Better weekend sleep leads to less exhaustion during workweek, research shows

A recent study of employees in Germany found that higher sleep quality during weekends was associated with slightly lower levels of exhaustion during the workweek. These employees were better able to refocus on their work on Mondays, setting a positive tone for the entire week.  The paper was published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior.

Typically, employees work from Monday to Friday and then enjoy two days of leisure on the weekend. After these days of relaxation, Monday, the first day of the workweek, demands a return to focus on work tasks, potentially making Monday the most unpopular day of the week, as the days of leisure and rest come to an end.

On Monday, employees need to undergo a process called psychological reattachment, which means they need to mentally reconnect to work. This involves thinking about their work-related goals again before actually starting work. Previous studies have emphasized the importance of mentally disconnecting from work for one’s well-being, but the topic of mentally reconnecting to work after leisure days has not been studied extensively.

Study author Jette Völker and her colleagues aimed to explore the role of sleep quality in mental reattachment to work after leisure days and its links to exhaustion at work and work task performance. They hypothesized that employees would report better reattachment to work on Mondays following weekends when they experienced higher-quality sleep. Conversely, weekends with catch-up sleep (sleep that compensates for previous lack of sleep) or disrupted natural sleep times due to social obligations and activities (social sleep lag) would be followed by lower levels of reattachment to work on Monday. Further, employees with higher-than-usual reattachment on Monday would experience lower levels of exhaustion and higher task performance during the workweek.

To test these hypotheses, the researchers conducted a weekly diary study with 310 employed individuals from Germany. The sample was predominantly female (81%), with an average age of 41 years. A majority (55%) held university degrees, and 77% lived without children in their households.

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For five weeks, study participants answered surveys on Mondays and Fridays. On Mondays, they reported on their sleep during the weekend and mental reattachment to work. On Fridays, participants reported on their workweek exhaustion and task performance.

Results showed that weekends when participants slept better were indeed followed by better reattachment on Monday. In contrast, more catch-up sleep tended to be followed by lower reattachment on Monday. This was not the case with social sleep lag (having to go to sleep or wake up outside one’s natural pattern due to social obligations). Lower reattachment on Monday was associated with higher levels of exhaustion during the workweek, but was not linked to worse task performance.

“Our findings suggest that high-quality sleep during the weekend can be beneficial, but catching up on sleep during the weekend can be detrimental to Monday reattachment and, in turn, indirectly to workweek exhaustion. Accordingly, we demonstrate that Monday reattachment can set the tone for the entire workweek, but the capability to reattach depends on weekend sleep as a core recovery process,” the study authors concluded.

The study highlights the importance of weekend sleep quality for feelings of exhaustion during the workweek. However, the study relied solely on self-reports, which required participants to remember how they slept on previous days of the week, something people easily forget. Results might differ if objective measures of sleep quality were used.

The paper, “It is Monday again: Weekend sleep differentially relates to the workweek via reattachment on Monday,” was authored by Jette Völker, Monika Wiegelmann, Theresa J. S. Koch, and Sabine Sonnentag.