The joys of working nights.

Having been working nights for a long time now, you would have thought that the body clock would be ticking along quite happily now, adjusted to the odd hours and even odder eating habits...or not.

Today featured interruptions, dog barking, getting up, dog crying, going back to bed, more dog barking and general thoughts of abandoning all attempts to sleep and just staying up. Some days are like that. Life carries on as normal because your's isn't. 

Here's my typical day's timeline, starting from when I leave for work at night.

9:40pm - leave for work to start at 10pm. The shift is 8 hours apart from the Sunday shift which starts at 1am Monday morning.

6:00am - finish work and go home (back by about 6:15.)

7:15am approx - into bed, and sleep.

2:30pm approx - get up.

Now, bear this in mind - I get up around half two, everyone's home by about 4pm from school etc and dinner's on. So my breakfast is dinner. In fact, in the week,I don't eat anything like a conventional breakfast. So I may get up and shortly afterwards be eating curry. Not normal at all.

From the time I get up, which is a whole 7 hours before I even leave for work, I have to do whatever most people do after a day at work, so my relaxing time comes before a full day's (night's) work. 

It's been suggested before now that I reverse this process, stay up in the morning, have dinner and treat the early morning as normal people treat their evenings. Then, go to bed late afternoon and get up fresh as a daisy and skip in to work after having a nice bowl of Coco-Pops.

Unfortunately, life is not like that - in my choice to work the unsociable hours (admittedly for the financial perks of those hours, and no early starts.), I can't disrupt everybody else's life. No-one in the house is going to want to get up to me cooking myself a curry, and nor are they going to be expected to tiptoe around the house for my benefit as I spend all afternoon and evening in bed. I'd never want that. 

The other problem comes at a weekend - you need to sleep Friday day after working all of Thursday night, but what happens when Friday night rolls around and you should go to bed to have a relatively normal Saturday and rest of the weekend? Often you lie there wide awake on the Friday night, leaving you tired all through Saturday. It's a vicious circle at times.

The night shift worker's drinking regime. And yes, that is my cup.

                    
On the plus side, when I do sleep in the day without incident, the quality of sleep is usually very good, and I do feel quite refreshed when I get up. It just scientifically isn't enough. Over the course of a week, a night shift worker can fall around 17 hours behind the average day worker in sleep gained.

The strange thing is, my body, after all this time, still shouts at me when I'm eating cheese rolls at two in the morning. It screams at me, 'This is not normal!', even now.

After a little research, all of this boils down to what's known as the circadian clock. Whilst there is no easy way to adapt yourself completely to night work, you obviously try to make the best of it. I've seen many people come and go on night shifts simply because they can't adjust their bodies to deal with such a switch in lifestyle. 

I wouldn't want to change the shift I work because I enjoy it as a whole, and have always been a little nocturnal, but it's also good to be aware of the issues that it brings with it.

I seem to have written more than I originally planned, so tomorrow I'll post something shorter, I promise.