That sandwich you took from the community kitchen fridge that wasn’t yours, the not-so-nice comment you made during a colleague’s presentation or the spat over a parking spot close to the office front door — all might be keeping you up at night.

That’s according to a new study from the University of Iowa that finds that people are more likely to suffer from insomnia on days when they do not behave well at work, a news release from UI says.

An article on the study will come out soon in the Journal of Applied Psychology. Its co-authors are Christopher M. Barnes of the University of Washington and Yongjuan Li of the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The finding is based on three studies that sampled from nearly 600 workers in the United States and China. They were asked about their workplace behavior and how they slept. 

“After people engage in bad workplace behaviors, they come to realize such bad deeds threaten their positive moral self-image, which creates stress,” said lead researcher Zhenyu Yuan, a doctoral student studying management and organizations in the UI Tippie College of Business, according to the release. “As a result, they may keep ruminating over their stress from work, and thus have trouble falling and staying asleep at night.”

Two of the studies asked employees to report their counterproductive work behaviors during the day and their off-work feelings and sleep quality at night over the course of 10 workdays, the release said. The researchers found that counterproductive behavior at work was significantly associated with work-related ruminative thoughts in the evening, which further led to insomnia at night.

In the other study, employees were asked to recall different types of work behaviors from the past, the release explained. Those who were prompted to think back to an instance of counterproductive work behavior had more trouble falling and staying asleep that night than those who recalled routine work behaviors.

Read the full UI release here. 

The Business Record newsroom’s finding? Be kind and thoughtful while at work (translation: quit acting like a jerk!) and sleep well.