and in specialist training, lawyers ahead of hearings and acquisitions, investment bankers in deal season. In this post I am not interested in whether such a schedule is “right” or “wrong”. I am interested in what it does to the body and to relationships — even when a person chooses it and loves it.

A number everyone knows and nobody takes personally

In 2021 the World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization published their first joint global estimate of the burden of long working hours. According to that estimate, in 2016 long working hours — 55 hours or more a week — were responsible for 745,000 deaths from stroke and ischaemic heart disease. Compared with people working 35 to 40 hours, their risk of stroke was estimated to be about 35 per cent higher, and their risk of dying from ischaemic heart disease about 17 per cent higher.

Two things matter with these figures. First, they are associations at the level of populations, not predictions for an individual. Many people work long hours and stay healthy. Second, the threshold in the study was 55 hours. Eighty hours is even further from that threshold than 55 hours is from an ordinary working week. Anyone working like this is not somewhere at the edge of what was measured. They are well beyond it.

It is striking how little these numbers move the very people who understand them best. The doctor who advises a patient with high blood pressure to reduce stress has herself just come off a long on-call shift. Not out of ignorance. But because statistics seem to apply to other people.

The body keeps its own books

The body does not know the phrase “just this month”. With long working hours, a few patterns recur in the research. A large meta-analysis by Mika Kivimäki and colleagues, which included more than six hundred thousand people, linked long working hours with a higher risk of stroke. The mechanisms researchers suggest are fairly ordinary: less sleep, more sitting, less movement, more alcohol, and a stress-response system that stays switched on for a long time.

You know this system by its effects. Under prolonged strain, the rhythm of cortisol can be disrupted: in the evening it does not fall as it should, so you cannot fall asleep even though you are exhausted. Or you fall asleep straight away and wake at three thinking about tomorrow’s meeting. I have written about what is happening then in the post Waking at three.

Twenty years ago, American hospitals ran a study with junior doctors that is now a classic: interns in intensive care units had their longest shifts shortened, and researchers compared what happened. With shorter shifts they slept more, had fewer lapses of attention and made fewer serious medical errors. Tiredness, then, is not only a personal matter. It affects everyone who depends on you in that moment.

Particularly telling is the research of the sociologist Alexandra Michel, who followed young investment bankers for almost a decade. In their first years they treated the body as a tool to be mastered: less sleep, food between meetings, pain to be overridden. Around the fourth year, the body began to rebel in many of them — with chronic pain, insomnia, allergies and addictions. Some then began to listen to it and changed. Others kept fighting.

When hours are proof of worth

If it were only about the amount of work, the solution would be simple. But in these professions hours also carry a symbolic meaning. Who stays last in the office. Who answers emails at midnight. Who takes the on-call shift even though they could have swapped. Hours become the currency with which you prove you have earned your place — to yourself and to others.

For people who, despite their success, fear that one day they will be exposed as not good enough, this currency is especially tempting. Working to exhaustion is proof that you at least tried. I have written more about this feeling in Impostor syndrome: why successful people doubt themselves.

For lawyers there is also the stance the profession demands: always ready, always on guard, always a step ahead of the other side. I have described how that stance travels home in the post Lawyers: when work means battle and you can’t take the armour off at home.

What happens to the relationship

As early as 1985, the psychologists Jeffrey Greenhaus and Nicholas Beutell described three forms of conflict between work and family. The first is time-based: the hours you give to one cannot be given to the other. The second is strain-based: tiredness, irritability and worry from work come home with you, even when you are physically there. The third is behaviour-based: ways of behaving that are useful at work — speed, decisiveness, control, a critical eye — do harm at home.

Most people think only of the first. “I’ll have more time once…” But at eighty hours the second and third are often worse. Even when you are at home, you are half elsewhere. Your partner is talking, and in your head you are checking a contract. Your child shows you a drawing, and you praise it in the voice you would use to confirm receipt of a document.

In a well-known study, the psychologist Rena Repetti followed air traffic controllers on days with different workloads. After more demanding days they withdrew more at home — they were quieter and less involved in conversation. The withdrawal was not necessarily bad: when their partners gave them that space, the controllers were also less angry. But withdrawal that comes every day is something different from withdrawal after a hard day.

A home that organises itself without you

In relational family therapy, which I am training in, we see the family as a system. When one member is absent for a long time, the system does not stand still. It adapts. The partner takes over decisions about the children, school, money, holidays. The children learn whom to ask for what. Routines develop in which the absent one is no longer needed — and when they come home, they feel like a guest.

This is one of the most painful sides of long hours, because it happens without bad intent. Nobody shut anybody out. Life simply went on. The partner who carried everything alone is often angry and proud at the same time. They no longer ask for help, because they have learned it will not come. The absent one feels they are not needed, and returns all the more easily to where they are needed — to work.

If criticism, contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling are appearing in your conversations, the relationship is in a serious state, whatever brought it there. I have described these patterns in the post The Four Horsemen in relationships. The good news is that they can be recognised and they can be changed.

