What is it like working graveyard shift?

In My Humble Opinion
41

I worked midnight to 8am Security for about 6 months. Then I’d drive 15 miles EAST, straight into the sun, going home. So after a month or so, I just got used to the idea of being up until about 1pm and then sleeping until about 9pm. The worst was my mother, who would call me about 2pm every so often, saying “oh, I thought you’d be up by now.” No mom, I just got to sleep. And even if I hadn’t, if say, I’ve have gotten to sleep at 9am, I’d have only been sleeping about 5 hours now and still wouldn’t appreciate the call.

Had no issue dealing with daytime stuff after I made that decision, because I could make appointments for 9am, 10am, then go home and sleep.

The real difficulty (if you don’t sleep like the dead) is getting used to all the daytime noise. Because you can’t do anything about it.

Until almost a year ago, I worked frequent but irregular late-night shifts, getting off anywhere from 2am to 5am. I just got used to sleeping whenever I was tired and getting up whenever, regardless of what time the clock said.

42

I spent a career working many nights in the ED. It’s difficult to generalize, but here are a few observations:

  1. You must learn to aggressively manage your sleep during the day. People who don’t figure this out are chronically fatigued because their kids/phone/spouse/friends keep them up when they need to be sleeping. I know nurses who have a mattress in a basement closet, but again, the practical solution is different for everyone.

  2. It’s easy to work all nights; hard to rotate.

  3. I personally slept two shifts most days. A four-hour nite and a two-hour nap before going in to work. Just my personal solution, but I could easily work an 8-hour nite if I’d just gotten up from a two-hour nap.

  4. No-one who doesn’t work nites knows what it’s like to be really really tired, and you just can’t explain it. You go in for a nite shift after a long period of sleep deprivation and on your way home you don’t want the light to turn red because you will not be able to keep awake for 60 seconds without something to do. You have to manage that because you cannot work effectively fatigued, but when it does happen, no one but other nite shift workers will really be able to commiserate.

In general, I loved the nite shifts, but perhaps in the Emergency Department it has its own special panache. Can’t speak for other jobs.

Be aware there is some research that suggests a physical detriment to working nites. I never paid much attention to it, but you will find a great deal of interest in this area in the literature.

43

One of my oddest post-night shift experiences was coming up to a light at an intersection after a particularly difficult shift and stopping while it was green. I forget which to stop on and which to go on! I don’t get that messed up by very many nights and it was a lucky thing that it was a Sunday morning and there were no other cars around me at the time. I didn’t always believe it when people compared driving after a night shift to driving drunk. I still don’t think it’s as bad but I’m much more open-minded about it.

44

The average weird late shift employee will average about 5 hours of sleep. When you get home it will be daylight, your kids will not understand why you need to be in bed when they want to play. The daylight will be hard to keep out when you want to sleep. Dogs will bark, phones will ring and people will knock on your door. You will not be able to resume normal schedules when the weekend comes.

45

Besides having worked nightshift for a while, I suffered from undiagnosed and untreated sleep apnea for several years, so I KNOW sleep deprivation. I always compared it to being under the influence of the most aggressively drowsiness-causing antihistamine possible. Your entire brain is under a fog…you literally start to see spots or delayed motion. All of your reactions are just that fraction of a second slow.

I had two car accidents before I was prescribed the CPAP machine. Luckily, they were very minor and involved no injuries.

46

I worked the graveyard shift for maybe 5 years’ total at Former Employer. I did what other Dopers have mentioned: staying up until noontime or so, then going to bed and getting up, say, around 7-8PM.

My main issue was staying asleep. The room-darkening shades, etc., never worked. I had to bury myself deep within the blankets. I relied upon melatonin and OTC sleep aids just so I could fall back asleep. Sometimes it worked. Most of the time, though, it didn’t, so I had a very serious sleep deficit for a few years. Even now, when I have an early morning (4AM start) shift, my circadian rhythm goes haywire for the next 24 hours.

But yeah, as a lot other Dopers have said, there is a beauty in the shift. I loved being able to do errands without waiting in line. I relished in keeping up with chores and such. My social life was nonexistent, but the extra pay for working the graveyard more than compensated for that.

Would I do it again? Probably. Would it physically affect me much worse now? Probably.

47

I have not been impressed by any of the “room-darkening shades” I have seen. Taping aluminum foil over my bedroom window is more effective, and much cheaper.

48

This particular detail has been mentioned several times, but none of my coworkers who worked nights or rotations had a problem with it, nor does my sister in law when she gets night duty. The kids got trained to play quietly when Daddy or Mommy were resting. It’s a lot easier than training Mom-who-doesn’t-live-with-you, from what I’ve seen.

49

I’ve stopped at green lights quite a few times when I was tired. Worse was when I was tired-er still and ran a red without thinking about it. That was going to work!

