Stress and Family Involvement

Two weeks ago, we began a series of articles on the family and social aspects of coping with shiftwork. We mentioned that this dimension of shiftwork has broad impacts on the individual worker and the family.

This week we’ll see that managing the family and social difficulties of shiftwork is much like managing stress. One of the keys is getting organized. The other tied to communication.

Since I wrote the last article, I had the opportunity to spend some time with a young married couple. The husband works nights as a desk clerk in a local motel. His wife works days in a food preparation center at a nearby ski resort. They have been married a relatively short time and have no children. I asked them how their schedules were working out for them.

Lyle likes his job because it offers him a lot of time to study while at work. He is attending the local community college and is trying to get his degree so that he can someday become a math teacher. Jane occasionally visits Lyle at work, and will sometimes bring him a light meal.

They don’t get to spend as much time together as they’d like because their days off don’t always coincide. But they mentioned that when they do get time off together, they make the conscious effort to go out and do something fun.

In other words, Lyle and Jane “manage” the difficulties, and balance them with recreation or other pleasurable activities together. (When they decide to have kids, they will be challenged even more – but aren’t we all?)

One of the keys to keeping your relationship healthy in the midst of changing shift schedules is to find ways of making life routine out of the non-routine. This is the underlying concept of planning and organizing your way to a helpful balance between “maintenance” and “recreation.”

The first step is to set priorities. You can categories them 1-2-3, A-B-C, etc. But you must distinguish those tasks and responsibilities that are essential, important, and trivial. You can find many systems for categorizing priorities. Stephen Covey has a wonderful way of describing tasks that are urgent-important, non-urgent-important, and non-urgent-non-important. The trivial, or non-urgent, non-important activities (like watching TV) are self-explanatory. If you spend too much time here, the other categories will suffer, and that’s where you need to focus.

If you do the things that are important but non-urgent, you will need to spend less time on the urgent-important items. For instance, if you make time to pay your bills before they are due, you won’t be under the gun to pay them in a panic, at the last minute. It’s like changing the oil in your automobile before you’ve neglected it to the point of engine failure.

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