Scientific papers are too complicated generally with their vocab and I’ve trawled through lots of like social media posts and wedmd/live strong type posts.
As someone who is being on night shift for the last 8 years and many times before that, I suggest that you get blackout curtains for your sleeping area.
Make sure to sleep in increments of an hour and a half, which is the approximate length of a sleep cycle. If you need to take time, release melatonin pills.
Eat your meals the opposite way that you would working during the day. Wake up, have breakfast in the evening, have lunch at work and dinner when you finish in the morning. Go to bed a few hours after dinner. This helps turn your biological clock to night shift work.
It isn’t perfect but it definitely helps make it bearable. If you are eating excessively to stay awake and you’re probably going to gain a lot of weight, you might also end up getting diabetes which is very prevalent in night shift workers as is cancer.
If you are using alcohol to try to get to sleep, do whatever you can to get the hell off night shift. It’s not a good way cope with this shift. It isn’t for everybody, the only reason it works really well for me is because my brain doesn’t work properly anyways and I need to sleep apnea machine to keep breathing so it doesn’t much matter to me when I sleep as long as I have that machine.
I have found its more through tips from colleges and shared trauma. In my experience its the intial change to nights thats hard once I’ve done 2 my body has started to adjust.
- either stay up late and go to sleep early morning to start transition - nap alot during the day and use caffeine to pull throughOnce on shift you need to keep active mentally and physically, being idle is the killer, make sure to take short breaks, keep hydrated, it is very easy to over snack but you need to keep eating.
The change back after isnt too bad imho you can gey some sleep straight away and but wake mid afternoon and can start to pull back to normal.
make sure you get paid for the rest day after when coming back to days you have worked that time you have taken the sacrifice and deserve to be compensated for it.
Are theres 12 or 8 hour nights? One is nicer.
