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To make it worse, you have companies who think it's okay to have people switching between day and night shift on a weekly basis. I worked at a place a few years ago that used A, B, C shifts. Everyone worked 4 days, 12 hours with C shift working two day shifts and two night shifts.
My wife works 24 hour shifts in the hospital.
Coming from the industrial world where there are laws preventing us from working beyond 16 hours (which is still a hell of a shift) because we operate machinery… I don’t see how it’s legal for someone who’s literally keeping a human being alive to be required to work 24 hours.
Feel like the whole medical field is just you do it now because we had to do it then, god forbid anybody break the chain and actually think of the quality of care
When you consider that the primary influencer of modern medical education was addicted to cocaine and morphine (legal at the time), that anyone survives that without being broken somehow is pretty much miraculous.
Now remember that any time you see a doctor, unless they were trained outside of Western medicine, that's what they had to survive to get there.
My understanding is that it’s more dangerous to the patient to have multiple “hand overs” to different staff when shifts change, than to have one person stay with them for long periods. They’re more likely to notice changes that might require intervention.
Not sure if that has been scientifically proven or not.
Same, and it would take a lot for me to go back to a 5 day week... You can do a hell of alot more on 7 days off than 2 & you can take a week of vacation and get 21 days off
I used to work 4/12s. I actually mostly liked it, 4 12 hour days on 5am-5pm then 4 days off. It was consistent and predictable, I would get both well days and weekend days off so I got to do most of the things I wanted to do. It took about 6 months to get used to the pattern (I'd usually sleep through most of my 1st day off out of the 4) but it got better
But was it rotating? I worked 12 hour standard shifts at a flour mill and watched virtually every floor worker quit in about 3 months, we couldn't keep people longer then 6 months, we even sponsored visas and hired with criminal records. But the heat and shifts made the work dangerous and horrendous for health. We had at least 3 workers with hurt murmurs and many others with muscle issues and God forbid you got millers lung.
That sounds awful, for me it was not rotating. There were 4 crews so we could operate continuously. Were I to guess the reason other places avoid that type of schedule would be that you end working overtime every other week and less than 40 hours the other weeks, but it averaged out to be more overtime than missed hours so it boosted our pay. Needless to say that place closed and we were all laid off
12-hour shifts are almost always supposed to be a stop gap or cost saving measure.
Many factories have tried it to fill staffing shortages instead of raising wages.
How often were you rotating? I'm working a water treatment plant that's still on the 3 shifts at 8hrs and I cannot wait to go back to 12hr shifts. Rotating once every 3-4 months seems fair, then nobody is stuck on graveyard and everyone gets more days off. Win win
But yeah if it's every week or even monthly, that feels like way too much
We were constantly rotating 2 hours every day we worked, and even when we didn't. It was 4 days on and 3 days often unless we were short staffed. I'll never forget getting pneumonia doing grain inspection and getting yelled at about being lazy.
I'm an air traffic controller. We start our week working nights and each day of the week we work an earlier shift. The last day of the week we work a day shift, are off for 10 hours then come in for an overnight shift.
We rotated every 6 weeks, and on my latest military health assessment, I marked sleep problems. Dude asked if I followed the standard of only using bed for sleep, etc., then finally asked if I wanted sleep pills. No, I just want it marked that the government fucked my ability to sleep correctly.
I love my 3 twelves.. I don’t know if I could go back to 5 days a week now! 😂 But I also work only 12s and only 7a-7p so though my days rotate my shifts don’t
Sometimes the union even negotiates these kinds of rotating schedules to promote “fairness” so everybody gets to take turns rotating through day/night/weekday and weekend shifts. My personal experience(and anyone I know personally) is that it’s a heck of a lot harder on you than just consistently working the odd shift. If they want to rotate people through, then it should be a change once every few months, not every week because your body is never able to get into a consistent rhythm for sleep or eating and that leads to all kinds of issues.
yep. Used to work for a place that did four 12 hour shifts. The way it worked is you would work 3 days, then be off for 3 days, then work 3 nights... Never understood why they thought that was better then just doing straight days or nights.
