How many paid hours per week does a person need to work to maintain good mental health? That is the question a new study aimed to answer, and the findings suggest that shorter work weeks and longer weekends could be most beneficial.

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In many countries around the world, people in full-time employment work 40-hour weeks (typically 8 hours per day), Monday to Friday.

Some countries have shorter work weeks, however.

For instance, in Belgium, people typically work 38-hour weeks (7.7 hours per day), Monday to Friday. In Norway, there are 37.5-hour weeks.

Yet companies in some parts of the world are increasingly trialing short weeks to see how they affect employees’ productivity and overall sense of well-being.

For example, one company in New Zealand trialed a 4-day work week (32 hours) in 2018, and the results were so positive that they moved the company to consider switching to this model permanently.

However, despite the fact that such experiments appear to be successful, little research has looked into just how many hours of paid work per week would be beneficial for a person’s mental health.

So, recently, researchers from Cambridge University in the United Kingdom launched the project Employment Dosage to investigate this subject.

“We have effective dosage guides for everything from vitamin C to hours of sleep in order to help us feel better, but this is the first time the question has been asked of paid work,” notes study co-author Brendan Burchell, Ph.D.

In a recent study that is part of the Employment Dosage research project, Burchell and colleagues focused on how changes in hours spent doing paid work impacted the mental health and levels of life satisfaction of 71,113 people in the U.K. in 2009–2018.

The investigators’ findings now appear in the journal Social Science & Medicine.