[322] - Managing Night Shift Better

We challenge the myth that you can flip your body clock and share a practical plan to work with biology instead of fighting it. Simple changes to food timing, light exposure, caffeine, sleep setup, and training can make night shifts survivable and your days off feel human again.

• Why nights never fully adapt to your rhythm
• Mistakes that ruin alertness and recovery
• Light management for alertness and sleep
• Meal timing and snack ideas that digest well
• The midnight caffeine cutoff and why it matters
• Building a dark, cool, quiet sleep space
• Nap tactics and realistic sleep targets
• When to train, when to deload, and why
• Blending science with lived experience for real-world wins

Book a free 15-minute one-to-one coaching assessment call with me. There’s a link in the show notes. Go and have a look at it, make the decision, and come in and have a chat with me.

Chapters

• 4:52 Why Nights Never Fully Adapt
• 8:06 Lived Experience Versus Lab Science
• 11:48 Common Mistakes Most Night Shifters Make
• 14:34 Low Power Mode: Biology At Night
• 19:00 Strategy 1: Manage Your Meals
• 23:12 Strategy 2: Master Light Exposure

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 3:17

Shift work can be brutal, but it doesn't have to be. Welcome to a healthy shift. My name is Roger Sutherland, certified nutritionist, veteran law enforcement officer, and 24-7 shift worker for almost four decades. Through this podcast, I aim to educate shift workers using evidence-based methods to not only survive the rigors of shift work, but thrive. My goal is to empower shift workers to improve their health and well-being so they have more energy to do the things they love. Enjoy today's show. And welcome back to a healthy shift podcast. You know who I am. I'm Roger Sutherland, and I want to say thank you very much to you as we we're in December now and we're kind of winding into the Christmas period. Now I won't be taking any time off at all. I'm a shift worker and I'm very used to just working right through. So I'm going to continue working through and building some momentum going into next year. For you who may very well need me next year, because if you can't get what I'm about to tell you right, then you're going to need my help because I can help you one-to-one. So today I want to talk about something that every shift worker has actually wrestled with. And I mean pretty much every shift worker, and that is managing the night shift. I'm not going to give you the polished version. I'm not going to give you the textbook version. What I want to talk about is what actually happens at 2 a.m. when you are fighting to stay alert. And what I've learned over decades of actually doing this, and also using the principles of what I learned during my towards the end of my shift working career and what I've actually applied to clients with no idea at all and the success that I've had with that. And I'm challenging a whole lot of the science with this because that just literally doesn't match real life. You know that, I know that. The researchers are doing amazing work. Trust me, they are. There's a lot of researchers that are out there that are really digging in and starting to do the best that they can possibly do to help us, the shift worker. Now, what they don't have is they don't have the lived experience. And all of this research is great. But what happens is it ends up just sitting on the shelf in journals getting dusty. If we don't have someone like me out here that's actually digesting what their research has told them and applying it with a lived experience to make it to massage it and get it to work in a real life situation. So let's get into it. Shift workers don't live in a lab. What we do is we actually live in a real world, and let's be brutally honest, shift workers. You know it, the real world is incredibly messy. So what I want to do is I want to start right here, and I want to make this clear. Night shift is not something that your body will ever fully adapt to. All right, now be keep be very clear on this. People repeat this idea that you can flip your body clock or you can train your circadian rhythm. And no, it does not happen. Your body clock is literally tied to light, and the sun will always win. Light will always win, no matter which way you cut it. Even a permanent night shifter, they are still tied to the light of the day because at some stage during the day they're going to get light and it's going to confuse their body clock. So once I accepted this, everything actually changed. I stopped trying to fix my body, and what I did was I started managing it instead. And that is the shift that I want to give you today to help you. When I first started doing nights, I did what almost everyone that starts doing night shift does. And this is the problem that I see today. There is no education. Put your hand up. In fact, I challenge you. Reach out to me and you tell me if you got education and what education you actually got in your shift working life to support you in how you can optimize your life around shift work. Because if you actually got it, I want to hear what it was and who the organization was. Because I'm yet to find an organization