The Night Shift Is Killing Me

The great Roman poet Ovid once said that the night is sadder than the day. It seems like he wasn’t wrong. This is even more true of the many people who have to work at night – their job could actually kill them.

At least according to the results of a study by the University of Surrey (England, UK) that was published in collaboration with other institutions. According to the results, the night shift has a direct effect on people’s quality of life. It’s interesting how the hours of the night, which we tend to associate with love and romance, can make you sick, even if work is of course not the same as being with a partner?

“The night is beautiful, naked. It has no boundaries or barriers. “

José Hierro

The problems with the night shift

The main problems seem to be the lack of sleep and the forced change in the sleep rhythm. Society revolves around day and light, and so people who work at night have to turn their lives completely upside down. If not, they will experience chronic exhaustion and fatigue from which they can rarely recover.

There are already many studies that show that night shifts are very unhealthy. One recently published looked at its effects on nurses in South Korea. Before that, there was a study of retirees in China who used to work shifts in the automotive industry, and studies of French workers. All of these studies have shown that the night shift adversely affects people’s health. Not only that, there were signs of a number of other, all negative, effects. For example:

• Among South Korean nurses, those who worked more at night were prone to obesity.
• Many of the Chinese retirees suffered from diabetes and high blood pressure.
• The French workers showed significantly greater cognitive deterioration than the control groups. In fact, the results showed that her cognitive decline was 5-10 years ahead of other people’s.

Night shift affects sleep

Night shifts affect many areas of life . If you work at night but do not fully adapt to the schedule or even have to switch between day and night shifts, your biological rhythms get completely out of hand. For example , you eat when your body isn’t actually ready and try to sleep even when you’re not tired.

• Eating healthy during the night shift is a completely different challenge than during the day. Not only do night workers eat at bad times, but they also have greater difficulty in finding healthy food. Many tend to eat fast food, which is not good for their health.
• The internal mechanisms responsible for the sleep-wake cycle become unbalanced, which can lead to serious problems for the mind and body. In the end, this imbalance leads to a disturbing lack of sleep that goes beyond what arithmetically results from the night shift. People who work at night rarely find restful sleep.

What should you do if you have to work the night shift?

There is no easy solution for night workers. As mentioned earlier, it would be ideal if you could adapt your life to your work flow and find a routine. But then the weekends become a problem because we neither want nor can be nocturnal. This lack of consistency brings the biological clock out of sync in the long run.

Also, a lot of people work on different shifts. Sometimes they work during the day and sometimes they work at night. This is terribly harmful for the body because it can never adapt to certain processes. According to experts, one of the few groups of workers who have adapted well to the nightly schedule is that of the oil drilling workers. Because they don’t have weekends off and sleep in rooms with no windows, they don’t have the same problems as people who live in cities and have to work at night.

“Well, if you find a note tonight that sounds good, play that damn note every night!”

Count Basie

Obviously people have to work to live. If someone has to work in shifts, he pushes them to them. But it is obvious that they cause physical and psychological harm. While there is still no acceptable solution to the problem, we have at least taken the first step by becoming aware of the negative effects. The next step would be to do whatever it takes to establish a routine and take minimal breaks.