Yasmina Kattou, edited by Ugo Pascolo 06:20, April 30, 2022

Sleep, metabolism, cerebral, physiological disorders... The consequences of working with atypical hours are numerous for the human body, and sometimes far from negligible.

These are in any case the results of the study "Atypical working hours: low-skilled women increasingly exposed", published in the monthly bulletin of INED this week.

Just over a third of French employees work atypical hours.

And among them, a growing number of women, many of whom have little or no qualifications.

These are the conclusions of the authors of the article "Atypical working hours: unskilled women increasingly exposed", published in the monthly bulletin of INED this week.

And the health consequences are numerous, explains Arnaud Rabat, researcher at the Armed Forces Biomedical Research Institute and specialist in the effects of fatigue.

Proven risks of sleep disorders, even metabolic...

"The short-term consequences with proven risks are sleep disorders and possibly metabolic disorders", begins by explaining the expert at the microphone of Europe 1. In the study, an employee is said to be working atypical hours s he declares that he usually works according to at least one of the following methods: early in the morning (5am-7am), late in the evening (8pm-12am), at night (12am-5am).

And people with these schedules will "be sleepy, that is to say have difficulty maintaining a level of alertness relevant to work, and this can lead to incident or accident situations."

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... and probable consequences on brain function

So much for the medium-term effects, but the list is far from being finished.

Since working with atypical schedules leads to "probable medium-term consequences on brain functioning, on physiological and metabolic functioning."

Concretely, this leads to "weight gain, the fact of possibly developing pathologies such as type two diabetes, carcinogenic risks in particular proven for night workers".

So when we know that we will not be able to have our sleep count [between 7 and 9 hours for an adult between 26 and 64 years old, between 8 and 10 hours below, editor's note], Arnaud Rabat recalls the possibility of “Take a 20 to 30 minute nap during the day to limit the effects of sleep debt”.