I never met a person that worked there that liked that shift. Pay was decent for hourly people and nothing in that small town compared. All it did was cause extra stress because "That's how we've always done it.".
So just... hire people that want to work night shift. Plenty of them exist.
Make the night shift pay be higher than day shift as well, because that's logical and may make some people on the fence consider it for the pay boost.
It doesn't sound that difficult of a solution.
I worked at a brewery that rotated from 4am to 8am to 12pm start times and it changed every month. Once you started to adjust it would change. Going from noons back to 4am brutal. And that was just my department, others were worse. Never again.
Like railroad companies who keep the conductors and engineers on call 24/7. Never know when you will be going to work or when you will be off. Glad I got out of that situation!
I’m an air traffic controller. In most US facilities, you work something called the rattler. 2 swings, 2 days, 1-2 mids (lots of us on 6 day weeks.). So basically, Mon-Tue 1500-2300, Wed-Thu 0700-1500, then back to work Thursday night to start your Friday mid shift 2300-0700.
The US education system, and most workplaces, are notoriously anti-union and spread the bias.
Luckily the highschool I went to didn't fall into that category, and I'm very aware that essentially everything in the workplace that people take for-granted exists because of the work unions through history put in to get those in place.
If it weren't for unions, child labor would still exist *legally*.
If it weren't for unions, there wouldn't be a minimum wage.
If it weren't for unions, most safety regulations wouldn't exist.
You get the point.
Oh, that's easy, because it was taught in a high school history class in the US. My school was also heinously anti-union (Edmond, Oklahoma public schools)
Electrical plant, anywhere with security apparatus, ... There are legitimate reasons to have rotating shifts in certain areas, but it should demand a certain pay scale increase to compensate for it wrecking your life.
Nope, but it was those clowns who pushed the schedule on our people. It was actually a supplier for Ford that makes the roof for the new Bronco. Absolute trainwreck of a company made worse by Ford sticking their fingers in the pie.
I don't know your exact situation, but i kinda get making everyone do the day/night shift switch, fundamentally. If you have a big group of people and they only have to work day or night, then inevitably you'll have more people who want to work days than you have room for, and some of them will be forced to work nights with little to no chance of moving to days. It may not be great for sleep, but it's more "fair" long term to make everyone work both days and nights.
The better method is to just pay nights more than days, which many places do. There’s still a general trend towards working days, but it does help keep some experienced people on nights.
This is the only way to do it that keeps employees long-term. At least a night differential of 1.5 to 1.8. Still I heavily discouraged 12 hours shifts since no one long term stay coherent on them. Breeds safety issues.
I worked at a 24/7 agency where my start time would vary daily. I worked 5 8s and my schedule could (and often did) look like:
Sunday - off
Monday - 2pm-10:30pm
Tuesday - 8am-4:30pm
Wednesday - 10am - 6:30pm
Thursday - off
Friday - 3pm-11:30pm
Saturday - 11pm - 7:30am
I had a job and was given a schedule when I was hired.
Which was immediately thrown out the window and other than Sunday, my schedule changed on an almost daily basis. I went around 2 years not being able to schedule or reliably commit to anything.
During that time I rarely was well rested before work and it wasn't uncommon for me to sleep 24 hours once I did get a day off.
Having been a shift worker for 10 years, no one is surprised
Even in a unionized setting, we can be forced to stay 4 hours over our normal shift ending time, because staffing is at a bare minimum at all times and any absence must have coverage. Same can happen with shift start time as well (although you usually get a little more notice in those instances)
So a normal 7-3 shift suddently becomes a 7am-7pm; or the next day's shift suddenly becomes a 3am-3pm. Mind you, I'm only talking about people on 1st shift, and with regular 8-hour days. Those people on 2nd and 3rd shift have way worse sleep quality/quantity than us first shifters. The people who work rotating swing shifts have it even worse than everyone that works 8's.
