Impact of Shift Work on Sleep

Shift work can have a dramatically negative impact on the quality of your sleep and ability to sleep. There is a diagnostic entity called Circadian Rhythm Sleep Disorder, formally called Sleep-Wake Schedule Disorder of which shift work type is a specific subtype.

Circadian Rhythm Sleep Disorder occurs when a person has recurrent or persistent disrupted sleep patterns as a result of a mismatch between the person’s body clock (when we would naturally sleep) and our environmental demands (when we are supposed to sleep or be awake). So typically, people with this disorder will complain of being awake when they need to sleep or excessively tired or sleepy when they need to be awake.

Understanding Circadian Rhythm Sleep Disorders

Other subtypes of Circadian Rhythm Sleep Disorder include delayed sleep phase where the person habitually falls asleep late and awakens late. These individuals can feel stuck in a cycle of sleeping late and have trouble moving their sleep times earlier. The other subtype is caused by jet lag. This is most severe when individuals travel more than 8 time zones in 24 hours. Traveling eastward is usually more difficult than traveling westward because it is easier to delay sleep than to fall asleep earlier.

Challenges of Shift Work Sleep

Back to the shift work subtype – in these cases, the person usually has normal circadian rhythm patterns, but the demand of switching back and forth between shifts disrupts the normal pattern of sleep. Even those who consistently work a night shift may have trouble because of the need to attend to personal or family responsibilities during the day. As a result, these people can not get adequate sleep during the day and fall asleep during their night shift.

Strategies for Managing Shift Work

What’s a person to do? The full answer to that is too long for this post, as it involves some behavioral adaptations. Provigil is a medication that is FDA approved for Shift Work Sleep Disorder to improve a person’s wakefulness on the job. But this is only half the answer as the second part is promoting sleep during the day. As tempting as it is to want to get things done during the day, it is equally important that a person treat the daytime as if it were night and shut everything down for a period so they may sleep.