Lifestyle

Sleep walking

All that tossing and turning adds up.

Insomnia is a major productivity killer for American workers, say sleep researchers, costing the average employee 11 days in lost time every year.

The cost to the nation is a whopping $63.2 billion in lost productivity, say the authors of the American Insomnia Study, who’ve published their findings in the current issue of the journal Sleep.

“We were shocked by the enormous impact insomnia has on the average person’s life,” said lead author Ronald Kessler, a psychiatric epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School. “It’s an underappreciated problem.”

Among workers surveyed, 23 percent suffered from insomnia. Women are affected more than men, and younger workers more than older ones.

The problem isn’t that underslept workers are failing to report for work, says Kessler — they’re clocking in, but they’re getting less done.

He suggested that the findings may be cause for employers to consider screening workers and offering treatment.

GRIM FINDINGS IN LONG-TERM JOBLESS SURVEY

New findings in a long-range survey of workers who’ve lost jobs in the recession show that many are struggling to find new ones — and most of those who’ve landed work say they’ve taken a step down.

Following up on a group of 600-plus unemployed workers who were first surveyed in August 2009, researchers at Rutgers found that 41 percent were either unemployed or working only part-time.

Hardest hit have been oder workers — just a quarter of respondents over 50 are currently working full-time.

“The grim reality is that millions of workers with valuable skills and experience still cannot find a full-time job,” said Carl Van Horn, director of the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development and a co-author of the study.

These jobless are borrowing money, selling possessions and cutting back on food and health-care expenditures. They’re also altering their retirement plans, with 35 percent saying they planned to retire earlier and an equivalent number saying they would delay retirement.

Among those who’ve found work, more than half have taken a pay cut. And pessimism runs deep — the majority believe their lower standard of living will be a permanent condition.