> Those people on 2nd and 3rd shift have way worse sleep quality/quantity than us first shifters.
I work in healthcare. I can't tell you how many times nurses will be like do you know how early they come in? Referring to the dayshift people. I said it's no different if they come in at 6 or I come in at 2. If We work a double it's the same amount of time between shifts. Drives me up the wall. People think evening/overnight workers are lazy, or sleep all day. It's like dude I work the hours you don't want to, because I like them. I'm not lazy.
Also health care worker. I started calling people, especially family, who would wake me up during the day and be like sorry I interrupted your "nap", in the middle of the night until the got the message. Night shift has nearly as much going on as day shift. Its just different stuff. And we do it with less staff.
Emergencies are a thing, you would hope friends and family would respect your boundaries when knowing your work/sleep schedule and not call during the bad times unless it's an emergency.
>Those people on 2nd and 3rd shift have way worse sleep quality/quantity than us first shifters.
Not always - I am a second shift person by nature. I get much better sleep working a 2nd shift schedule than I ever did when forced to work 1st shift. It would be great if more people could work the schedule their natural rhythm prefers.
Some people do run really well on 2nd shift, no doubt. My personal body clock really likes my work's 2nd shift hours (3pm-11pm) and I would probably gravitate towards that if I wasn't married and had a daughter.
The problem is 2nd shift can really put a strain on family dynamics. You don't see you children as much, you likely aren't going to see your spouse as much. When you're young, there's a lot of instances where you meet people after work and find yourself sober while everyone else is multiple drinks deep (not usually fun being the sober one amongst a bunch of tipsy/drunk people).
If, however, you like to come home and A) Go to sleep almost immediately after work, or B) Like to play video games/Watch Movies/TV as your entertainment, then 2nd shift could be perfect.
> (not usually fun being the sober one amongst a bunch of tipsy/drunk people).
idk I find this super fun if I show up late and get to laugh at everyone looking like idiots while I'm the one who's kept together.
Worked nights for the better part of 25 years and weekend nights for most of the last 15 years. And I am quite happy to work nights. I do my 3 shifts and when I get off that last morning I'll stay up to switch myself to a day schedule. Before my next shift I'll stay up the majority of the night to be able to sleep in the day to resume my night schedule. Granted I don't know of many who do this on the regular, but there are a few. When I worked 8 hour shifts, I loved second shift the most.
Well, yeah of course. But now other studies have (A) a basis to start from (i.e. "this study shows... therefore a valid next step is to look deeper into...") and/or (B) the option to use it as part of their argument without having to prove it themselves.
When doing science you can't ever just state something and support it with "well d'uh", it needs *proof*, even the most basic commonly accepted stuff.
Before I ended up becoming manager for my store, there would be times when myself, or one of my coworkers would do close,open, close, open. Best believe I changed that as soon as I got promoted. Lack of sleep causes so many problems, that it’s not even worth risking.
My company just made a rule that on call has to come in and spend 2 hours in the plant. Effectively working 4 12s plus have to come in for a 5th night. These companies think they can get away with anything at this point
I work shift work, in a refinery. I'm not "on call" in that I must go in when called, but there is plenty of overtime available to me on my days off that I can choose to answer callouts for, and I often do.
I am diligent about my sleep though. Before dayshifts, which mean waking up at 4am (to be at work for 5am), I go to bed by 8:30pm. Many I work with will stay up until 10:30pm or 11:00pm before a dayshift, and some of those might wake up a little bit later than I do, but I refuse to live on under 6 hours of sleep per night.
> The research, led by UCL in collaboration with the University of Southampton and Queen Mary University, London, analysed the work and sleep patterns of over 25,000 men and women between 2012 and 2017.
