I once worked in an industry once that wound up forcing long periods of excessive overtime. Think 60+ hour weeks for months on end. And for peanuts (16 to 22 an hour.)
The combined stress resulted in the following issues among the team:
- Employee #1 committed suicide the weekend after valentines day, (work stress led to alcoholism relapse, then everything else fell apart)
- Employee #2 wound up completely throwing out his back (i.e. could not move and had to crawl into his house) because of the bad chair ergonomics.
- Employee #4 had multiple nervous breakdowns, ruining their marriage and setting back their life years.
- Employee #5 relapsed on some bad habits involving opioids.
Of the above 4, 2 were tobacco users and their intake increased substantially during these time periods. This was true of others on the team that didn't fall into these more extreme examples.
But even in those other cases, I saw ruined marriages, slow spirals into bad habits (gambling, drinking, adult clubs, etc.) and overall years taken off peoples life from stress.
So yeah, long hours are no joke.
Edit: I skipped #3 on the list because the way they responded to stress wasn't easy to delineate. (They were however also a smoker and would increase intake under stress)
On the other hand... it's worth noting that #3, when under high workload stress, would become very judgemental, easily offended and prone to rants that would, depending on day, either belong on breitbart or buzzfeed.