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The role of good sleep can be challenging for some well-run workplace wellness programs. After all, one sleeps mostly at home rather than at the office (we hope!).

However, sleep benefits are integral to overall wellbeing — including many components that a well-run workplace wellness program focuses on.

For example, we noted a Washington Post report about several “obstacles to healthy eating,” which include understanding “why you’re still hungry.” One was that “you aren’t sleeping enough.”

Indeed, a 2015 study in the Sleep Medicine Journal looks at the role sleep may play in healthy eating. It’s titled “Human REM sleep: influence on feeding behaviour, with clinical implications.”

We also recognized the potential workplace benefits of midday rest. According to the New York Times, part of that sleep education may want to include naps at work. As the piece notes: “A growing field of occupational and psychological research is building the case for restfulness in pursuit of greater productivity.”

Indeed, the post notes a study previously published in Nature titled “The restorative effect of naps on perceptual deterioration.” Here researchers “tested human subjects four times in one day and found that with repeated, within-day testing, perceptual thresholds actually increased progressively across the four test sessions. This performance deterioration was prevented either by shifting the target stimuli to an untrained region of visual space or by having the subjects take a mid-day nap between the second and third sessions.”

Now a new study connects rest challenges with poor quality of life in some chronic kidney disease (CKD) patients.

The study is published in the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology. It's titled “Sleep Duration and Health-Related Quality of Life in Predialysis CKD.”

The authors state: “Sleep duration has been associated with cardiometabolic risk and mortality. The health-related quality of life represents a patient’s comprehensive perception of health and is accepted as a health outcome. We examined the relationship between sleep duration and health-related quality of life in predialysis CKD.”

The researchers conducted a cross-sectional study in which “data from 1910 adults with CKD enrolled in the Korean Cohort Study for Outcome in Patients with CKD were analyzed. Health-related quality of life was assessed with the physical component summary and mental component summary” of a survey.

Their findings “suggest that short or long sleep duration is independently associated with low health-related quality of life in adults with CKD.”

For well-run workplace wellness programs, the research may offer new insights into the benefits of focusing on good rest habits — even if that's a health activity that occurs mostly outside of the office.