I love it, but I have delayed sleep phase disorder. I’m a natural night owl. I feel the most awake at like 1 am. I love the fact that it’s cooler, darker, and quieter, and I feel like the most interesting people come out at night.
But I mostly work days, because that’s how to get promoted, sadly.
I don’t know if I have the same disorder, but I definitely feel this. It’s so much nicer at night. A lot of people fuck up their sleep schedule on the weekends. I keep the weekends the same as my work week and have no problems being sleepy.
But I’m considering applying for a new position at my organization which will mean I have to shift back to days. I’m not sure if the promotion is worth the headache of early mornings and the commute.
The key is, if you take like 2 weeks off work, and sleep/wake whenever you want, what times do you tend towards?
Nights absolutely. With 2 weeks off, I easily stay up till 5 in the morning without even realizing it’s that late. I’ve always found it hard to sleep at 10pm like other people, and I won’t start get tired until 3am.
Unfortunately the shift I’m on right now is 12 hour shifts, which means I’m up till 8-10am. Which is a little later than I like, but I still feel better than waking up at 6am. Working 6am-6pm is way rougher on me than 6pm-6am
Yep, sounds like DSPD.
I’m a night owl. My body wants to go to sleep around 6am and wake up at like 2pm, and if it doesn’t get to it will rebel. I used to struggle with resetting my sleep schedule all the time. Falling asleep during the day, gradually drifting later on my days off, and usually feeling kinda shit.
Went back to working nights, driving a cab 5p-12a or 3p-12a depending on the day. I love it. I feel so much better. My body is never easy, but it’s a hell of a lot easier than it was. One less thing to worry about.
It is hard to make appointments, and companies are always trying to call my firmly muted phone at 9am when I tell them not to, but it’s a lot more comfortable. I see all kinds of neat crepuscular animals and there’s like no traffic.
I think it very much depends on your body’s natural rhythm. People like to chalk it up to ‘insomnia’, but that’s just pathologizing normal behavior. Nothing wrong with being nocturnal.
I agree with a lot of the things people are saying here having worked nights for around 12 years.
I loved the calm and having a completely different schedule to everyone else etc however the forced depression can be pretty horrible. Especially during the winters in the UK when I would often go weeks without seeing any daylight at all. This can really affect your mood and general feeling of well being negatively over time.
Working days now I don’t really get any of those similar feelings, instead however I have to work with people and I dislike people generally, especially having to work with them so instead I have entirely different issues. Add on top of that having to do 5 day weeks as opposed to 3 or 4 I was used to working nights and I can’t choose which is better / worse.
I miss working nights bit don’t miss that depressed feeling.
I worked 6pm to 6am for 4 years. I loved working nights. Easy commute, no boss, more pay, quieter at work (not less busy just quiet). There are two huge downsides. I feel like it decimated what little social life I had and ruined my days off. I also feel like it was rough on the body and mind. Always tired and depressed.
It’s taken a few years to feel like me again. Maybe an 8 hour night shift or 4pm to midnight would be okay but 6pm to 6am was rough.
I work until 10pm. It’s feels quiet, comfortable. The only back draw is that after a long period your social life starts to get affected.More if you have family.
Ive been in graveyard for about 8-9 months now. It feels pretty regular now.
The most important thing to do is to get 8 hours of sleep, and wake up right before you have to leave for work. It helps if you can avoid looking outside and seeing its dark out.
Fun at first, starts to suck. Usually when you have been at work all night and it’s 6AM, and you have an appointment at 8AM because that’s the earliest they open, but all you want to do is pass out.
This is going to depend enormously on what your body clock is like, and how flexible it is. Mine is extremely flexible and infinitely reconfigurable so I find shift work is a doddle and I dont get jetlag at all. I’m on a shift right now, and loving it. But some people really struggle with anything that even slightly messes with their natural circadian rythyms and will really struggle with working shifts and it can actually seriously impatc their health. Such people should never be forced into shift work
Worked nights for a couple years, 7pm to 7am. Hated it. The shift cycles through the days so every few weeks you’d be on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday night, then Fri, Sat, Sun, Mon,…so on. Miss all social life things for weeks, days off were hell cause switching back to day shiift hours to get stuff done was impossible. Couldn’t sleep great in daytime, plus summer days were fuckin hot for sleeping, noise another issue during the day. Really hated it.
I’m on a bit of a weird shift 3pm-3am (yes, 12 hour shifts, but I work less days overall) which is a bit of day shift then mostly night.
I hope I get to stay on it as long as I work here.
I miss all of the worst traffic on my commute.
I’m basically living the schedule we all dream about as teens and college kids- sleep in until noon, go home when the bars have kicked everyone out. That’s my every day, but it’s not so far removed from a normal schedule that it would be a huge adjustment to get up earlier to do stuff when I want/need to.
I work in a 911 dispatch dispatch center, to me, days shift kind of sucks, the calls are often nonstop and tend to be mostly dumb shit, night shift is (usually) slower so I have some time to read or bust out my switch and play games or whatever between calls, but when the phone rings it’s more likely to be something Interesting (which is admittedly not a plus for everyone given the nature of the job)
My wife works a normal day job, so our dog is only ever left alone for about 3 hours or so when we both work (although this has worked against us a bit since she expects a 3am walk and some playtime and attention)
This isn’t really a day/night shift thing, but the way my schedule works I never work more than 3 days in a row unless I go in for overtime, every other weekend is a 3 day weekend, I have days off during the week to get stuff done. I actually kind of struggle to find stuff to do with my PTO because I pretty much can fit everything in to my normal schedule, and if I plan things right I only need to take 2 days off to get a whole week off.
