Tips and Tricks: How to adjust to night shift
- RT Jaime
- Mar 31, 2021
- 5 min read
Tips and Tricks: How to adjust to night shift.
So I will start right off the bat and say that I worked night shift for a year as a new grad and it certainly was not my thing. If you’re a die hard night shifter, this post is probably not for you. However, I will be as objective as I can when writing this post, because there are some pros to working night shift. Most likely you are in clinicals and have to rotate on nights to get some good hours in for your clinical rotations. You may also be a new grad applying for jobs and have come to realize many hospitals hire new grads onto night shift as opposed to day shift. There are a plethora of reasons why anyone would work night shift. It is a reality of healthcare since patient’s need 24 hour care while they are healing in the hospital. In this Blog post I will share my tips and tricks for adjusting to night shift as well as give some pros and cons of working night shift. My goal is for you to adjust to night shift much faster with the information I learned while I was on night shift!
Pros
There are many pros and cons to night shift as you can see. Many of these things depend on your personality. Ultimately the Pros include less patient family, MORE MONEY, and being able to learn your skills in a “more relaxed” atmosphere. I use that term “more relaxed,” loosely. When I say there is less patient family present, I do not mean that patient family members are there to slow down our work or impede our work and this pro is heavily dependent on the unit you work in, the patient population you work with, and ultimately the family you are serving that day. We hope to get kind and understanding families, however it does not always work out that way.
Items in the middle I would like to point out that can be pros or cons include less management, family life, and more autonomy.
Less Management
Less Management is nice, until you are waiting at your managers office after your 12 hour shift to talk about something important and all you want to do is go home. However, the flip side is that you usually do not have to worry about management coming down on you during your shift.
Family Life
Family life can be a pro or con because I have heard mixed reviews from coworkers with families, in particular children, where they feel they see their children more working night shift. They get off work at 720 AM and go pick up their kids to take them to school, have a nice conversation on the way and then they go home and sleep. After they wake up they go pick up their kids from school and help them do their homework which seems like a decent family lifestyle. This sounds nice, but trust me there are also other aspects of family life that can become hindered from night shift. A friend once told me that when he was working night shift his wife's friends didn't believe she was married and thought she made up the fact that she had a husband. This was due to the fact that he was sleeping all day and was not able to attend gatherings and events with her. Never forget there are two sides to the same coin.
Autonomy
The last one I want to point out is autonomy. This goes hand in hand with less physician staff. You have more autonomy because the physician is not there, which means you MUST know what to do in different situations. Many times you and the nurse will troubleshoot and make decisions if the doctor is not available or currently saving another patient’s life. So this can be a pro for you to sharpen your skills, but in the beginning, it may be a con because you are still learning things. Typically night shift is a little bit slower than dayshift which gives you the ability to learn things in a more relaxed setting, but make no mistake, depending on the institution, you will work just as much, but perhaps on different tasks for patients versus the tasks they do on dayshift.
CONS
Cons include daytime noise (trouble sleeping), less staff at night, and adverse health effects from working night shift.
Daytime Noise
You don’t realize how noisy your neighbors are until you work night shift. All the gardeners are tending to the lawns, neighbors are working in their garages on projects, and children are outside playing with their friends. All of these things make plenty of noise for us to listen to while we are trying to sleep. What is the solution? I have found that I slept much better with EAR PLUGS! It was an absolute lifesaver when I worked night shift and I even continue to wear ear plugs to this day even though I am currently on day shift.
The sun also poses a great issue during daytime sleep, because it may be shining in your face. However, blackout curtains will help solve this problem easily. You can buy them at any retailer or Amazon. I could not tell you how much it helped me to sleep during the day! You could also get an eye mask as well so you do not allow any light to hit your eyes.
Less Staff at Night
When you are preparing for your night shift you have to remember there is less of EVERYTHING. There is less support staff, management, physicians, equipment technologists, cafeteria workers. There will most likely not be a lift team, there will most likely be less respiratory therapists, there will most likely be less cafeteria workers and food choices. You will have to pack your own lunch at that point, pick something up on the way to work, or head to the cafeteria before it closes at whatever time in the evening.
Adverse Health Effects
I took my first job on night shift because it was a hospital where I did my clinicals and I was comfortable with the people, equipment, and management team. They unfortunately only hired people onto night shift and then you worked your way up from there. If you have never heard of shift workers syndrome, look it up. I was unfortunately one of the people who really struggled with my health during night shift. I had the benefit of the many pros I just mentioned, but I paid the price with my health. I ate bad food because I picked up fast food on the way to work, I drank far too much caffeine to stay awake which gave me acid reflux, I never felt fully rested for the entire year I worked night shift, I got a knee effusion from running around and not getting proper rest during the day. Any extra money I made from working night shift went to doctors and physical therapists that helped me get my knee back to where it should be. There is a book sitting on my shelf waiting to be read called “Why We Sleep.” I have not read it in full yet, but it does talk about sleep from the perspective of anti-inflammatory processes that happen while we sleep and several sleep molecules that accumulate throughout the day to help us sleep at night. I can’t wait to have time to finish it.
Closing Thoughts
Sometimes you do have to work night shift to get your foot in the door with a great hospital and then put your name on the waitlist to go to dayshift. There is nothing wrong with that. Ultimately, I hope this post helps you prepare for night shift and take everything I learned about it so you can apply it and adjust much better and faster to night shift than I did!
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