Even if I'm at home, there's other stuff going on during the day. At night everyone's asleep, no noise or messages or anything.
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.
It is the same for me, except that I'm not in a position in which I can afford to wake up that late. I don't want to let my sleep habits be shaped by society, but lectures and work say otherwise.
As far as we know you only live once. Personally, I'm not waiting around to hope for another go before I live my life the way I want to. Everything has a cost, but to me the cost is well worth not having to deal with all that bullshit.
Graveyards are awesome depending on where you are in your life.
Hated working them in my twenties, wouldn't mind so much in my thirties. I have always enjoyed the night, I grew up in a loud house and night time was the only time it was quiet and I could do what I wanted peacefully.
Only issue I had was my day not lining up with other people or businesses. 24 hour grocery stores are wonderful however.
During the winter up north it’s bleak and cold for the trades, I’ll see the sun for an hour or so when I wake up.
Personally I wake up every other hour during daytime sleeps, so I’m rarely well rested.
But the pay bump is quite good, and there’s way less supervision micromanaging you.
It's amazing, like living under an enchantment. Everything just sounds different, the colors are more muted, the temperatures are brighter. Given my druthers, I'd be fully nocturnal.
I had 4 consecutive months of only night shifts. It was more relaxing at work but it felt like my perception of day/night was being distorted. Had short moments were it felt like day time was fake and it doesn't exist, reality is not real, and other wierd sensations that I have no clue how to explain.
Actually productive for study, as there are no interruptions and much less ambient noise.
Like heaven. It was heaven. Nobody expected me to get up in the morning, I never had to turn on the alarm, I was getting up when I had a good sleep, not when the sun got up or whatever. Happiest years of my life.
I worked nights for 7 years, I currently work swing shifts
Nightshifts were brutal, especially during the winter
It's hard on your mental health, it's hard to sleep, you don't see the sun enough
There's few things as terrible as stopping and realizing the last time you saw the sun was months ago due to your work schedule.
Working days again (though it as early as I'd like) let me feel human again.
And for those currently working night shifts, get your vitamin D levels checked. They're low, trust me.
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 only had a nightshift job for a relatively short period of time, so my insight is minimal. personally, it mostly felt like being exhausted all the time, bcause the rest of my life refused to make any allowances for the adjustment in my sleep schedule. like, friends still only wanted to hang out when i should have been sleeping? same with setting up appointments, going shopping, etc etc.
otherwise, i felt like if that wasn't the case, i would have been pretty happy with it. mostly because there were less people overall to interact with in my waking hours, which was nice.
Quiet and peaceful. Less anxious.
Productive, as long as you don't need to run something by someone from a different shift. When you do you pretty much delay that task for a day or lose a whole night's work trying to figure out ways to get around whatever made you need that person.
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.
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.
I've done the graveyard shift for a couple jobs now.
Usually for medical IT.
Its usually quiet, I don't see my boss very often, and for the most part just run the entirety of IT stuff by myself.
I know how much I value my sleep, so I try not to escalate issues in the middle of the night.
In a lot of ways its made me a more creative problem solver and just a better more rounded tech.
Some things I just don't have permissions for, and have to escalate. Sucks, but I get it.
It helps that my wife works similar hours to me.
We can both go to bed in the afternoon, though I'm jealous of her getting to sleep later than me in the moments I'm first awake, but I leave work first so its a fair trade I guess.
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.
Working at Night is peaceful. I work till 3-4 .. I have to bc of my insomnia. Can’t sleep so I rather work than just stare to blank space
Everything is much more calmer at night. I work/study best at night. I’ve always been a night owl.
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.
I worked night shift for 2.5 years (9:30pm-4:30am M-F) straight out of college. I'll never do it again.
I actually didn't mind being up and working late, I'm a night owl, it was everything else though. I think people look at the hours and go "well I'm up till 5am anyways", but it's not like you get home and fall asleep right away. You shower, eat, decompress, watch tv for a bit, it's usually 8am before you're actually falling asleep. Hungry after work? There's two places open 24 hours in town, get used to eating those a lot. You can make a meal at home, just be careful not to wake up your roommates. In fact just be careful of that in general.
