Exodus 20 · Subject · Stress and Weariness
Stress, Sleep and the Sabbath
Eight peer-reviewed studies of chronic stress, lost sleep and Sabbath keeping stand beside the command to rest on the seventh day.
Deuteronomy gives the Sabbath a reason of its own, “so that your manservant and maidservant may rest as you do” (Deuteronomy 5:14).
but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God, on which you must not do any work—neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant or livestock, nor the foreigner within your gates.
- Books
- Exodus, Deuteronomy
- Hold in memory
- Mark 2:27
Summary
Scripture commands a weekly day of rest and calls sleep a gift of the LORD. Medical research describes the cost of going without rest, in the body's response to stress that does not let up and in the effects of sleep cut short. The research stands beside the command as corroboration, and Scripture remains its ground.
- The Sabbath command rests on what God has done, at creation and at the exodus.
- Stress that is repeated or that outlasts its cause wears the body down over the years.
- Too little sleep harms judgement and health, and the tired often misjudge how tired they are.
- Surveys link Sabbath keeping with lower burnout and more regular sleep, and the cause of that link remains unproven.
What Scripture Says of Rest and Sleep
The command, its reasons, its purpose and the sleep the LORD gives.
Stress, Sleep and the Sabbath belongs to the trial of stress and weariness, and its reader is anyone whose work leaves no room to stop. The weary often treat rest as a luxury to be earned, and Scripture treats it as a command and a gift.
The question it answers is what the Bible says about rest and sleep and what peer-reviewed studies add about the cost of going without them. It gives the Sabbath command with its reasons, the texts on sleep, eight studies with their findings, and what those studies cannot show.
Six days you shall labor and do all your work,The command opens with six days of work, so the day of rest is set inside a week of labor.
For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth and the sea and all that is in them, but on the seventh day He rested. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and set it apart as holy.The verse stands here because it gives the reason Exodus attaches to the command.
Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and that the LORD your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. That is why the LORD your God has commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.The verse stands here because Deuteronomy attaches its own reason to the same command.
Then Jesus declared, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.Jesus names the purpose of the day, given for the good of the people who keep it.
Scripture also treats sleep as a need the LORD supplies to His people.
I will lie down and sleep in peace, for You alone, O LORD, make me dwell in safety.David lies down in peace because the LORD keeps him safe, so his sleep rests on trust.
Elijah, who had asked the LORD to take his life, slept under a broom tree and was woken twice by an angel to eat before the journey to Horeb (1 Kings 19:4 to 8).
Deuteronomy 5:15, Mark 2:27, Psalm 4:8
Eight Studies Side by Side
Two studies concern stress, three concern sleep and three concern the Sabbath.
The eight studies measured different things in different people, so each finding stands on its own design.
| Study | Who or what was studied | What was found |
|---|---|---|
| McEwen and Stellar, Archives of Internal Medicine, 1993 | A review of human and animal studies of stress and disease | Allostatic load defined as "the cost of chronic exposure to fluctuating or heightened neural or neuroendocrine response resulting from repeated or chronic environmental challenge" |
| Van Dongen, Maislin, Mullington and Dinges, Sleep, 2003 | 48 healthy adults aged 21 to 38, given 4, 6 or 8 hours in bed a night for 14 days, or kept awake for 3 nights | Six hours or less a night "produced cognitive performance deficits equivalent to up to 2 nights of total sleep deprivation", and the subjects "were largely unaware" of them |
| McEwen, Metabolism, 2006 | A review of chronic sleep deprivation as a stressor | In young healthy volunteers, chronic sleep loss was reported to raise inflammatory cytokines, blood pressure, evening cortisol, insulin and blood glucose |
| Juster, McEwen and Lupien, Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 2010 | A review of studies using an allostatic load index of neuroendocrine, immune, metabolic and cardiovascular measures | The index gave "greater prediction of morbidity and mortality over and beyond traditional detection methods" |
| Cappuccio, D'Elia, Strazzullo and Miller, Sleep, 2010 | A meta-analysis of 16 prospective studies, 27 cohorts and 1,382,999 people followed for 4 to 25 years | Short sleep carried a relative risk of death of 1.12 and long sleep of 1.30, with sleep reported by questionnaire |
| Dein and Loewenthal, Journal of Religion and Health, 2013 | Interviews with 13 practising Jews, 9 in the United Kingdom and 4 in the United States | Rest from mundane concerns and deeper relationships were named as benefits, and "some found they were prone to worry more on Shabbos" |
| Cheng, Lee and Djita, Journal of Religion and Health, 2023 | 1,300 teachers in Christian schools in the United States, Canada, Indonesia and Paraguay | "An inverse and statistically significant relationship between Sabbath-keeping and burnout" |
| Zarina, Berger, Fishbein, Tkachev and Korman, BMC Public Health, 2025 | 473 Israeli Jewish adults aged 60 to 88, 274 religious and 199 secular | The religious group slept 442.7 minutes on the Sabbath against 424.8 and had 14.1 minutes of social jetlag against 25.7, with no difference in reported sleep quality |
Cheng, Lee and Djita, Journal of Religion and Health, 2023, Zarina, Berger, Fishbein, Tkachev and Korman, BMC Public Health, 2025
Chronic Stress and the Body
The body's stress response protects in the short run and costs the body when it stays on.
