By Jerry Dzugan, AMSEA
“To sleep perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub!” wrote the Bard. It’s unlikely that Shakespeare ever went commercial fishing. If so, he would have known that trying to get to sleep on a vessel could be the rub.
The Northeast Center for Occupational Health & Safety (NEC) has been partnering with the Alaska Marine Safety Education Association (AMSEA), Oregon State University and George Mason University since 2019 to better understand sleep and other health risk issues in fisheries. It’s one of the most comprehensive studies of sleep and health on commercial fishing vessels.
The study involved sleep surveys with 262 fish workers and free in-person health exams provided by health care teams in fishing harbor locations for 162 workers. These fish workers came from Alaska, Massachusetts and Oregon and represent folks in the salmon gillnet, Dungeness crab, scallop and lobster fisheries.
Since much of our physical and mental health is based on sleep, the survey was used to better understand sleep and look at what factors affect sleep on a fishing vessel. The data below on length of sleep fish workers get in different fisheries was based on 262 interviews.
How much sleep workers are getting on the vessel in a 24 hour period:
Lobster fishing was used as a control group for the study, since it is largely a day fishery. In the study, researchers found that of those surveyed:
- 40% of fish workers on vessels reported having pain that was severe enough to interfere with sleep.
- Nearly 50% reported they do not have great quality of sleep.
- Nearly 33% said they had trouble getting to sleep.
- Nearly 50% said they had trouble staying asleep.
- Nearly 20% reported having a diagnosed sleep problem.
Keep in mind that the adult human body needs eight hours of sleep in a 24-hour period to operate at full function. There are no exceptions to this need for sleep, unless you are the 1 in 12,000 people who have a rare gene that allows you to operate at full function with just six hours of sleep. Your chances of getting hit by lightning are greater than having this gene.
There are many reasons why sleep is difficult on a fishing vessel: screaming hydraulics, engine noise, the motion of the ocean, erratic work and delivery schedules, stress, caffeine, alcohol, pain or the straining of the anchor gear in a dark and stormy night, to name a few reasons.
Many health and safety issues associated with insufficient sleep have been demonstrated by other studies with adults who do not commercially fish. Sleep deprivation has been proven to increase accidents and injuries and results in higher risk taking decisions, memory problems, obesity, cancer, diabetes, cardiac problems and dementia.
Other studies outside of the NEC study have also demonstrated that sleep deprivation also has a significant negative effect on immunity.
Flu vaccinations given to young adults who had only four hours of sleep before a vaccination had only a 50% immune reaction to the flu shot compared to people who had a seven-to-nine hour sleep. Even if the test subjects had two or three weeks of recovery sleep, they never developed a full immune response to the shot.
Lesson learned: if you want the full benefit of a vaccination, get seven to nine hours of sleep before and after your shot. The idea that you can make up for your lost sleep is just a myth when it comes to the body defending itself from illnesses.
Sleep deprivation has long term consequences for your body’s own immune system as well. Your killer T cells are produced by your body’s immune system to destroy deadly virus, cancer and foreign cells.
A study was conducted with young males who were only allowed four hours of sleep in one night. They were found to have lost 70% of the killer T cells circulating in their immune system compared to a group that had a full eight hours of sleep.
One can imagine the effect that weeks or years of poor sleep would have on your cancer immune system. A large European study of almost 25,000 people demonstrated that sleeping just 6 hours a night or less was associated with a 40% increase in cancers. Similar associations were demonstrated in a group of 75,000 women who were traced over eleven years.
The NEC study realistically notes that obtaining eight hours of sleep on a commercial fishing vessel is not an option in many cases. NEC suggests focusing on other areas that can positively affect brain health such as physical exercise, diet, medical and mental health and having a positive social network.
We will look at other tips to improve sleep health in the next issue of Fishermen’s News.
There were several other phases that were an outgrowth to the NEC study. One outgrowth is a 16 series podcast aimed at fish workers called Fishing Forward which has been very well received.
About 25% of the podcasts were on sleep health and sleep strategies in commercial fishing. All episodes can be found at: coastalroutes.org/fishingforwardpod.
More on sleep deprivation and the health study can be found at https://tinyurl.com/54dd3jx7.
Funding for the study was provided by the U.S. Coast Guard & National Institute for Occupational Safety & Health.