I’m a nurse and I don’t do night shifts. The few times I did it I earned a 150% differential but it’s not worth the money: I’d go back home and have to use noise cancelling headphones to sleep, 'cause people are loud, I’d wake up rested at 04:00 pm, but completely destroying my circadian rhythm. I’d need a whole day or 2 to recover my regular rhythm because otherwise I’d be a zombie.
I hear my coworkers who do night shift complaining about this same issue, but they still pick up night shifts, which I don’t understand.
To me it was impossible to have something akin to a life while working night shift, but I’ve met some people that only do night shifts: the housewife that only works 4 nights shifts per month, the single mother or young wife or husband who work 14 night shifts per month and have the next 2 weeks for him/herself…
I don’t understand why they do it. It’s extremely taxing and not worth it imho.
But if you do, how do you have a life? And how do you keep yourself healthy?
Well, I’m no longer working.
But I used to prefer night shifts since I’m a notorious insomniac and tended to do better that way.
For most of my twenties and into my thirties, I would work 60 - 80 hour weeks spread out between home health (nurse’s assistant) and bouncing for a couple of club/bar owners, plus some less steady side gigs.
Having a life was difficult. But nobody can work every day without breaking down, so I’d usually make sure to have a day or two a week for myself. Usually lol.
Since my default, most refreshing sleep range was and is from about 2 am to 10 pm, I would usually not be too far off from that most of the time. So I didn’t have that constant sense of being off that working a standard 1st or 2nd shift would give me.
That brimming being said, the pay differential is what pulls people to 3rd and other night shifts. Things like a Baylor shift are often a great way to get paid as much or more, while having a little more time away from work too. So that’s a big perk if you can sustain it.
I didn’t keep myself healthy though. Oh, I ate well enough; I was hiking, camping, lifting weights, doing martial arts. But I was also averaging out to maybe 6 hours of sleep a day. That grinds you down, no matter who you are. I reached a point towards the end of my working life that I was frazzled, grumpy, not thinking clearly. My body wasn’t recovering properly either, so there was always some injury or another nagging. Which, since I was bouncing places that had a proclivity for outright attacks against customers, that could mean stuff that was pretty bad.
My mental health deteriorated as well. Depression was with me since I was a kid. So was PTSD. Doing mostly end of life care, and seeing as much violence as I did exacerbated the depression, added new layers to the PTSD, which also came with anxiety and panic attacks. Nightmares I’d wake up screaming and punching from. Shit got pretty real.
But I did manage to have a life. A very busy and sometimes crazy one. I made time for dating as well as my hobbies. I managed to keep my shit together and help raise one of my friend’s son after his father died. Did some partying along the way. Went to school twice (once to go for my RN, then for psychology), but couldn’t manage to finish either time.
I packed twice the years into those twenty years. Every time I think of it now, I’m amazed I survived it all. There were a horrifying number of close calls tbh, what with the fights and pushing myself alone in the mountains. I’m fifty, and have been disabled for as long as I worked, since I started working at 17.
But it was taxing, and definitely not worth it overall. Didn’t ever make enough money to do more than get by at the official jobs, and my side gigs weren’t reliable enough to make up for that.
Since you’re here asking this, you definitely need to avoid night work if you can. I naturally default to being awake at nights, so it wasn’t even that bad for me. If I’d been the typical daytime kind of person, I’d have fallen apart even sooner. If you keep doing it, you’ll be accelerating the eventual end of your ability to work.