that satisfactorily educates their staff in relation to how to go about doing shift work. But I've had some companies reach out to me recently, getting on the front foot with new staff starting, that actually they want to educate them on how to go about it from the word go. And all kudos to those companies because I'm telling you, that is an investment in their future. It's a really good investment as well. So what I used to do was when I first started doing nights, I did what everyone does. I smashed coffee at the wrong times. I need coffee to keep awake. I ate heavy meals overnight. I've told you before on this podcast, I literally used to make up a spaghetti bolognese and take it in and eat that with a pasta sauce, a pasta, at three o'clock in the morning. Oh my God, if I any knew. Anyway, I tried to sleep during the day with sunlight pouring in through the blinds, and I trained after night shift because I thought, oh, well, at least I'll be productive. Or I would stop on the way home from night shift and actually go and smash myself with an F-45 or a similar type of education exercise. My goodness me. Anyway, then I wonder why I actually felt wrecked. Why was I so inflamed? Why was I so swollen? Why was I feeling even more tired? And here's the truth I wasn't doing anything wrong for a lack of effort, right? What I was doing was what people thought actually made sense. But I was fighting my biology all the way through, every step of the way. And once I started coaching shift workers and I saw the same patterns over and over again, like good people working really hard, doing fantastic jobs, really highly stressful jobs, but doing a fantastic thing. What they were doing was just simply using the wrong strategies around it. You can still get that exercise. You can still get everything done that you need to get done, but you just need to learn how to go about doing it the right way. Let's make this simple. Overnight, your body goes into low power mode. Now you've literally watched your phone go into low power mode where it reduces the screen brightness, it shuts down certain apps, it changes the definition of the screen, it does all sorts of things. Your body does exactly the same thing overnight. Your digestion slows down. Your brain, it wants to sleep because it needs to detox. Your hormones change completely, your temperature drops. So when you push against all of that, what you're doing is you actually confuse your body and you hit a wall. Now, this is not a motivational issue. What it is, it's actually a biology issue. And that's why you can't just push through fatigue and win. And that's why you can't outsmart your circadian rhythm. But you can work with it. And that's when things finally improve. So let's just go through what actually works and some practical steps that I can help you with, just in a nutshell. I want to walk you through what actually works in the real world because these are the things that change my nights completely and have helped hundreds of shift workers that I've coached. Number one, manage your meals. Now keep in mind your digestion slows overnight. So we need to keep those that food overnight light or just really light snacks. Think simple, easy to digest and small. We don't have a full dinner between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. And what we do is we can save that proper meal and have it before we go in and then have another one afterwards and just have something light, something sweet that we can have in the middle of the night to just get us through and fuel us. That's the first one. Number one, manage your meals. We do not want to be eating overnight. Even though you might be highly active, we don't eat overnight because if we eat overnight, it's floating around our bloodstream and it's going to end up being parked as body fat. Number two, use your light to your advantage. Now your body clock is literally watching for a particular spectrum of light every single day, and that's 480 nanometers, and it is literally the color of that sky blue, and that's what it's looking for. So on your break during work or while you're at work, keep your lights bright because what it does is it actually helps you to stay alert. But on the drive home, this is when we need to be protecting ourselves. This is when we want to be wearing those blue light blocking glasses, not the ones that you get at your local optometrist. You need to be getting proper orange lens that block blue light. Okay, now you can go to my website, ahealthyshift.com, and then up the top is a menu item which says resources, and under there is recommended products. I highly recommend you go and have a look at the proper blue light blocking glasses that there are there. I have two companies that run them, and you can go and have a look at either of those and find what suits you best. We need to reduce that light exposure. So what we do is we literally wear blue light blocking glasses right up until we are in our room with our curtains closed in the dark, take them off, put the sleep mask on, and we're done. Now you might think that seems ridiculous, but this is what gets you to sleep. It's the light that's confusing your body that you might think, oh, I