Bizarre HR: Night-time bathroom trips make you less productive

Workers who get out of bed during the night to use the bathroom carry out a quarter less work than those who don’t.

New research has suggested nocturia – where a person wakes up once or more in the night to urinate – leads to “notable work productivity loss”, the Daily Mail reported.

The study examined 261 women and 385 men with the condition and gave them a standardised work productivity questionnaire to complete. From this, researchers discovered nocturia seemed to reduce work productivity by 24%.

This percentage is higher than the productivity loss shown by people with asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases, the researchers claimed.

“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,” Philip Van Kerrebroeck, professor of urology at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, told DM.

“These 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."