You regular shift people don’t know the half of it. My current job has multiple potential start times, from 2 AM to 7 PM. They’re mostly grouped on the roster so that you do earlies 2 - 5 AM starts for a fortnight, and then lates, 3 - 7 PM starts the next fortnight. There are a few odds and ends in the middle of the day, but it’s mostly the early and late extremes. The shift length varies around the 8 hour mark. The change of fortnights is the killer, but I swap roster lines with someone to stay on the afternoons. We don’t have a proper night shift, thank goodness.

I really like afternoon work, starts from midday through to about 6 PM. I can do regular daywork, but repeated early AMs do me in. The early mornings are better if you have a family, you see them every day, as opposed to afternoons. I’m single, and may stay that way if I stay on afternoons. My last ex-girlfriend didn’t appreciate my work hours. She didn’t like the lack of a Monday to Friday routine either (we work every day of the year, to a roster that covers slightly more than half of the weekend days).

This is a lot more stable than the job before, where it was rostered like this every second fortnight, but with true 24 hour operation. The other half of the time was “blank line” rostered. The days off were known in advance, but the jobs only appeared a day or so in advance. You might be off Sunday, start at 6 AM on Monday - work 10 or 11 hours, have the minimum 11 hours off between shifts, start 3 AM on Tuesday, midnight Wednesday, back to 5 AM Thursday, have Friday off, start 2 PM on Saturday, 7 PM Sunday, off Monday and Tuesday, Back at 3 AM, and so forth. As long as they gave you at least 11 hours off, they could do whatever they liked with you, and you learned what the next shift was when you finished the last one. It fucked me over pretty good, but you learn that everything is relative. 4 AM tomorrow sounds like heaven when you’ve just done ten hours starting at 1 AM. Like someone who has been tortured, you get a perverse thrill when the tormentor (roster clerk) occasionally gives you shifts you like.

I don’t want it to sound all Monty Python Yorkshireman, like “we had it really tough, the roster clerks flogged us to death with a broken bottle - if we were lucky”, but fixed, non rotating shifts that you know about in advance are pretty good, whatever time they are. I did four years of the hard stuff, and it taught me to appreciate sleeping at night like the luxury it is. I think having kids would be worse, but not much else would be.

50

I spent a summer alternating between F, Sa, Sun night and Tu, Wed, Th days (not always working all 6 days). There were also a few Fridays where I ended up working at one job doing farm calls from 7 AM to 6 PM, eating a quick dinner, taking a nap, and leaving at 10:45 PM to go work at the horsepital from 11:30 PM to 8 AM. These days, I have day classes during the week and work an evening shift or two on the weekends. I’ve sworn off nights because it completely wrecks you to have to switch every week – you never have any time to do things you like to do because you’re always trying to catch up on sleep. I can’t comment on a consistent night schedule, since I’ve never been a full-time night person.

You won’t necessarily have complete control over when you sleep, either, although it may be easier once you get into a consistent schedule. No matter what time I got home from work or how tired I was, I was almost always too keyed up to go right to bed. Even if I got home from work at 9 AM and WANTED to sleep, it usually took until 11 or so to relax and get settled. It’s like it took that long to unwind and convince my brain that it really was OK to go to sleep. Then, I was OUT until dinnertime, and any plans to get anything done in the afternoon were usually quashed by the greater appeal of the pillow.

51

That’s how it works for me. I know people who can go right home and go to sleep. I wish I was one of them but, like horsetech, I need some time to decompress in between getting home and being able to sleep. On the other hand, I also hate getting up and having to head right out to work so I need a little time between waking up and having to face the work world.

I’ve never understood how people manage those schedules where they keep changing your shift. Even one that goes against your natural body clock would be easier to deal with, in my humble opinion, than having to keep changing and adjusting all the time.

52

Worked many graveyard shifts (11PM - 7AM) when I was starting out as a Radio personality. Actually wasn’t too bad, I’m one of those rare people who can sleep through anything.

I actually enjoyed the hours better than later on in the career when I was doing morning drive shows. Yeah, the AM drive time paid well, and was the most prestigious shift, so I got up every morning at 4AM and slugged the coffee down, but the overnight shift was fun. The boss wasn’t listening, the hotline wasn’t ringing, and you had more leeway to do things at night that you didn’t have in the daytime.

It was fun.

53

My BF used to do the graveyard shift at a hotel. He liked it at first because he’s practically nocturnal anyway. But it did take its toll on our social lives. He’d be coming to bed as I’d be getting up in the morning. I couldn’t vaccum or play loud music during the day and early afternoon since he’d be sleeping. We’d only have a small window of opportunity to hang out and do stuff.

Thankfully, he’s changed careers and works normal hours, but I think he misses the sleeping in and staying up all night.