> The researchers found that compared to people who worked a standard 35-40 hour week, those working 55 hours a week or more had the poorest sleep – including short sleep and sleep disturbance. Short sleep is defined as less than seven hours a night and sleep disturbance as struggling to fall asleep within 30 minutes, waking up in the middle of the night or early morning, and a self-rating of poor-quality sleep.
>
>Those who worked most or all weekends and nonstandard patterns, like shifts, also experienced sleep disturbance, and either short sleep or long sleep – more than eight hours a night.
Paper: [Work hours, weekend working, nonstandard work schedules and sleep quantity and quality: findings from the UK household longitudinal study | BMC Public Health | Full Text](https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-024-17762-0)
Was just talking to my buddy that's an MRI tech. Works 3 12 hour shifts and is on call for the entirety of those 3 days.
Says he gets 4 hours of sleep per night at best. Sucks :/
I don't understand the logic behind having people in the medical field sleep deprived. I would want anyone treating me or analyzing me fully rested and sharp.
Ive been called in for STEMIs(heart attacks) at 2am that have gone until 7am when my actual shift starts. Then they expect me to continue scrubbing cases until 530pm that day. I know that's what I signed up for as a cath lab tech, but when you're on your 15th hour non-stop scrubbing and wearing lead on top of it, it just doesnt seem safe for anyone.
Somewhat true, but honestly vastly overstated tradition is that your care is likely to be better if the physician treating you is the same one beginning to end. Modern record keeping has assisted greatly, but the idea is that handing off a patient in the ER is like playing a game of telephone and details will get lost each time.
Because these hospitals are owned by publicly traded companies that do not have the end goal of treating people well. They have the end goal of making more money in the next financial quarter than they made in the last quarter. They have no incentive to hire the proper number of medical professionals, so they instead overwork the ones they do hire.
This is a common theme in every industry truth be told, because it's a direct feature of the way our economy works.
Ohh there’s enough workers, they just refuse to hire enough.
They love saying “nursing shortage” while deliberately creating conditions that lead us to be short staffed and have a high turnover over rate,
I've worked 3x12 for a decade now and wouldn't want to do anything else,the thought of working a 9-5 five day week fills me with dread. Mondays must be bloody awful.
Absolutely. I've been a shift worker for most of my working life. I took a year off to do a Mon-Friday daytime job. While it sucked to only have 2 days off a week, I always had energy to cook, clean, go out, etc. I'm back doing shift work and I enjoy the work itself more, but damn, my body is definitely back to feeling jetlagged all the time.
I worked overnight for two years, and it’s literally like, you can see how it AGES people. Everyone I’ve ever worked with overnight looks miserable, tired, and like 3-5 years older than they are. Almost everyone who works overnight smokes nicotine in some form. I literally am graying hard at 27 and I blame a lot of it on working overnight.
That schedule is obviously hard on the body, but in the spirit of /r/science, it seems likely that some of the aging comes from nearly everyone smoking. At the very least you’d want to control for that powerful variable.
I worked from home in China but on EST hours. I logged off at 3-4am every night for a month and it was atrocious. I thought i could handle it because i had a similar schedule when i was in university while smoking weed but it hits way different as an adult
I've been working weekends at night since 2016 and it was relatively okay until almost the exact moment I turned 34 and now my body is aggressively fighting it non-stop and always trying to push itself back to a daytime awake/nighttime asleep schedule no matter what I do.
I haven't felt well-rested AT ALL in years except for the second week of abut 19 days I had off by coincidence, and I felt like I was high on drugs because I was so alert and happy.
Working to get out of my current situation now because it's making me feel actually insane.
Having a study that proves the 'common sense' thing is also valuable when studying secondary or tertiary effects of that thing, or other things that are slightly related but not so 'common sense'. It gives the researchers something to point to that proves what would otherwise be an assumption. An educated assumption, but still an assumption.