McEwen and Stellar described a body whose systems shift to meet each demand, a process researchers call allostasis. A demand that keeps returning, or a response that outlasts the demand, turns that flexibility into a cost.
Juster, McEwen and Lupien gathered studies that scored this cost across the hormones, the immune system, metabolism and the heart. The combined score warned of illness and death better than the usual clinical tests.
What Lost Sleep Does
Lost sleep impairs thinking, strains the body and is linked with earlier death.
In the laboratory study of Van Dongen and his colleagues, the cost of short nights built up day after day, while the sleepers' own ratings of their sleepiness rose little after the first days.
McEwen described chronic sleep loss as a stressor that adds to allostatic load throughout the body. Cappuccio and his colleagues found, across studies of whole populations, that both short and long habitual sleep went with a greater risk of death.
Studies of a Weekly Day of Rest
Three studies asked what keeping a Sabbath goes with, in teachers, older adults and practising Jews.
Cheng, Lee and Djita surveyed teachers in Christian schools in four countries and found less burnout among those who kept a Sabbath. Zarina and her colleagues found that religious Sabbath keepers in Israel kept steadier sleep times across the week than their secular peers.
Dein and Loewenthal heard from practising Jews that the day gave rest and time with others. They also reported that the quiet of the day left some of them more room to worry.
The Limits of the Research
What the designs of the eight studies allow a reader to conclude, and what they leave open.
The three studies of the Sabbath measured people at one time or recorded their own accounts. A difference found that way may come from the kind of people who choose to keep the day. The sleep studies tested healthy adults in a laboratory or followed populations by questionnaire, and a risk found across a population cannot be read as one person's future.
Exhaustion, sleeplessness and burnout that last are matters for a physician as well as a pastor, and medical care belongs beside prayer.
Which Day, and How It Was Kept
Which day believers keep, and how Israel kept the day.
Rest Received
The Sabbath and the night's sleep both ask a person to stop before the work is finished.
Scripture gives that stopping as a gift, and the weary receive it by trusting the LORD with what is left undone.
Sources
Scripture is the Berean Standard Bible.
- Bruce S. McEwen and Eliot Stellar, Stress and the individual: mechanisms leading to disease, Archives of Internal Medicine 153, no. 18 (1993): 2093 to 2101.
- Hans P. A. Van Dongen, Greg Maislin, Janet M. Mullington and David F. Dinges, The cumulative cost of additional wakefulness: dose-response effects on neurobehavioral functions and sleep physiology from chronic sleep restriction and total sleep deprivation, Sleep 26, no. 2 (2003): 117 to 126.
- Bruce S. McEwen, Sleep deprivation as a neurobiologic and physiologic stressor: allostasis and allostatic load, Metabolism 55, no. 10 supplement 2 (2006): S20 to S23.
- Robert-Paul Juster, Bruce S. McEwen and Sonia J. Lupien, Allostatic load biomarkers of chronic stress and impact on health and cognition, Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 35, no. 1 (2010): 2 to 16.
- Francesco P. Cappuccio, Lanfranco D'Elia, Pasquale Strazzullo and Michelle A. Miller, Sleep duration and all-cause mortality: a systematic review and meta-analysis of prospective studies, Sleep 33, no. 5 (2010): 585 to 592.
- Simon Dein and Kate M. Loewenthal, The mental health benefits and costs of Sabbath observance among Orthodox Jews, Journal of Religion and Health 52, no. 4 (2013): 1382 to 1390.
- Albert Cheng, Matthew H. Lee and Rian Djita, A cross-sectional analysis of the relationship between Sabbath practices and US, Canadian, Indonesian, and Paraguayan teachers' burnout, Journal of Religion and Health 62, no. 2 (2023): 1090 to 1113.
- D. Zarina, A. Berger, P. Fishbein, V. Tkachev and M. Korman, Living by the clock of the book: religious observance enhances circadian stability and reduces social jetlag in older adults, a cross-sectional study, BMC Public Health 25, no. 1 (2025): 2607.
Keep Studying
Doctrines1
Trials of life1