Friends wanna do something on Friday night (or any night)? You either can't or have to call it quits early to leave for work. Drinking more than a beer is out. Friends want to do something Saturday at noon? You're either joining them late or you're a zombie all day. Everybody's going to that movie you wanna see, but it starts at 6 and is 2.5 hours, you're not gonna be able to make it. Got a girlfriend? She's gonna feel a little lonely, especially if she works an evening shifts at a restaurant or something. You're gonna be scrambling just to find hours to be together. Saturdays and Sundays you can kinda recover and live a normal life but you don't wanna get out of rhythm too much because you have to go back to work Monday night. You just feel so off from everyone else, like you're living in two separate worlds, it's a weird quasi-isolation. You're kinda depressed and in the winter you'll go days where you barely see the sun. I lived with my best friend and some days the only time I'd see him would be the 30 minutes after he'd get up to go to work and I would be going to bed. Your coworkers become your best friends because they're the only ones who really get it, which has its benefits if you work with cool people, but for me personally I kinda wanted to have a separate work and leisure life.
Some people enjoy it. Some people look at all the stuff I laid out and go "oh well that doesn't really apply to me. I don't have roommates or a gf, I don't go out with friends and like being alone, I never see the sun much anyways", etc etc, then maybe it's for you. There are some positives. Driving is incredible. There's a serenity to nobody on the road and it cuts your commute in half. Summer heat? Literally never have to deal with it.
And at the end of it all, I made it through and look back and laugh. But I'm not doing it again.
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
It feels like shit tbh. I work at a Utilities company. I work 8 hour day shifts and 16 hour night shifts this repeats twice and I'm given 2 days off. Thankfully, it's all quiet at night so we can snooze a bit.
It can get hard working the morning shifts since I like sleeping late. Regardless, I'm always tired. I'm not physically tired like manual labor tired but more or mentally exhausted tired all the way. Do it for 4 years though and you get used to the feeling of being tired.
I do feel that my IQ has gone down from the constant lack of sleep.
Its like another world
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.
Like I'm not getting ahead no matter how hard I try
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.
Peace and quiet, no distractions
Even if I'm at home, there's other stuff going on during the day. At night everyone's asleep, no noise or messages or anything.
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.
It is the same for me, except that I'm not in a position in which I can afford to wake up that late. I don't want to let my sleep habits be shaped by society, but lectures and work say otherwise.
As far as we know you only live once. Personally, I'm not waiting around to hope for another go before I live my life the way I want to. Everything has a cost, but to me the cost is well worth not having to deal with all that bullshit.
Graveyards are awesome depending on where you are in your life.
Hated working them in my twenties, wouldn't mind so much in my thirties. I have always enjoyed the night, I grew up in a loud house and night time was the only time it was quiet and I could do what I wanted peacefully.
Only issue I had was my day not lining up with other people or businesses. 24 hour grocery stores are wonderful however.
During the winter up north it’s bleak and cold for the trades, I’ll see the sun for an hour or so when I wake up. Personally I wake up every other hour during daytime sleeps, so I’m rarely well rested.
But the pay bump is quite good, and there’s way less supervision micromanaging you.
It's amazing, like living under an enchantment. Everything just sounds different, the colors are more muted, the temperatures are brighter. Given my druthers, I'd be fully nocturnal.
I had 4 consecutive months of only night shifts. It was more relaxing at work but it felt like my perception of day/night was being distorted. Had short moments were it felt like day time was fake and it doesn't exist, reality is not real, and other wierd sensations that I have no clue how to explain.
Actually productive for study, as there are no interruptions and much less ambient noise.
Like heaven. It was heaven. Nobody expected me to get up in the morning, I never had to turn on the alarm, I was getting up when I had a good sleep, not when the sun got up or whatever. Happiest years of my life.
I worked nights for 7 years, I currently work swing shifts
Nightshifts were brutal, especially during the winter
It's hard on your mental health, it's hard to sleep, you don't see the sun enough
There's few things as terrible as stopping and realizing the last time you saw the sun was months ago due to your work schedule.
Working days again (though it as early as I'd like) let me feel human again.
And for those currently working night shifts, get your vitamin D levels checked. They're low, trust me.