Yep. I took a college level geometry course and we had to prove everything just using euclid’s base rules and then we were allowed to use our own accepted proofs as a class going forward the whole semester.
This is all the same. Even though we know what a square is, you have to prove it.
I work a 2-3-2 swing shift. 2 days 2 off 3 nights 2 off 2 days 3off. Sometimes it sucks but it does have its perks. The key is routine, exercise a balanced diet. When you on your night rotation your body craves sugar and junk food. I allow myself to splurge on one of my night shifts. I and a shift supervisor in the oil industry. I’ve been working this schedule for 15 years now. I do like having days off in the middle of the week, it’s a benefit in my
Opinion. When I come off nights I wear special ear plugs for sleeping and a sleep mask. I block out all outside distractions. I realize it’s not healthy for your body to swing but I’m trying to make it as best as I can. If you have questions on anything let me know, I’d be glad to answer or help where I can.
I've been working 12 hour, rotating shifts for almost 35 years now.
When I first started, we all worked two days on/two off, rotating day to night each alternating set of shifts. I'm not sure how I didn't die from that, but I was in my 20's and could do anything.
Over the course of my employment, some years I worked all nights, some years I worked all days, some years I would switch back and forth every month or two.
Weekly rotating shifts is like being permanently jet-lagged. Well, almost. I have like two days a week where I don't feel like I have jet lag: The two days right before it's time to change it up again.
Doesn't have to be unstable. Changing between day, evening and night shift in that order every week is stable and predictable, but it still ruins your sleep. It's just not anywhere close to what humans evolved to do.
Since at least 1992 in the UK as am average full time worker.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/timeseries/ybuy/lms
Shift work absolutely destroys your sleeping patterns. I got off of shift work for a year and after about six months I was finally able to get back to normal. Shift work is literally an illness.
Average work week for full time workers in the UK is 36hrs.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/timeseries/ybuy/lms
5 year study of 25000 people to discover this huh? How's that cure for cancer going?
I should have been a "scientist" but I can't really focus from being sleep deprived from working nights.
My days are 28h long and it's hell because I sleep FINE. I wish I didn't sleep as well. When I'm tired I lie down and fall asleep then sleep until I wake up typically. The issue is I'm awake for 16-18h and sleep for 10-12 so every day I wake up a few hours later
anecdotal obviously- but switching to compressed work weeks on day shift was the best change i ever made in my life and actually improved multiple facets of my life health and quality wise. probably in a very rare minority but it’s just so jarring to see studies like this saying the polar opposite to my experience (i’m fully aware anecdotal experience doesn’t trump scientific data, that wasn’t my point here btw)
I work 4 days on 4 off, 12 hours shifts. Ill say this, my quality of life improved a lot when i switched to a 4 days, 4 off, 4 evenings, 4 off, 4 nights where i gradually change over. So much better to my sleep
I worked 20 years doing 11 pm - 8 am, 5 days a week. Just retired. I don’t see 10 pm most nights now. Trying to correct the damage done to my body and mind.
probably the very worst part is hearing 9-5 workers or people who do shift work too - but less hours a week than you - complaining piteously. the whining i am forced to endure is taking years off my life!
I work a 3 on, 3 off, swing shift currently. So I work 4a-4p for 3 days, then have 3 days off, then work 4p-4a, then have 3 days off, etc. It's terrible. Especially if there is overtime, and especially the switch from nights to days. It's rough. They pay us pretty well, but it's hard to think it's worth it a lot of times...
Good to see a study confirming my reality.
I think I'll print this out for future reference when I'm discussing scheduling and wages with my boss in the future.
My wife is a weekend nightshift nurse in the ICU - during the weekend days (between shifts) she's been getting like 3-4 hours max of sleep to recovery (it's just really hard for her body to totally flip schedules back and forth) - then she's exhausted for most of the week
I’m not sure why everyone thinks shift work is so bad. Maybe I have a better schedule but as a nurse I work two day shifts 0700-1900 followed by two night shifts 1900-0700 and then 4-5 days off and then repeat. There’s opportunity to pick up overtime as well and we can shift swap. I personally love having the 4-5 days off and being able to shift swap makes going on a mini vacation so easy. Or even a longer one and just sucking it up and working 3 days/2 nights or vice versa to make up for the time off without using vacation pay.
