Waking up at Night to urinate could decrease your productivity – Study

Do you know that waking up to urinate could actually decrease your productivity? This is what elderly persons who have difficulty sleeping may discover, especially if they find that their problems worsen if they have to get up in the middle of the night to urinate, according to new research....


The problem is known as nocturia, and according to the researchers, it has been linked not only to sleep disruptions but to "significant reductions" in both work productivity and leisure activity as well.

They polled 261 women and 385 men who suffer from the condition over a 14-day period, asking them about the impact it has on their ability to perform their work-related and other daily tasks.

 As it turns out, nocturia decreased on- the-job productivity by 24 percent and the ability to perform recreational activity by 34 percent.

A paper detailing the results of the research is published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine on March 15. Researchers also reported that more than half (54 percent) of all nighttime sleep disruptions were associated with the need to urinate, and that people who woke up remained awake an average of 11.5 percent longer on nights when they had to make a trip to the restroom.

 "Nocturia is a common problem affecting around a third of adults, but its burden is underestimated and it is often dismissed as being less serious than other chronic conditions in terms of impact on quality of life and societal costs.

Data show that nocturia negatively affects both sleep and daytime performance and its impact on work productivity is in line with many other chronic conditions.

Patients with nocturia should seek specific treatment for this debilitating condition. It is expected that proper treatment of insomnia might reduce the occurrence of nocturia.