Night workers do you take anything to boost sleep?

I have been working nights for the past 16 years, I love it.

Blackout blinds/curtains are a must, just recently I have been using Flare Ear plugs, as there is a lot of building work going on outside.

I finish at 07:00 from a 12 hour shift, if I can sleep till 13:30 I am happy.
 
mysticsniper said:
I have been working nights for the past 16 years, I love it.

Blackout blinds/curtains are a must, just recently I have been using Flare Ear plugs, as there is a lot of building work going on outside.

I finish at 07:00 from a 12 hour shift, if I can sleep till 13:30 I am happy.
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What time do you actually get to bed though? Even if you can be in bed and asleep by 8 that's only 5 and a half hours sleep. I'd be in be in bed by 9:30 and sleep through till 4 or 5, would still feel like crap though.
 
I've worked nights for almost 20 years I find ear plugs and a eye mask work for me although I do have periods where I struggle to sleep throughout the year.
 
For me when I am doing nights

1) Make sure I wind down after work before climbing into bed, you may be exhausted when you get back but if you dont take a bit of time 30 min/an hour to wind down before you go to bed it will make getting a restful nights sleep hard.

2) make sure you have full blackout blinds AND curtains. Ear plugs are pretty essential too. This combination will block out almost all the light from a room and make sleeping far easier, nothing worse than light flooding in on a nice summers day whilst you have to sleep!

3) If you can't sleep you can't sleep, if you do wake up naturally at 12/13:00 get up, potter about do some bits and pieces but do try and have a nap before you go into work that night.

4) sometimes you need a little extra help. This is not medical advice but sometimes I occasionally take sleeping aid to boost the amount of sleep I get if I am struggling.

5) Routine. Try and maintain a routine as you would if you were working days but adapt if for a night shift. For example I have breakfast at around 15:00, lunch at around 19:30 and dinner around 01:00. setting your body in a rhythm in anyway you can will help train it for when it's time to sleep.

6) lay off the caffiene! On nights I try and limit myself to a couple of coffees per night and make sure i dont have any caffiene after 03:00.

There is no magic bullet sadly, we are naturally day time creatures but you can make the whole process a lot easier with some effort.
 
moon man said:
Those are pretty much the hours I used to sleep when I did night's, never sorted it I was a zombie, tired but not a nice tired, more like the life has been drawn out of you by a giant syrynge sort of tired
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Same. I worked 12 hour night shifts for twenty years and 4 hours sleep a day was normal. I got used to it but it wasn't healthy.
 
Rich1988 said:
For me when I am doing nights

1) Make sure I wind down after work before climbing into bed, you may be exhausted when you get back but if you dont take a bit of time 30 min/an hour to wind down before you go to bed it will make getting a restful nights sleep hard./QUOTE]


That is the biggest one for me. I have tried lots of things over the past 15 years or so. Blackout blinds make a massive difference. In the summer get an air con unit too. I tired all sorts of ear plugs but can't get on with any of them.

For me, when I was working a proper night shift, I would get home about 6.30am and go straight out and walk the dog for an hour. That hour of fresh air, just clearing my mind of anything work related was the best sleeping aid.

I would get into bed at about 8am and sleep through until 4pm most days then. The only other things I found helped me were tablets called Kalms.
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Been working nights for 12 years now.
I finish at 0730, home for 0830 have my tea so a proper meal, take dogs out then shower and into bed for 1030-1100 wake up at 1650. 5 hours is enough sleep for me on nights. Days off I get a good 8-9 hours sleep. Summers easier as I take Antihistamines daily and they seem to knock me out.
 
Been working nights for a year now. 14hr shifts for 3 weeks then 3 weeks off. I get the best sleep ever when I'm nights, I pretty much go straight to bed and get a solid 7 or 8 hours. Unfortunately, it's the 3 weeks off when the shenanigan start - at least a week of 3 hour sleep sessions that are random times so not unusual to get so tired I'm passing out at say 19:00 and then wake at midnight to go all the way through the night and pass out again at 11:00 for a rinse repeat.

It's horrendous and just as well we've been in lockdown for pretty much all of that time.
 
The only night shift I ever enjoyed was 3 x 12 hrs max a week but leave when jobs list completed (CNC alphcam programmer, water jet op) I used to just sleep 3 hrs on the Thursday morning so I had a decent 4 day weekend to recover
 
Dirk Diggler said:
Been working nights for a year now. 14hr shifts for 3 weeks then 3 weeks off. I get the best sleep ever when I'm nights, I pretty much go straight to bed and get a solid 7 or 8 hours. Unfortunately, it's the 3 weeks off when the shenanigan start - at least a week of 3 hour sleep sessions that are random times so not unusual to get so tired I'm passing out at say 19:00 and then wake at midnight to go all the way through the night and pass out again at 11:00 for a rinse repeat.

It's horrendous and just as well we've been in lockdown for pretty much all of that time.
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14hr night shifts? Is that not breaking the WTD of at least an 11 hour break between shifts?
 
I genuinely don't know how people can do constant nights for such a long time, especially with such little sleep.

I did nights for 6 months when I was younger and it was horrendous. The only 'benefit' was the feeling of satisfaction coming out of work when everyone else was going in.

I remember I tried to have some down time after work so I would finish at 7 and then get home, have a meal and play on the Pc for a few hours. I'd sleep from 11-6/7 and the rinse and repeat. I felt like a zombie for the whole time.
 
Helen Barber said:
I get in from my shift at 7:30am and find I'm only sleeping until around 12..... I just a need a more deeper/longer sleep
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Perhaps get some blackout curtains and avoid screen time when you're about to go to bed... I mean are you doing a regular night shift or do you have some day shifts and say one week of nights per month or something? In the latter scenario, with an irregular shift, it's perhaps less easy as you will just mess with your sleep patterns/biological clock whereas in the former scenario, where you're just continually working nights then no reason in theory, once you've switched to that pattern (and perhaps stick with it on your weekends - odd days off) that you can't just shift your sleep schedule.

Only thing standing in the way is perhaps natural light getting into your room, aside from that, just imaging you're in some other time zone and centre your schedule around that... frame your regular night shift as a 9-5 or, if you like, a 7-3 or an 11-7 shift (if that works better with free time/available daylight hours before and after the shift) and then pick normal bedtime/getting up time lie getting up at 7:30am and going to bed at like 11:30pm or something around that imaginary other time zone you're in.
 
I used to get home around 8am after a night shift and found the best thing to do was to try and eat immediately then go to bed around 10-11am

Blackout curtains and white noise were essential for me to be able to get more than 5-6 hours of kip, earplugs and a mask might be worth a try if you can't change the curtains or live in a noisy house.
 
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