This prospective research was designed to investigate, for the first time, the across-time interrelationship between job strain, burnout and insomnia. The first study objective is to elucidate the directionality of the across-time linkages of burnout and insomnia. The second objective is to explore some potential long-term effects of job strain on burnout and insomnia. The third objective is to explore whether burnout and insomnia levels predict each other development across time over and above job strain.

Subjects were 1,356 healthy employed adults who completed questionnaires during a periodic health examination at two points of time, T1 and T2, about 18 months apart. We study two different outcomes across all three studies:
(a) A change of insomnia or burnout symptom levels over time; was tested by using OLS regressions in which T1 value of the respective criterion as the first predictor.
(b) Development of new cases of burnout and insomnia; was assessed through logistic regression models, which were implemented only on subjects who reported not suffering from the criterion at T1. For each analysis we controlled the effects of depression, neuroticism, age, gender and obesity.

The findings of Study 1 are that burnout and insomnia represent a risk factor for development of each other change and an onset of new cases across time. The results of Study 2 show that job strain intensify burnout or insomnia symptoms with time. The findings of the third study indicate that insomnia at T1 predicts increased burnout lev els with time over and above job strain.

These findings open a new avenue for exploring why burnout and sleep problems occur and may ultimately provide new insights into how burnout and insomnia may be prevented. We suggest possible psychological and physiological mechanisms of the link between burnout, insomnia and job strain.

Faculty of Management, Tel-Aviv University

Research number: M/4/2005