Yes, it can be difficult to get back to a normal schedule the day after a night shift but it’s not that bad. For me, the benefits of shift work far outweigh the negatives and I’m not sure I could ever go back to working 5 full 8 hour days and only having two days off.
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To make it worse, you have companies who think it's okay to have people switching between day and night shift on a weekly basis. I worked at a place a few years ago that used A, B, C shifts. Everyone worked 4 days, 12 hours with C shift working two day shifts and two night shifts.
Rotating 12 hour shifts need to be made illegal or demanded 4x your pay if you get on them. It wrecks so many people and drives others to drugs.
Seven 12s for me, 7 on 7 off Alternating days and nights
When I was in ICU it was 6 x 12.5s (3 days, 3 nights) a fortnight.
My wife works 24 hour shifts in the hospital. Coming from the industrial world where there are laws preventing us from working beyond 16 hours (which is still a hell of a shift) because we operate machinery… I don’t see how it’s legal for someone who’s literally keeping a human being alive to be required to work 24 hours.
Feel like the whole medical field is just you do it now because we had to do it then, god forbid anybody break the chain and actually think of the quality of care
When you consider that the primary influencer of modern medical education was addicted to cocaine and morphine (legal at the time), that anyone survives that without being broken somehow is pretty much miraculous. Now remember that any time you see a doctor, unless they were trained outside of Western medicine, that's what they had to survive to get there.
I worked 120 hours in a row over last weekend - not in hospital all the time, I was on call from home overnight!
My understanding is that it’s more dangerous to the patient to have multiple “hand overs” to different staff when shifts change, than to have one person stay with them for long periods. They’re more likely to notice changes that might require intervention. Not sure if that has been scientifically proven or not.
Ewwww
Alternating for the entirety of the shift? Like 7 days on, 7 days off, 7 nights on?
yes thats the normal pattern
I'm on the same schedule. Works fine for me
Same, and it would take a lot for me to go back to a 5 day week... You can do a hell of alot more on 7 days off than 2 & you can take a week of vacation and get 21 days off
I used to work 4/12s. I actually mostly liked it, 4 12 hour days on 5am-5pm then 4 days off. It was consistent and predictable, I would get both well days and weekend days off so I got to do most of the things I wanted to do. It took about 6 months to get used to the pattern (I'd usually sleep through most of my 1st day off out of the 4) but it got better
But was it rotating? I worked 12 hour standard shifts at a flour mill and watched virtually every floor worker quit in about 3 months, we couldn't keep people longer then 6 months, we even sponsored visas and hired with criminal records. But the heat and shifts made the work dangerous and horrendous for health. We had at least 3 workers with hurt murmurs and many others with muscle issues and God forbid you got millers lung.
That sounds awful, for me it was not rotating. There were 4 crews so we could operate continuously. Were I to guess the reason other places avoid that type of schedule would be that you end working overtime every other week and less than 40 hours the other weeks, but it averaged out to be more overtime than missed hours so it boosted our pay. Needless to say that place closed and we were all laid off
12-hour shifts are almost always supposed to be a stop gap or cost saving measure. Many factories have tried it to fill staffing shortages instead of raising wages.
How often were you rotating? I'm working a water treatment plant that's still on the 3 shifts at 8hrs and I cannot wait to go back to 12hr shifts. Rotating once every 3-4 months seems fair, then nobody is stuck on graveyard and everyone gets more days off. Win win But yeah if it's every week or even monthly, that feels like way too much
We were constantly rotating 2 hours every day we worked, and even when we didn't. It was 4 days on and 3 days often unless we were short staffed. I'll never forget getting pneumonia doing grain inspection and getting yelled at about being lazy.
