The Nightmare of the Nightshift

The Nightmare of the Nightshift: What every boss, coworker, friend, spouse and family member should know.

Let’s face it, people benefit from other people working nights; manufacturing doesn’t have to shut down a process, we can get medical care in the middle of the night, and tasks can get done that might otherwise be a distraction or serious inconvenience during the day. But the cost to the nightshift employee is too often ignored and misunderstood. Let’s look at five specific costs suffered by a nightshift person and what dayshift people, who spend time around those nightshift people, should or should not expect.

• As nightshift work drags on from a few nights to weeks to years, the nightshift worker doesn’t feel like himself, ever.                                              
  • Day people think that a nightshift person should be able to get some rest and then, BINGO, they are now completely ready to join in on the day activities. But it doesn’t work that way. Much of the world revolves around the daytime. This is a double whammy for a night person who gets nighttime demands from their job and day demands from the rest of the world and possibly work too. This always-on-demand leads to a level of exhaustion that never goes away. Because of this exhaustion, the nightshift person never feels like they did before the nightshift work took over and consumed their life. Something isn’t quite right, but it can be difficult to verbalize the issue or make a specific complaint.

Summary: Don’t expect a nightshift person to feel completely okay, because they probably don’t.

• A nightshift worker’s eating habits can go completely bonkers.                  
  • Our system can become accustom to eating at specific times. If you are working nights, when does that person have breakfast? Lunch? Dinner? And what about those events where the family wants the nightshift person to join in for a meal during a time when he/she would normally be sleeping (during the day). The nightshift person’s digestive system ends up complaining about all these inconsistent mealtimes, but no one can listen. Things only get worse at time goes on. Perhaps the nightshift person needs to eat to stay awake. Or the person keeps eating to find that magic food that will make him/her feel normal and energized again. (That magic food doesn’t exist.) The nightshift person feels bloated from all the odd hours eating but the cycle is so vicious, there is no way out. If day people don’t understand this bad spiral, then try getting up at 10 pm, 2 am, and 4 am and figure out what you should be eating at those times.

Summary: Prepare meals for the nightshift person if they are a member of your family but don’t expect them to eat when you do. Before you start nagging about a nightshift person’s eating habits, figure out how you are going to help.

• A nightshift person can become fatigued to the point that normal tasks become impossible.  They need others to help out.                                                
  • If you can’t imagine fatigue felt by a nightshift person, think jet lag from a huge trip or exhaustion from a serious illness. Now, have that jet lag or illness go on for months and years. The picture is a person so fatigued, they don’t even know who they are anymore. A night person’s normal tasks around the house, such as laundry or yard projects, become impossible because there isn’t the energy to do them.                                 
  • It is easy for an argument to start over unfinished house chores because the day person doesn’t understand. This person who works a night job might be awake in the afternoon, but they sit on the couch and get nothing done. Why? Well, it is like this. You take a six-cylinder car and gum up four of the six cylinders with really nasty stuff. The car still runs, but it can’t do much and certainly doesn’t run like it used to. It putters, sputters, and backfires when the least amount power is asked for.                         
  • This means very body else around the nightshift person is going to have to help out, so the nightshift person feels comfortable going back to bed during the day. Family members will need to take on different responsibilities.

Summary: The normal chores that a nightshift person may have done in the past will need to shift to all those happy day people. Yes, that means the day person must go the extra mile. Get accustomed to it.

• A nightshift person doesn’t have emotional patience anymore, so don’t ask for it, don’t expect it. They have become like a wounded wild animal; hiss and snap first, ask questions later. And the truth is, they are wounded, by a society who wants them to do something that is damaging to their physical and mental wellbeing.                                                                    
  • All too often, those normal dayshift people believe that if we are having a positive physical existence in the world, then all is good. But that superficial point of view fails to understand an important concept; it is the emotional state we seek in our existence. Living in a nice house doesn’t mean you have feelings of joy, happiness, and love. And so, the nightshift person, robbed of sleep and half alive with fatigue, finds positive emotions becoming strangers. Contentment requires sleep and enough of it at the right times. As the nightshift persons nerves become more raw, negative emotions get the upper hand.

Summary: The nightshift person may become an unhappy stranger, quick to anger. Other than a job change to a dayshift, solutions maybe fleeting

• To top off all the indignities a nightshift person will suffer, they become socially isolated.
  • How many of you day people start cooking Thanksgiving dinner at 8 p.m. and serve up the meal for the family and friends at 2 a.m.? No one, right? That scenario is equivalent to inviting your nightshift worker to a large meal at noon. If they just got off a shift at 6 or 8 in the morning, they would feel lousy at noon. The frequency of social interactions and the quality of the interactions suffer because a nightshift person should be sleeping when all those dayshift people want to have fun socializing. There is a social awkwardness that occurs when you try to socialize when you are overly fatigued. Then the loneliness sets in for the long haul.

Summary: Be patient with your nightshift person and don’t be offended by their inability to meet your day schedule. Try scheduling events when they are more awake and have gotten some rest.

Era Lewis

Author of A Woman’s Guide: Cultivating Everyday Personal Magnificence