go to sleep, no problems at all. But the problem is you're still disrupting your circadian rhythm and waking up. And that is the problem. So what we want to do is we want to reduce that. So what this does, reducing light exposure, is it helps your body to shift into that sleep mode sooner. Number three is to build a strong sleep environment. First of all, stand at your door, look into your bedroom. Does that look like the place that I want to be? Now, we don't do this when we're getting home from night shift and looking, go, does it? Because of course it does. You'd stand on your head in the corner and sleep after night shift. But what you need is you need your room dark, you need it cool, and you need it quiet. You need it tidy and clear and free of clutter. We want blackout curtains or a roller blind. You ideally you should be wearing an eye mask when you're on night shift sleeps. An eye mask, super important. Don't tell me it's uncomfortable, you can't. Spend the money and get a decent one. When you get a decent one, and I recommend highly the Mantis sleep mask. And I would I've been using a mantle sleep mask for many, many years, and I absolutely love it. The reason being is it's super comfortable. You can light it on the side, it's pitch black. The difference that having an eye mask makes is massive. And again, it's listed on my recommended products page. White noise. White noise is something that is really important. It gives your brain something to actually focus on, and subconsciously, your brain focuses on the white noise and it doesn't notice the hot water service clicking in and out, the fridge clicking in and out. It doesn't notice all of those things that are going on. So it's not about tricking your body, it's about actually removing the barriers that stop you from falling asleep or staying asleep. We need to change, number four, is we need to change our mentality around what we're trying to do when we get home to go to sleep. My suggestion is, and this is from experience and coaching clients, stop trying to think, oh, I've got to get eight hours sleep or I'll be hopeless. You must not take medications to sleep. We don't medicate ourselves to sleep because we're not actually sleeping. We're unconscious. Have you ever noticed that the people that take medications that tell you they got eight hours are also the ones that are hanging off the off the door of the car and they can't function overnight at all. They're always the ones falling asleep. It's because they haven't slept. They'll tell you they have, but they actually haven't. They've been unconscious. Now, this is really important for you to understand. Change the anxiety of sleeping to try and get seven to nine hours sleep to I'm just gonna nap and get up when I wake up and then have another nap before you go in. Once you change your mentality around that, it makes an enormous difference. This is important because most shift workers feel like failures because they can't get that eight hours during the day. You're not meant to. You are not meant to sleep during the day. If you can just get three and a half hours or so of sleep, three and a half, sorry, three to four and a half hours of solid hours sleep, it's actually a good day's sleep. Then if you need, you can have a 30-minute nap later just to get you through. We want to get in and out of night shift quickly. It's not about thriving on nights, it's about getting in and out and getting back to our normal life. So stop beating yourself up for something that no human body actually does well. No one does well. The next thing is we don't trade hard after a night shift, and this is a really big one. I know people want to be productive, they've got goals and they want to get there, but I will tell you this: if you're training and doing resistance training on the way home from night shift, you're actually not cashing in on the adaptations from the training. Your body is already stressed, it's high on cortisol, and you're not actually getting any benefit from the training that you're doing. You're wasting your time. Go home, go to sleep, get a solid sleep, and get up and train afterwards. Pushing your body to train after being awake all night just digs a much deeper hole for you. Avoid it. It's not smart, it's not clever, and sending your coach photos from the gym at seven o'clock in the morning on the way home is actually stupid. And if anybody does that to me, I tell them to go the hell home and get to bed because that sleep is all important. We don't train on the way home. We don't even train hard when we're on night shift. This is an opportunity for us to deload and actually just take it easy. Our body is stressed, everything's out of whack. Hormonally, we're out of whack, and this is when we make and we have injuries. All right, this is when we need to be really, really careful. So that's that. Caffeine. Caffeine timing really matters. I've got a golden rule. 12 o'clock. I don't care whether you're on day shift, afternoon shift, or night shift, we cut caffeine at 12 o'clock. Which one, Rog? Both. We cut caffeine at midday when we're on day shift or afternoon shift, and on night shift, we cut caffeine at midnight. Use the caffeine early in your shift, not