For me is like my body can’t decide, sometimes I can, sometimes I wake up exhausted.
I recommend sleeping in a dark room. I’ve spent most of my life working nights and blocking out my windows is a necessity.
If you can sleep with ear plugs in that can help block out all the noise the day walkers make. I personally find them too annoying but other people have found success.
Blackout curtains have been essential for me. Instead of earplugs, I prefer a noisy fan. Circulating the air is good and the constant white noise normalizes hearing stuff, so neighbors or traffic or whatever isn’t different enough to wake me.
My wife has a Bluetooth sleep mask, so she can play soothing stuff from headspace or YouTube or Spotify while keeping light out of her eyes. You can find it pretty cheap.
As we enter dry winter months, a small humidifier in the bedroom might also be a good idea.
It also helps to have a routine on how you wind down for bed so that your body and mind can ease into being ready to sleep even if the clock or the sun are telling you otherwise. Maybe do some light reading, wash your face, set out something for the next day (like your outfit), whatever you need and can repeat nightly.
Blackout curtains help a lot from my experience. I have a hard time falling asleep and staying asleep to begin with and those make a big difference with or without an offset sleep schedule.
Melatonin can also help with sleep duration/quality but its also easy to become dependent on it to fall asleep so not ideal for long term.
I wear earplugs daily and nightly due to a sensory disorder and recently tried a new kind that’s by far the best from the many I’ve tried in terms of comfort. They’re also excellent in noise reduction.
As much as humanly possible, I try to put everything in my day during the 2pm-6pm but when I can’t, I do what I call “resets”. The day before I need to be awake during the day, I will stay up for about 16-20 hours and then go to bed around 2am. It’s essentially resetting my sleep schedule, so of course it occurs mostly during weekends. It’s an extremely unhealthy way to change sleep schedules and should be used sparingly, but it’s effectiveness can’t be beat.
I sleep better with lights, noise and distractions than without; without gives my brain time to think about things like elections, exactly how much time I have left to sleep before I have to get up for work, what troubles I’ll face at work the next day, etc. I slept so much better during the days than I do during night.
edit: For some reason my client decided to post this as I was in the middle of typing a sentence. Edited to actually finish the post.
I second light blocking curtains and I personally sleep with a fan to drown out noise. I also take melatonin about an hour before I lay down, I used to take ambien but I couldn’t handle the side effects anymore. I usually feel pretty well rested, at least enough for my shift.
I did this for a year and a half, and I never fully adjusted. I worked 4 10 hour days from 10pm til 8am.
One thing that helped a lot was to go to bed straight after work. Then I’d wake up, go do stuff/work out/be social, then head into work again. The only thing that threw a monkey wrench into this for me was the 3 day weekend, where I’d find my body fighting to return to a normal schedule.
Yes it never gets better. If anything only worse. If you do somewhat adapt to at least rise quickly or on demand then you have trouble going back to sleeping in again. The only benefit is nights pay more, so make sure they pay you more.
If you’re having trouble getting a restful sleep, try segmented sleeping.
On work days I always get a good 7-8 hours, but if I’m not working I very rarely manage more than 3-4, it’s as if my brain feels like it’s wasting the day. I’m one of those people who can operate comfortably on very little sleep. I use a sleep cycle alarm that is supposed to wake me when it senses I’m only sleeping lightly or something, no idea if any of that stuff’s real/helpful but it can’t hurt. I also maintain a healthy weight (I used to be overweight) which keeps pressure off my neck and reduces snoring & breathing interruptions, that definitely helps with feeling rested.
Once in a blue moon my body decides to sleep about 9 hours longer than planned to catch up on missed sleep, but I either rarely feel particularly tired or I’ve been doing this long enough that I don’t remember what being properly awake felt like 🤷♂️
I’m unresponsive to blue light, so I can sleep anytime
I basically flipped my schedule when I worked nights. Went to bed at 9 or 10 am and woke up at 4 or 5 pm. I struggled on Wednesday when I wanted to stay “up late” until noon or 2pm and would then sleep until 10 pm.
Much happier back on days with a regular schedule. Though I do miss grocery shopping at 6am or getting to the trail at the crack of dawn since I was already up.
I certainly did. Rarely managed to get more than 5 - 6 hours sleep, spent half my time in an exhausted daze.
