Service instead of sleep
What night and shift work does to us
Updated on November 28th, 2024 – 2:10 p.m. Reading time: 3 min.
Distorted rhythm: Those who have to go to bed during the day often sleep worse. (Source: fizkes)
Working when others are sleeping: This is not uncommon in hospitals, the police or in industry. But how well does the body cope with it?
Night and shift work not only makes you constantly tired, it is also unhealthy. However, shift workers can often only influence their working hours to a limited extent. But there are a few tips on how to manage your working hours better.
According to Prof. Ingo Fietze, head of the Interdisciplinary Sleep Medicine Center at the Charité Berlin, the top problems with shift work are diseases of the cardiovascular system such as high blood pressure and cardiac arrhythmias – at least in terms of frequency. Metabolic diseases come in second place.
Night work in particular poses even more dangers, as an evaluation by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) from 2019 shows: “Based on what we now know, we have come to the conclusion that night work is probably carcinogenic “, explains Prof. Hajo Zeeb from the Bremen Leibniz Institute for Prevention Research and Epidemiology (BIPS), who worked on the evaluation.
But why does night work harm us? “The immune system also recovers at night,” explains Fietze. Anyone who works at night and sleeps during the day has a less well-functioning immune system. This also applies if you want to catch up on sleep as much as possible during the day: “The quality of sleep is always worse during the day and you sleep for shorter periods of time,” says Fietze.
Other disadvantages of night and shift work include:
- Sleep disorders
- Disorders in the gastrointestinal area such as chronic gastritis, intestinal inflammation or stomach ulcers
- Psychological problems such as restlessness, nervousness, sexual problems and depression
- Problems in social and family life
Some people can cope with it, others can’t. “There are still no predictors as to who can tolerate shift work and who cannot,” says Fietze. According to Fietze, there are many warning signs that night and shift work are not suitable for you:
- You are unfocused, more mistakes or even accidents happen,
- you are mentally and physically unfit,
- you’re in a bad mood, right?
- memory fades.
However, it is normal that shift work makes you tired, says Fietze. “As long as shift workers sleep well on several days off or on vacation, all is well with the world. If they sleep just as badly during these times as during the working week, then that is a serious warning signal.” It is better not to work shift work for people who already have sensitive or poor sleep, those who are chronically ill, who have another job or who are very involved in their families.
Most people are considered so-called owls: They would prefer to go to bed between 11:30 p.m. and 2 a.m. and get up again between 7:30 a.m. and 9:30 a.m., explains Hans-Günter Weeß, psychologist and head of the sleep center at the Pfalzklinikum. It would therefore be good if people who are early risers anyway – the so-called larks – took over the early shifts. The late risers then do the late and night shifts.
According to Weeß, when working in alternating shifts, it is better to work in short rotating shifts: i.e. two days of early shifts, two days of late shifts, two days of night shifts and then a longer rest break. “This means the body doesn’t even begin to adapt,” explains Weeß. Anyone who takes on a shift for a week at a time finds themselves in a kind of permanent jet lag, which is more stressful in the long term.
