Night Shift

My beautiful cousin just started working night shift. She messaged me with some questions about how to survive night shift. I know there are lots of articles on the Internet about this but I thought I'd share my experiences.

Disclaimer: important fact..I have never worked full time nights. I have only ever worked part time. This is the equivalent of 24 hours a week. Usually 2 twelve hour shifts. Occasionally I have worked more in a row but then I would have a long stretch off. (Most people try to group their shifts together so that the sleep issues are condensed..)

I love nights because I didn't start work until 7pm. I could still spend the afternoon picking my kids up and getting to most of their sporting activities. Because day shift lasted til 7pm it felt like I would be missing more.

I had to train family and friends that sleep was essential between shifts. Let me say that again. SLEEP IS ESSENTIAL. So if I worked 2 nights in a row the day in between I was asleep, generally from 7:30 am until 4pm. People do a lot between those hours and they want to call and visit and conduct business. Mainly I had to turn off my phone, invest in really good curtains and just go to bed. I think I called my husband at 3 am one night to illustrate my point about what my daytime sleep interruption felt like. I also had to tell my kids they couldn't wake me up to ask me things because I would always say yes ( and then have no memory of it). Like,"mom can I have 100 dollars ?". Ummm "yes, just go away I'm sleeping!" One day I heard my kids playing Barbies. The Barbies were telling each other to shush because mom was asleep. I can sleep without medication other than Benadryl but some people really need to get a good sleeping pill so they can stay asleep. I guess it's a personal decision. But fighting your biorhythms is hard!

A drawback of night shift is that essentially you lose 2 days for every night you work. Because you sleep the day after and some of the day before.

It is REALLY important to sleep. I have tried to cut corners on my sleep with working nights and it leads to 1. mistakes (errors in judgement, reasoning, and general bad moods all around) and also 2. health problems.

Other dangers of working night shift are: issues driving home and issues with no filter.

Driving home is pretty self explanatory. When you are really tired you are a danger on the road. I have had to pull over on the way home and take a nap (when I worked in Salt Lake and lived in Provo).... and I've fallen asleep driving a time or two. It's really important to watch the drive home.

The other issue is no filter. When you are well rested you can police yourself better... as in say the right things at the right times and be polite. Sometimes if you are really tired after working, you don't say anything right, because you just plain lose your filter... or you might giggle hysterically in church, or at 3:30 in the morning tell everyone at work something really personal that you would never share. Beware of this!

Lets see... Other night shift issues are eating to stay awake and drinking too much soda. I have a friend that cuts up veggies and eats them all night. She also drinks water all night. Mainly I just drink Dr. Pepper all night. Probably not good. Some nurses drink pots of coffee and smoke to stay awake. Again, not healthy.

I think if you are a night owl in general... night shift is an easy transition. I'm pretty much a night owl. A lot of night shifters stay on a night schedule when they aren't working. So they would sleep in until 11 am or so every day and stay up late even on the nights they aren't working. This lets your body stay in the same general routine. I do a variation of this. So pretty much I am not in charge of getting people to school. Kris takes the girls to school and has prayer with them in the morning. I'm the afternoon/evening girl. I pick people up from school, do homework with them, pack lunches and get them ready for bed.



Now adays... I only work Wednesday nights. To survive this I take a nap Wednesday when the kids are in school... then after working Wednesday night I only sleep until about 1pm. This is because I have to transition back to a day life style because my other hours of work are day shifts for surgery. If you sleep too long the last day of your stretch of working YOU WILL STAY ON THE NIGHT SCHEDULE and it is frustrating. So if you don't want to be up all night and sleeping all day after your shifts are done... You must wake yourself up after only a few hours when you work your last night. It's still important to get that nap in but just don't be tempted to extend it as long as you would if you were working that night. Working one night a week is pretty easy compared to 2 or 3 shifts... but it is still a little hard... mainly because I am now almost 45.


Most nurses have to start on night shift because that is where the openings are... if you really aren't a night shifter, I suggest that you suffer through it until you can bid on a day position. This is generally based on senority but occasionally day shifts pop up after working 6 months to a year. I've heard of nurses getting notes from doctors that they just can't do night shift based on their health.


If you find nights are your thing... you generally stay with it a long time. Night shift is generally slower. I like the pace on nights because I like downtime and I don't love the chaos of days with all of the people and the doctors everywhere. Night shift staff members are like a family... Generally they all get along and work together well... because they have less people around to help. Our night staff does pot lucks and baby/wedding showers.

The hours between 3am to 5am are the worst. These hours must be when your body is in a very deep sleep, because they are so hard to get through on a night shift. Sometimes I have to go on a walk around this time, or find a project because I really would like to crawl in a hole and sleep.

Some places let nurses take a small nap on their break. I have done this but if you are very tired it is hard to wake yourself up and function, so I don't really recommend napping at work. If I take in house call I will go to an empty room and sleep... but I'm not on the clock.


The other thing to remember about nights is that nothing is open when you are awake! It is therefore sometimes hard to get your to do list done. I have had to sacrifice things in order to stay healthy while working night shift. I have to make myself sleep rather than clean or do certain projects.

So there you go. Night shift.



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