What children see

Children do not count hours. But they notice mood. In a follow-up study, Rena Repetti and Jenifer Wood found that after more stressful working days mothers were more withdrawn from their preschool children — they talked with them less and showed them less affection. The children did not understand this as tiredness. They understood only that their mother was less reachable.

In her book Ask the Children, Ellen Galinsky asked the children of working parents what they would change if they could. Most parents expected their children to want more time with them. More often, though, the children wished their parents were less tired and less stressed. It was not only about how much parents were at home, but about what they were like when they were there.

That is both bad news and good news. Bad, because “quality time” at the weekend does not erase a tired face all week. Good, because even half an hour of attention in which you are truly present counts for more to a child than two hours of being half there.

A conversation at eleven at night

This is how a couple’s conversation might sound when he gets home from work (composite, not a real person):

“You’re late again. You said you’d be home at eight.”
“I know. I couldn’t. The client…”
“I don’t care about the client. I care about when you’re ever going to be here.”
“I’m working for us. For all of this.”
“I don’t need ‘all of this’. I need you to ask me, sometimes, how my day was.”

In this short argument both of them are telling the truth, each about their own. He about responsibility, she about loneliness. When a couple stays with the question of who is right, the spillover cycle turns once more. But when each hears what lies beneath the other’s words — his fear of not being good enough, her fear that she no longer matters — room opens for a different conversation.

Such a conversation often does not require working less as of tomorrow. It requires both of you to say what you really want, and to name what has happened between you as something shared, not as one person’s fault.

Exercise: your week on paper

You can do this exercise alone or together with your partner. You need paper and twenty minutes.

1. Write down your last week hour by hour. Not an ideal week, and not an average one, but the one that has just passed. How many hours of work, of sleep, of travel, how much time with the people close to you.
2. Circle the hours when you were truly present. Not just physically at home, but with your mind where your body was. There are often fewer than you think.
3. Ask your partner how they saw the week. Without defending yourself. Just listen and write down what was hardest for them.
4. Choose one single protected hour. An hour a week that you will defend the way you defend an important meeting — phone off and no “just this one thing”. Put it in your calendar.
5. Check again in three weeks. Did the hour survive? If not, write down what pushed it out. That answer tells you more about your work than any performance review.

The exercise is small on purpose. People who work long hours often approach change with the same perfectionism they bring to work — and give it up after two weeks. One hour that lasts is worth more than a perfect plan that stays on paper. If you find it hard to say no to others, the post on setting boundaries may help.

When long hours are not the main problem

I would not want to claim that every long week is harmful, or that the answer is always to work less. A few limits to my view:

• Phases are different from a way of life. A few weeks before an exam, a hearing or the close of a deal can be perfectly fine if it has a beginning and an end, and if you genuinely rest afterwards. The problem starts when the exception becomes the rule.
• Hours are not everything. How work affects health also depends on control over your own work, on meaning, and on support from colleagues. Someone working 60 hours on something they love and steer themselves may be better off than someone working 45 hours feeling powerless.
• Sometimes work is an escape. When home is hard — because of conflict, illness or emptiness — the office becomes a refuge. Then working less will not help until whatever the person is running from has been addressed.
• Some couples manage it. When both have consciously agreed how they will live, and the agreement is revisited regularly, one partner’s long hours can be part of a shared plan rather than a source of resentment.

If you notice that your sleep, mood or physical health have been getting worse for a while, talk to your GP. With chest pain or sudden neurological symptoms, do not wait — call 112 in Slovenia. If thoughts that you would rather not be alive ever appear, you can call the crisis line Klic v duševni stiski on 01 520 99 00 in Slovenia (7 pm to 7 am) or the Samaritans helpline on 116 123 in Slovenia (24 hours a day).

Where to start when you have no time

The most common response from people with long hours, when the conversation turns to help, is: “I don’t have time.” I understand it. I have written about how it can still work out in the post “I have no time for therapy”. For doctors, who nearly always put their own health last, there is the post When you help everyone but yourself: doctors as patients.

The first step can also be very small: fill in the burnout self-check in the knowledge base, or read what chronic stress is. Not to diagnose yourself, but so that what you are feeling gets a name.

In therapy, alone or as a couple, we do not ask how you could work less. We look at what purpose work serves in your life, what has happened to your relationship in the meantime, and what you both want to be different in five years’ time. The answers often lead to changes in the schedule — but from the inside, not as one more task on the list. I also work with English-speaking clients, in person in Ljubljana.

What to remember

• According to the WHO and ILO estimate, working 55 hours or more a week is linked with a higher risk of stroke and heart disease. Eighty hours is far beyond that line.
• Conflict between work and home is not only about time. You bring tiredness and “work” behaviour home with you, even when you are there.
• A family adapts to absence. When you come back you may feel like a guest — which is one more reason to talk, not to withdraw.
• Children often do not want more hours with their parents, but parents who are less tired and less tense.
• Start with one protected hour a week. A small change that lasts is worth more than a perfect plan.