late. If you take it at 3 or 4 a.m., then you're still gonna feel it when you get home. Now I I know what you're gonna say. Oh, yeah, but it doesn't affect my sleep. I can go to sleep, no problems. Good one. It still messes with your sleep, it is still disrupting that adenosine receptor, right? And what it does is it actually floats around in your bloodstream. And as soon as that adenosine's gone, that sleep pressure from when you go to sleep, it falls away, and that caffeine in your bloodstream just goes into the adenosine receptor and wakes you up. This is why people don't stay asleep. It's the caffeine floating around in them. Yeah, you go to sleep, but the caffeine wakes you up. 12 o'clock rule, keep that one in mind. I want you to bank your sleep before nights. I've done a podcast on this recently. You can't catch up on sleep, but by golly, you can absolutely bank your sleep. While you can't catch up on lost sleep, you can still go into nights with extra sleep. And a nap before your first night shift or a nap napping between the nights is the way we start banking our sleep. It's one of the best tools that you actually have in your kit box. As you're going into night shifts, start getting to bed earlier and start banking some sleep because you don't want to go into night shift chronically fatigued to start off with because you're already up against it. Now that's seven tips. These things might seem small, but they will all add up in a very, very big way. And this is where I want to actually challenge the science a bit because a lot of research on night shift is done in these perfect lab conditions. Control, it's quiet, it's predictable, it's got routine. Shift work isn't like that. We deal with alarms, we've got emergencies, staffing issues, patients, offenders, conflict. We've got constant uncertainty and high stress. So I take the science, and what I do is I matched it with lived experience, and that's where the real answers lie, right there. You can't beat that. There's nobody else out there that is actually doing what I do with lived experience, actually looking at the science, reading the research, understanding what the research is telling us, and applying it into a real life situation that benefits all of us. And I'm even challenging what the research has told us, which is actually going to be investigated as a hypothesis for a research paper now. Because I believe that we're doing night shift all wrong, or we have been, and my way is the absolute best and optimal way. Get in, get out as quickly as you can, so you've got a quality of life. This is how I coach clients now, and what I do is I support them with where they are actually at. We need practical solutions that literally will hold up in the real world, and that's what I teach. Not only that, this is why I coach, because I know how to go about doing it with people. You can't copy a controlled lab protocol and expect it to work at 3 a.m. in a patrol car or in a hospital ward or on a mine site. It doesn't work. So let's just go through one more thing before I wrap it up. You need to stop beating yourself up about night shift. Just get in and get out as efficiently and as quickly as you possibly can. Night shift is really hard. You're not weak for struggling with it. You're actually human. Because you're human, it's hard. When you understand your body, and instead of fighting it, your nights will actually get easier. Your days off will feel better, and you'll get that life back outside of your night shifting life. And this is what I do with clients. What I actually do with clients is I want to give them more energy to enjoy their days off, not just crawl from one shift to the next. And if you don't believe me, challenge me. I will help you with this. So if you're struggling with a night shift and you would like support in relation to what matches your life, your social life, your home life, and your shift working life, then book a free 15-minute one-to-one coaching assessment call with me. There's a link in the show notes. Go and have a look at it, make the decision, and come in and have a chat with me. I'm here to help you. It doesn't matter where you are in the world or what you're doing. I will coach you along these lines and help you with it. I'll show you how we can build a plan that works for your roster, that works for your fatigue, that works for your lifestyle, so that you can actually start to enjoy your days off again. So, what I want to do on the back of that is I want to say thank you so much for listening to this episode. I want you to take care of yourself. I don't want you to be hard on yourself. I want you to just get in and get out of that night shift so that you can enjoy your life outside of it. The more time you spend trying to adapt to night shift, the less time you're going to be. You get on your days off. I'll talk to you in the next episode. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe so you get notified whenever a new episode is released. It would also be ever so helpful if you could leave a rating and review on the app you're currently listening on. If you want to know more about me or work with me, you can go to ahealthyshift.com. I'll catch you on the next one.