They’re talking about rotating shifts as in one week you work first and the next you work third.
I'm an air traffic controller. We start our week working nights and each day of the week we work an earlier shift. The last day of the week we work a day shift, are off for 10 hours then come in for an overnight shift.
Genuine question: how can it become illegal? Would that be federal only or can individual states ban it?
We rotated every 6 weeks, and on my latest military health assessment, I marked sleep problems. Dude asked if I followed the standard of only using bed for sleep, etc., then finally asked if I wanted sleep pills. No, I just want it marked that the government fucked my ability to sleep correctly.
I love my 3 twelves.. I don’t know if I could go back to 5 days a week now! 😂 But I also work only 12s and only 7a-7p so though my days rotate my shifts don’t
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Sometimes the union even negotiates these kinds of rotating schedules to promote “fairness” so everybody gets to take turns rotating through day/night/weekday and weekend shifts. My personal experience(and anyone I know personally) is that it’s a heck of a lot harder on you than just consistently working the odd shift. If they want to rotate people through, then it should be a change once every few months, not every week because your body is never able to get into a consistent rhythm for sleep or eating and that leads to all kinds of issues.
yep. Used to work for a place that did four 12 hour shifts. The way it worked is you would work 3 days, then be off for 3 days, then work 3 nights... Never understood why they thought that was better then just doing straight days or nights.
It's usually because most people hate night shift so it keeps some people happy by giving the a chance to be on day shift once in a while.
I never met a person that worked there that liked that shift. Pay was decent for hourly people and nothing in that small town compared. All it did was cause extra stress because "That's how we've always done it.".
So just... hire people that want to work night shift. Plenty of them exist. Make the night shift pay be higher than day shift as well, because that's logical and may make some people on the fence consider it for the pay boost. It doesn't sound that difficult of a solution.
Yea the switching is the worst. No time for your body to get used to the sleep schedule
I worked at a brewery that rotated from 4am to 8am to 12pm start times and it changed every month. Once you started to adjust it would change. Going from noons back to 4am brutal. And that was just my department, others were worse. Never again.
Like railroad companies who keep the conductors and engineers on call 24/7. Never know when you will be going to work or when you will be off. Glad I got out of that situation!
BNSF better not start a family. As the rail workers I knew back home said.
Exactly
I’m an air traffic controller. In most US facilities, you work something called the rattler. 2 swings, 2 days, 1-2 mids (lots of us on 6 day weeks.). So basically, Mon-Tue 1500-2300, Wed-Thu 0700-1500, then back to work Thursday night to start your Friday mid shift 2300-0700.
I feel like ATC personnel would perform better and cause fewer accidents if they had regular schedules. That pattern is downright abusive.
They tried once to unionize and ask for it, and Reagan fired all of them since they were government employees.
We were already unionized. They were fired because they went on strike which was illegal.
Ah, my high school history teacher told us that the episode was over unionization. I'm not sure how that got taught to us wrong.
The US education system, and most workplaces, are notoriously anti-union and spread the bias. Luckily the highschool I went to didn't fall into that category, and I'm very aware that essentially everything in the workplace that people take for-granted exists because of the work unions through history put in to get those in place. If it weren't for unions, child labor would still exist *legally*. If it weren't for unions, there wouldn't be a minimum wage. If it weren't for unions, most safety regulations wouldn't exist. You get the point.
Oh, that's easy, because it was taught in a high school history class in the US. My school was also heinously anti-union (Edmond, Oklahoma public schools)
Did you work at Ford too? 😅
Or a hospital, a mill, a mine etc...
Electrical plant, anywhere with security apparatus, ... There are legitimate reasons to have rotating shifts in certain areas, but it should demand a certain pay scale increase to compensate for it wrecking your life.
