Just curious as to when those of you who work second or third shifts sleep, and why…
I’ve been working a full time, 40-hour a week 2nd shift job for almost two weeks now, and I’ve been sleeping during the day. I work from about 3:30 to midnight, come home, putz around for a few hours, and usually sleep from four AM 'till noon. This gives me a few hours on either side of work to do what I like to do, and lets me get a full 8 hours of sleep.
Obviously, I’m not doing this today. I figured out that I can stay up until 6 AM and sleep until 2 PM, and get the same effects. I’ve also been toying with the idea of going to sleep at 1 or two and getting up around 9 or 10.
I don’t work 2nd shift, but I always thought going to bed soon after getting home from work would be a good idea. That way, you have the daylight hours to do stuff like shopping, banking, kid stuff, dr. appointments…all the stuff that we 1st shifters don’t get to do. But I’m a daytime person…I can tell you that most of the good movies are on late at night, so if you’re a movie person, you may want to do it that way.
I spent about 8 years working 12 hour shifts. 7am to 7 pm or the other way around (switching from one to the other within the same week).
For most of that time, I did all of my shifts within 3 weeks (14 shifts in 21 days) and I had the 4th week off. I did a couple of years of 4 on, 4 off.
The days that I worked left little time to do anything but work and sleep. After the day shifts I was able to get a normal 6 or 7 hours if I tried to get to sleep by 10pm; after the night shift, I tried to sleep asap after getting home. I found that if I woke up anytime after noon, I was not able to get back to sleep.
[slight hijack]
For the past year (promotion to management) I’ve been working M-F 9-5 (ostensibly any way, usually turns into 9-7 or so).
I miss working shift work.
No doubt the 12 hour shifts were challenging and they don’t get any easier as one gets older, but I miss the generous amount of time off I had. That more than made up for the long days which I put in. During the time that I got a week off every month, I lived for that week. It was fantastic.
I find that working m-f is challenging. I’m still getting used to working 5 days every week and then joining the rest of society in the consumerist frenzy that the weekends are.
I used to work at a gas station-the graveyard shift and I’d regularly put in more then 8 hours. My thoughts were that I’d get paid more and really, there wasn’t anything to do when I got off work and all my friends were at their day jobs. This was back after highschool though.
In any event, I’d usually work from 6pm to 6am (sometimes from 8pm to 7am) and I’d come home, putz around for a few hours and then crash. I’d get every other day off, which I used in order to go to school.
When I worked in fast food as a manager my shifts jumped around from day to day, so this made it very difficut to establish a regular sleep pattern and I was often tired because of my varying shifts. Following a closing shift (3:00 PM to about midnight) I’d always go straight to bed when I got home. Sometimes I would have to do this anyway, since the next day I might work the midday shift (11:00 AM to 8:00PM) and then open the following day (6:00 AM to 3:00 PM). Even then I would still go to bed at around 11:00 or so. Now that I work regular daytime hours (6:00 to 2:30) Monday through Friday I must say I am quite satisfied with my schedule now and I sleep much better, and I can always visit family and friends, which was hard to do when I had to put in the equivalent of working second shift while working as a fast food manager.
When I get home from work, I do some exercises, take a shower, grab a bite to eat and then read the SDMB. I usually end up going to bed around 3 or 4 am, or 4:30 am when I notice that someone has GMail invites to give away to the first six responses and I have to wait for the SDMB to come back up so I can be the first reply. (Thanks, alterego!)
I generally sleep until noon or 1.
Today I’m up way, way early because I have a doctor’s appointment. I’ll probably catch a little extra sleep after that but before work.
I spent 2 summers working 3rd shift tech support (actively on-duty from 2am to 9am, and on pager right before my shift - from 11pm to 2am).
I was lucky to be working from home, so my commute consisted of getting out of bed, washing my face, starting a pot of coffee and opening the office door.
I usually went to sleep sometime after my active shift, from around noon - 4pm. Then I’d get up, do errands & things. My husband got home from work between 7 & 8pm. We’d have dinner, hang out, then I’d sleep from about 10pm - 2am (barring the pager going off).
When I worked 4pm to 4am, I’d usually crash about 5 am to noon, then be up again for another round.
In those days, we worked 2 days off, 2 days on, 3 days off, 2 days on, 2 days off, 3 days on, etc.
I liked having alternate three day weekends. And after the last shift of three days on, I’d occasionally join the guys for a beer … nothing open then but we just found and empty lot and had one (or half of one in my case).
I work 5pm to 2am (give or take a couple-three hours, depending on what’s going on) four days a week. I usually come home, have some dinner, mooch around with the critters and play on the computer for a couple of hours. Assuming the Death Snore isn’t at full blast, I usually go to bed between 4 and 5 (if it’s really bad, I just wait until Dr.J gets up, or else sleep in the guest room), then sleep till noon or so. Well, actually, sometimes I wake up at 10, sometimes I sleep till well after 2. My body clock is incredibly irregular.
