Assoc. Prof. Dr. Yesim Sirakaya

St. Clements University, UK Head of the Department of Labor Economics and Industrial Relations
Orcid ID: 0009-0004-2558-8194

DOI : https://doi.org/10.58806/ijsshmr.2025.v4i12n01

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ABSTRACT

Although sleep has long been treated as an individual biological necessity, it has increasingly become a societal, organizational, and cultural phenomenon in modern societies. Social sleep disruption refers to the collective breakdown of sleep duration, sleep architecture, and circadian rhythms, as well as the clash between individuals’ biological time and the institutional, digital, and socio-economic rhythms imposed upon them. Rather than reducing sleep disturbances to physiological issues, this article analyzes the structural effects of working life and digital culture on sleep from an Industrial and Organizational Psychology perspective. Growing evidence shows that chronic sleep fragmentation slows cognitive processes, heightens emotional reactivity, and weakens self-regulation (Walker, 2017). Importantly, this deterioration is no longer occurring at the individual level alone but is increasingly observed on a societal scale. Urban noise levels, shift work patterns, the expectation of 24/7 availability, attention-driven digital algorithms, and socio-cultural role pressures systematically disrupt sleep architecture for broad segments of the population (Foster & Kreitzman, 2014; Roenneberg, 2012). Within organizational structures, the obligation to remain connected after hours, the normalization of being “always online,” and the chronicity of performance culture force employees’ biological rhythms to submit to the rhythm of work. Consequently, significant negative effects emerge in job satisfaction, organizational commitment, innovation, psychological safety, self-efficacy, and psychological capital (Bakker & Demerouti, 2007; Bandura, 1997; Maslach & Leiter, 2016). Individuals thus begin to carry not only a “sleep debt” but also an organizational rhythm debt. The article further discusses how digital culture-particularly social media platforms-captures and manipulates circadian rhythms. TikTok, Instagram Reels, and other short-form video streams alter dopamine cycles, pushing users toward delayed sleep. Roenneberg’s (2012) “social jet-lag” has become a mass phenomenon rather than an individual irregularity. This study conceptualizes this situation as a collapse of social rhythms. Social sleep disruption affects not only individual health but also societal well-being, productivity, educational outcomes, family relations, and organizational efficiency. By integrating neuroscientific findings, organizational behavior models (especially the JD-R Model), cultural rhythm theories, and digital ecology, this paper fills a major gap in the literature. Finally, it offers policy recommendations-including national sleep policies, revised school start times, after-hours communication laws, organizational sleep hygiene programs, and digital rhythm awareness strategies-arguing that this invisible psychological pressure has become a crisis with implications for public health, labor productivity, and organizational well-being.

KEYWORDS:

Social sleep disruption, circadian rhythm misalignment, digital attention economy, industrial and organizational psychology, organizational rhythm debt, psychological safety, performance.

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VOlUME 04 ISSUE 12 December 2025