Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.
Sleep in Heavenly Peace. That’s a foreign concept to shiftworkers. Many shiftworkers report that they only get about four or five hours of sleep when they are working the night shift. That’s not too bad, but after a few days, noticeable fatigue feels like a way of life. Allowing for individual differences, most people still need 7 or 8 hours of sleep to be effective.
This week’s article addresses the number one issue for shiftworkers. Sleep. It’s an activity that drastically affects the biological clock.
In 1729, a biologist named Jean Jacques d’Ortous de Mairan studied the leaf movements of a heliotrope plant, which opens its leaves during the day and closes them at night. When he isolated the plant where sunlight couldn’t reach it, he found that the plant still opened its leaves during the day and closed them at night. Pretty interesting, huh? Over the years, this research expanded to include other organisms and humans. The controlling mechanism for this is our biological clock, which is a timekeeping system in the brain. It is not one single clock but many interrelated processes. The clock tries to keep going even when sleep is eliminated, and you would be unaware of the time of the day. So as you alter sleep schedules, other functions of your body will lag behind, and may be on different cycles, which are known as your circadian rhythms. (When you travel to other time zones, you can completely shift your sleep cycle and your other functions will catch up eventually.)
That’s the basis for many of our problems on the night shift. But what can we do to get the 7 or 8 hours of sleep we need each day? Here’s the bad news. You probably can’t get that 7 or 8 hours sleep - at least not all at one time. You may have to take one or two naps to make up the difference. Days off must be considered, because most people revert to a regular sleep pattern on their days off, which compounds the problem.
Let’s say you’re working the night shift and you get home from work about 9:00 a.m. You sleep for four or five hours, and are up for the rest of the day. By the time you get to work you’ve been up for 8 or 10 hours already. That’s not the best thing for alertness on the job, and then you still have to drive home.
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