There’s nothing quite like shift work — waking up before your partner, trying not to wake your housemates when you get home at 2 in the morning, never being able to commit to a barbecue or a regular sporting match. The irregular sleep and the odd mealtimes don’t make it any easier. Night shifts have been shown to decrease a person’s life expectancy by approximately 5 years.
But shift work is not impossible, and the negatives can be managed. How, you might ask? By prioritising everything except work.
Shift work, by it’s very nature, makes work the centre of your universe. Everything has to be planned around it. So in order for shift work to not take over your life, you have to actively prioritise everything else.
Friends and events
What happens:
- You’re highly likely to miss some things. Birthdays, christmas, easter, weekends. People don’t generally have to plan around work for these events — sometimes work forces your to take this time off.
- Because you don’t have regular day off, it’s difficult to attend things that happen regularly — book clubs, sporting events, regular group brunches.
How to survive it:
- You will be free at unusual times. You will have days off in the middle of the week. An evening at a friends house is not going to disrupt your life in the way it might if you had to get up at 8am the next day. As long as you make it feasible for others (you travelling to your friends), you can make midweek social events a thing
- Because of the above, your relationships will become far more personal and one-on-one. Its difficult to “make” time to see a group of people, because you have to co-ordinate multiples. It’s much easer to arrange with one person, and so you will end up getting a lot more one on one time.
Sleep
What it means:
- Sleep is difficult. Every time you get into a rhythm, it changes. You’ll forget what day it is, and instead only know how long it is until your next day off
- If you live with someone, you have to creep around you house when the last thing you feel like doing is being considerate. If you live by yourself, you’ll start to feel like you neve see anyone outside of work, because you’re out of sync with the rest of the world.
How to survive it
- Schedule is your friend. Naps are your friend. Alcohol is not. Yes, when you go to bed changes all the time. How you go to sleep should not. No thinking about work. Work phone off. If your personal phone is contactable by work, silence it. Do something the same every night. If it’s showering before bed, do that. If it’s having a snack — do that. But keep it consistent. That consistency will help counteract how variable the actual sleep time is.
- You will be awake at odd times of the day. Enjoy it. Enjoy the city when there’s no-one else around. Enjoy the sunrises. Enjoy getting to see a whole different group of people moving around. Enjoy seeing the stores open, and taking the dog for a walk at midnight.
Eating
What happens:
- Shift work effects what you eat, when you’re hungry, and the food available. This leads to shift workers having a higher rate of metabolic disorders than the general population. While meal prepping can be an option, its often the last thing you want to do when you can’t get any sleep and you have no time to see your friends. This can result in an unhealthy diet, as people often can’t be bothered to cook when they’re exhausted and they’ve just worked for 14 hours.
- Trying to figure out when to eat becomes a nightmare. Do you eat at 2am in the morning, when you get home? Or at 12 when you wake up? and then do you eat three meals while you’re awake, or two, given it’s over a 12 hour period?
How to survive it:
- Think about eating as “how much nutrition am I getting” rather than “Is it lunch time?” By divorcing yourself from a schedule of three meals a day, and thinking in terms of “have I eaten enough for the last 16 hours awake”, or “do I need to eat when I’m sleeping for the next four hours” will help. It won’t solve getting home at 3am, and having to wake to start work at 11am. But it will help answer the question: “Do I eat now, when I wake up, three times during a 12 hour shift, once?”
- Meal prep, but simply. Find something that will work well for “lunch”, that will keep in the fridge. Make enough for a week, and then you have your work meals covered. Having enough for a week means that if you get home and are just absolutely exhausted, you’ll have something to eat. Have a supply of things that are easy and quick to eat — dumplings in the freezer, hambugers/risolles, bagged-salad. Things that just need 10 minutes in the microwave/in the pan/in the over are your friend.
With a bit of lateral thinking, you can avoid having shift work take over your entire life. This won’t stop it from sucking occasionally — only a time-turner could do that if you’re going from 6am wake-ups to 6pm wake ups in the space of a week — but it is one way to navigate shift work and have a life at the same time.
