Most research on sleep and aging asks whether people are getting enough hours. A new study from the University of Edinburgh Business School asked a different question: for employees heading toward retirement age, how often does work itself get in the way of sleep — and how much of that goes unnoticed by both workers and the health system?
The answer, published in Scientific Reports, is more than researchers expected. As part of the Supporting Healthy Ageing at Work (SHAW) project, the team followed 45 workers aged 50 to 66 across a range of employment sectors for a full year, combining more than 1,900 self-reported wellbeing and workplace assessments with over 5,200 days of wearable sensor data.
A Sleep Disorder Threshold Met by Nearly Everyone
Nearly 70% of participants experienced persistent, clinically significant sleep problems over the course of the study — despite having no known history of a diagnosed sleep disorder going in. Even more strikingly, almost 92% of participants met the clinical threshold for a sleep disorder at least once during the year-long tracking period.
That gap between the two figures matters. It suggests sleep disruption in this age group isn't a fixed subgroup problem affecting a chronically poor-sleeping minority, but something close to a universal experience that ebbs and flows — meaning a single point-in-time doctor's visit or one-off sleep questionnaire would likely miss most of it. The study, funded by the UK Research and Innovation Healthy Ageing Challenge's Social, Behavioural and Design Research Program, was designed specifically to catch that kind of fluctuation using continuous, longitudinal measurement rather than a snapshot.
The Common Thread Was Work, Not Age
The researchers' analysis pointed to work-related stress, not age-related decline, as the factor most consistently associated with the sleep and wellbeing disruptions they tracked. Overall wellbeing in the cohort was heavily dependent on whether participants maintained a sustained work-life balance — when that balance broke down, sleep problems tended to follow.
That distinction reframes how sleep complaints in older workers are typically interpreted. Sleep difficulty in this age range is often chalked up to menopause, general aging, or early markers of disease. This study instead points toward the workplace itself — scheduling demands, job strain, and the erosion of personal time — as a modifiable driver that clinicians and employers rarely screen for directly.
What This Means for Patients
Workers in their 50s and early 60s experiencing new or worsening sleep trouble should not assume it is simply an inevitable part of aging. Because nearly all participants in this study crossed a clinical sleep-disorder threshold at some point, and because the researchers linked those episodes to periods of higher work stress, patients and their doctors have reason to ask about workload, scheduling, and work-life balance as part of a sleep evaluation — not just about sleep hygiene or menopause status in isolation.
For employers, the findings suggest that sleep complaints among older staff may be a leading indicator of unsustainable workload rather than a personal health issue to be managed individually. Because the study used continuous wearable tracking rather than occasional check-ins, it also underscores a practical point for anyone monitoring their own sleep with a wearable device: sleep problems that come and go with stressful stretches at work can look unremarkable in a single week's summary while still crossing a clinically meaningful threshold across the year. Patients with a pattern of sleep trouble that seems to track their work calendar should mention that pattern specifically to their doctor, since it may point toward a different intervention than a diagnosis of chronic insomnia unrelated to daily circumstances.
