Searching for overworking health risks at GoogleScholar yields 22.400 results. The two mostly cited papers are the following:

Karoshi, death from over-work, is usually the extreme result of acute cardiovascular events including stroke. Among 203 karoshi cases received worker compensation in Japan, sixty percent died of stroke. Karoshi is a term for social medicine originated from Japan. Literature reviews on karoshi found that long overtime at work, on duty in holidays, attending a new job with no family members around, and working at night shift are risk factors. Work stress increases secretion of catecholamines (epinephrine and norepinephrine) and cortisol which is associated with progression of atherosclerosis and increased risk of cardiovascular diseases and stroke. To avoid long working hours, stress management and treatment of hypertension, diabetes, and hyperlipidemia are key issues in preventing karoshi caused by stroke.

Why Do People Overwork at the Risk of Impairing Mental Health? - Journal of Happiness Studies

We find that job satisfaction increases when people work more than 55 h per week. However, we also find that hours worked linearly erode workers’ mental health. These findings imply that people who overvalue job satisfaction work excessive hours, consequently damaging their mental health. People may hold incorrect beliefs and underestimate the mental health risks of overwork, which may lead them to work longer hours. Our findings imply that educational and regulatory interventions are needed for both workers and employers to reduce the detrimental impacts on mental health caused by overwork.

It is common knowledge that overworking is counterproductive and “brings detrimental impacts on mental health”.

Yet, we observe at Aragon that overworking is rather the norm than the exception, which caused many people to leave. At the end of the day, after spending countless hours in front of the monitor, sometimes even skipping lunch, we still feel unproductive and unsatisfied.

This problem is not unique to the engineering team. We all suffer from

• too many meetings
• lack of focus time and constant noise by messages
• tight deadlines

Most of this seems to be unavoidable in the remote working environment and fast-paced web3 world we find ourselves in. Also our path to progressive decentralization is a particular rocky and hard one. The work of all the people are trying hard to improve on these conditions is acknowledged and greatly appreciated by all signers of this petition.

However, tight deadlines are avoidable because we collectively define them ourselves. We should not accepted overwork as a trade-off for the most precious thing we own, our health. It goes without saying that this is also very counterproductive and put the goal of the Aragon Project at risk.

In consequence, we propose to bring attention to the subject of working culture and work-life balance and suggest prioritizing efforts to reduce this unhealthy workload across all teams.