I grew up in a household with a single-mother working third shift. My grandfather worked third shift, my sister worked third shift, and now I work the night shift. My schedule includes three twelve hour shifts overnight. There are many great things about working the night shift, but nothing is perfect.
#1 Everyone else is up during the day.
This is a given, a kinda duh moment. My husband works during the day, and when I come home, I sleep between nine in the morning until three in the afternoon sometime a little earlier, sometimes a little later. The problem with everyone else being up really comes into play with those outside my household. I am in an apartment, my upstairs neighbor has a toddler, my neighbor walks on her heels, and clean every day. There are several mornings where I lay in bed and hear her walking through her apartment, and the toddler runs up and down the hallway. UPS usually will deliver a package at the central office which is fine except when they knock at my door to with the box, my dog goes crazy, and I wake up to calm the dog and bring in the parcel. All maintenance and construction are done during the day. Lawn mowers, leaf blowers, hammers, pest control, and everything else comes through my walls, windows, and doors during my sleeping hours.
#2 Insomnia, at times.
This is a weird thing that I did not think would affect me, but it does, it makes no sense, but at times I suffer from insomnia. There are weeks that after I work my three shifts, I am able to switch back into day-night sleep easily. Then there are weeks that I stay awake all night and spend the four days with cat naps, two hours here or one hour there. It drives me crazy, I can’t spend time with my husband, and I am tired and unable to be productive during my free time. I have noticed patterns. For me, it’s all about that first-day-off, the day I have dubbed “the recovery day,” I mainly make no plans, I come home to sleep and relax the rest of the day. Well, timing is everything, I have found that if I wake up between two and three in the afternoon, I can slip into a regular sleep cycle. But the days I sleep in, where I sleep in past five in the afternoon, I am doomed for the rest of the week no matter what I do to correct it.
#3 No exact sleep pattern.
As described previously, I genuinely have no exact sleep pattern. Three nights a week I am up all night and sleep five to six hours during the day. Then four days a week I try my hardest to wake up early in the morning and be productive. Keeping a routine is hard, and maybe it’s because the timing difference and the sleep pattern is not routine. I find even if I was able to sleep throughout the night that I am still tired the next 4day and ready to nap. I try not to take naps during the day. But a routine in sleep and day to day activities would prove to be a better lifestyle.
#4 Health concerns.
There are so many different health concerns that are linked to long-term night shift workers. Let me express the “link to” again, they have found that people who work at night have been shown to have higher occurrences of depression, heart disease, gastrointestinal problems, diabetes, and malnourishment in certain vitamins and minerals. A quick search on Google, and on the NIH(National Institute of Health) brings up a multitude of studies looking at night shift and varying health issues. A theory is the change in sleep patterns changes your metabolism and appetite, this alteration over a long-term period can cause these issues. I have heard of one nurse who decided to live as a night person, during their day off they kept up the nightly lifestyle and ended up with Rickets from lack of sun exposure and vitamin D deficiency.
There are plenty of people that are unable to keep the nighttime schedule, some people expressed that they felt drunk and, in a fog, when working nights. Night shifts are not for everyone. But like everything else, there will always be both the good and bad to everything.