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 only had a nightshift job for a relatively short period of time, so my insight is minimal. personally, it mostly felt like being exhausted all the time, bcause the rest of my life refused to make any allowances for the adjustment in my sleep schedule. like, friends still only wanted to hang out when i should have been sleeping? same with setting up appointments, going shopping, etc etc.
otherwise, i felt like if that wasn't the case, i would have been pretty happy with it. mostly because there were less people overall to interact with in my waking hours, which was nice.
Quiet and peaceful. Less anxious.
Productive, as long as you don't need to run something by someone from a different shift. When you do you pretty much delay that task for a day or lose a whole night's work trying to figure out ways to get around whatever made you need that person.
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.
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.
I've done the graveyard shift for a couple jobs now.
Usually for medical IT.
Its usually quiet, I don't see my boss very often, and for the most part just run the entirety of IT stuff by myself.
I know how much I value my sleep, so I try not to escalate issues in the middle of the night.
In a lot of ways its made me a more creative problem solver and just a better more rounded tech.
Some things I just don't have permissions for, and have to escalate. Sucks, but I get it.
It helps that my wife works similar hours to me.
We can both go to bed in the afternoon, though I'm jealous of her getting to sleep later than me in the moments I'm first awake, but I leave work first so its a fair trade I guess.
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.
Working at Night is peaceful. I work till 3-4 .. I have to bc of my insomnia. Can’t sleep so I rather work than just stare to blank space
Everything is much more calmer at night. I work/study best at night. I’ve always been a night owl.
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.
I worked night shift for 2.5 years (9:30pm-4:30am M-F) straight out of college. I'll never do it again.
I actually didn't mind being up and working late, I'm a night owl, it was everything else though. I think people look at the hours and go "well I'm up till 5am anyways", but it's not like you get home and fall asleep right away. You shower, eat, decompress, watch tv for a bit, it's usually 8am before you're actually falling asleep. Hungry after work? There's two places open 24 hours in town, get used to eating those a lot. You can make a meal at home, just be careful not to wake up your roommates. In fact just be careful of that in general.
Friends wanna do something on Friday night (or any night)? You either can't or have to call it quits early to leave for work. Drinking more than a beer is out. Friends want to do something Saturday at noon? You're either joining them late or you're a zombie all day. Everybody's going to that movie you wanna see, but it starts at 6 and is 2.5 hours, you're not gonna be able to make it. Got a girlfriend? She's gonna feel a little lonely, especially if she works an evening shifts at a restaurant or something. You're gonna be scrambling just to find hours to be together. Saturdays and Sundays you can kinda recover and live a normal life but you don't wanna get out of rhythm too much because you have to go back to work Monday night. You just feel so off from everyone else, like you're living in two separate worlds, it's a weird quasi-isolation. You're kinda depressed and in the winter you'll go days where you barely see the sun. I lived with my best friend and some days the only time I'd see him would be the 30 minutes after he'd get up to go to work and I would be going to bed. Your coworkers become your best friends because they're the only ones who really get it, which has its benefits if you work with cool people, but for me personally I kinda wanted to have a separate work and leisure life.
Some people enjoy it. Some people look at all the stuff I laid out and go "oh well that doesn't really apply to me. I don't have roommates or a gf, I don't go out with friends and like being alone, I never see the sun much anyways", etc etc, then maybe it's for you. There are some positives. Driving is incredible. There's a serenity to nobody on the road and it cuts your commute in half. Summer heat? Literally never have to deal with it.
And at the end of it all, I made it through and look back and laugh. But I'm not doing it again.
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
It feels like shit tbh. I work at a Utilities company. I work 8 hour day shifts and 16 hour night shifts this repeats twice and I'm given 2 days off. Thankfully, it's all quiet at night so we can snooze a bit.
It can get hard working the morning shifts since I like sleeping late. Regardless, I'm always tired. I'm not physically tired like manual labor tired but more or mentally exhausted tired all the way. Do it for 4 years though and you get used to the feeling of being tired.
I do feel that my IQ has gone down from the constant lack of sleep.
Its like another world
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.
Like I'm not getting ahead no matter how hard I try
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.