I work second shift too. 3 to 11:30. Usually I’m sleeping from 4 to 12 though on occasion im up till sunrise. The schedule really isn’t that bad since you are falling asleep when its still dark out. The only thing i hate is that i can’t hang out with many people after work. It can put your social life into the ringer.
I work M-F 9-5 now, but I’ve done shift work several times.
• I worked 2nd shift as a nurses’ aide in a nursing home. In by 3:00, home by midnight. I can’t sleep immediately after work, so I take a couple hours to decompress. That meant I went to bed around 1 or 2 and up by 11am or so.
• I worked a weird 12-hour weekend-only shift for a very short time, inspecting tiny steel mufflers in a steel muffler factory. 11pm-11am Fridays and Saturdays. I also had two part time 9-5 day jobs (one was actually 8-noon and the other 1-5) at the same time, so I was constantly working my ass off and slept whenever I could. I remember that I lived 30 minutes away from the factory, but my dad and step mom lived five minutes away. So I’d go sleep at their house on Saturday during the day and then go home after work on Sunday morning. That commute would rob me of an hour of sleep, so I crashed at their house. That lasted all of three weeks before I couldn’t take it anymore and settled for having just two jobs.
• I was a technical writer, documenting work processes in a BMW factory. I started on third shift – went in about 10:30 pm and went home about 8 am. Again, I needed a couple hours to settle down before sleeping so I’d sleep from about 10am to about 6-8pm. Weekends off, I kept to the same sleep/wake schedule so I didn’t screw up my circadian rhythms too much. After I wrote up all those third shift jobs, I switched to 2nd shift which fits my natural sleep cycles the best. I finished those jobs and went back to normal 9-5 business hours.
I think there’s pros and cons to all of those shifts, but I think I prefer 9-5 just because I’m basically on the same schedule as everyone else I know. If I didn’t want to interact with other humans regularly, I’d prefer 2nd shift because I’m a night owl and like to sleep late. That precludes getting anything done during regular business hours so it’s the least convenient shift.
In general, I found I do better to wake up and go straight to work, and stay up for a few hours after work. Many people did the opposite.
Mr. S and I have both worked the night shift (both 2nd and 3rd), about 15 years between us.
Our sleep schedules depended on how tired we were when we got home. Some mornings we might get home and collapse. Others, no matter how tired you were, you just couldn’t get to sleep, and slept on and off all day. Sometimes 3 hours in a row was a good day. Mr. S liked to stay up if he could and work on the house, then crash in the afternoon.
Second shift doesn’t seem to be as big of an adjustment, sleepwise, since you can still sleep during night hours and just sleep in later than day people would. But it does put a crimp in the social life.
By choice I work in the afternoon and evening and get home around 10 pm. I usually stay up (as can be seen by my usual posting times) for a few hours and go to bed in the middle of the night and sleep into late morning.
But I used to work nights and that seemed really different. Working at night and sleeping during the day definitely gives you a different perspective on society. After a few weeks, you start feeling like you’re living in a parallel universe.
I’ve worked just about every shift. What always worked for me was keeping a normal rhythm (i.e. coming home, doing laundry, meals, tv, whatever, then sleeping until time to get up for work.) Last time I worked third, though, I couldn’t do that, as I was married and needed to have time with my husband. So I went to bed earlier, and got up earlier, so we’d have some time together before I went to work.
I worked 2nd shift for several years, 3-11. I usually went to bed at around 4-5 am, (more like 5 am) but sometimes “stayed up late” until 6 or 7 am. Didn’t do that too frequently, though. I’d get up at 1 or 2 pm. (I wore very casual clothes and could rush and get ready in half an hour if I had to.)
It really pissed me off that our employers insisted on scheduling many of the meetings and seminars and such at the crack of frickin’ dawn. (Okay, we had to leave at 7 am for the meeting at a distant location.) They didn’t blink an eye at expecting that we 2nd shift workers be bright-eyed and bushy tailed, ready to attend these early morning meetings (and of course, be ready to work our regular shift that afternoon). I was always death warmed over at those meetings because of course I could not get to sleep immediately after I got home from work the night before. So, I told my bosses that it was one or the other: a morning seminar (which often lasted 4 hours or longer, not counting the 2 hour drive, round trip) or work 3-11, but not both. They went along with that without any complaint. What amazes me is that so many other 2nd shift workers put up with it—dragging themselves up for an early morning meeting after obviously having little time for sleep after their previous shift, and working their regular shift that afternoon. They acted as if they had no choice but to do both things, but obviously they did.
I’m a paramedic, and the ambulance company I work for does a Kelly Shift. This means we have 3 shifts (A,B,C) and we work the following schedule: 24 on (0700-0700), 24 off, 24 on, 24 off, 24 on, 4 days off. We can hypothetically sleep at work, but I usually end up going home and sleeping a few hours when I get home.
(Thanks, alterego!)