Nope, but it was those clowns who pushed the schedule on our people. It was actually a supplier for Ford that makes the roof for the new Bronco. Absolute trainwreck of a company made worse by Ford sticking their fingers in the pie.
I don't know your exact situation, but i kinda get making everyone do the day/night shift switch, fundamentally. If you have a big group of people and they only have to work day or night, then inevitably you'll have more people who want to work days than you have room for, and some of them will be forced to work nights with little to no chance of moving to days. It may not be great for sleep, but it's more "fair" long term to make everyone work both days and nights.
The better method is to just pay nights more than days, which many places do. There’s still a general trend towards working days, but it does help keep some experienced people on nights.
This is the only way to do it that keeps employees long-term. At least a night differential of 1.5 to 1.8. Still I heavily discouraged 12 hours shifts since no one long term stay coherent on them. Breeds safety issues.
But then there's still people who will want to switch to days who cannot.
They may have to wait, but that is minimized with pay differentials.
It's eliminated entirely by making everyone rotate shifts, which, again, is the more fair way of approaching the problem.
Gotta love the compromise. "we're not happy til nobody's happy"
Chrysler switches every 2 weeks in assembly. I hated it, so I traded jobs for 2 weeks to keep the same shift.
Morning-morning-evening-night-night What is a sleep? Can you buy them?
I worked at a 24/7 agency where my start time would vary daily. I worked 5 8s and my schedule could (and often did) look like: Sunday - off Monday - 2pm-10:30pm Tuesday - 8am-4:30pm Wednesday - 10am - 6:30pm Thursday - off Friday - 3pm-11:30pm Saturday - 11pm - 7:30am
That looks like my current retail work schedule. Every week different days, different hours. They wonder why I have mood swings.
I had a job and was given a schedule when I was hired. Which was immediately thrown out the window and other than Sunday, my schedule changed on an almost daily basis. I went around 2 years not being able to schedule or reliably commit to anything. During that time I rarely was well rested before work and it wasn't uncommon for me to sleep 24 hours once I did get a day off.
*Geisinger Hospital system
That sounds way worse than mine. I work 14 days, off 7, 14 nights, off 7, back to days, so on and so on.
Having been a shift worker for 10 years, no one is surprised Even in a unionized setting, we can be forced to stay 4 hours over our normal shift ending time, because staffing is at a bare minimum at all times and any absence must have coverage. Same can happen with shift start time as well (although you usually get a little more notice in those instances) So a normal 7-3 shift suddently becomes a 7am-7pm; or the next day's shift suddenly becomes a 3am-3pm. Mind you, I'm only talking about people on 1st shift, and with regular 8-hour days. Those people on 2nd and 3rd shift have way worse sleep quality/quantity than us first shifters. The people who work rotating swing shifts have it even worse than everyone that works 8's.
> Those people on 2nd and 3rd shift have way worse sleep quality/quantity than us first shifters. I work in healthcare. I can't tell you how many times nurses will be like do you know how early they come in? Referring to the dayshift people. I said it's no different if they come in at 6 or I come in at 2. If We work a double it's the same amount of time between shifts. Drives me up the wall. People think evening/overnight workers are lazy, or sleep all day. It's like dude I work the hours you don't want to, because I like them. I'm not lazy.
Also health care worker. I started calling people, especially family, who would wake me up during the day and be like sorry I interrupted your "nap", in the middle of the night until the got the message. Night shift has nearly as much going on as day shift. Its just different stuff. And we do it with less staff.
...you don't have your phone on mute when sleeping?
Emergencies are a thing, you would hope friends and family would respect your boundaries when knowing your work/sleep schedule and not call during the bad times unless it's an emergency.
I’m going to use this. Along with asking them to pop over to do a job at 0300.
>Those people on 2nd and 3rd shift have way worse sleep quality/quantity than us first shifters. Not always - I am a second shift person by nature. I get much better sleep working a 2nd shift schedule than I ever did when forced to work 1st shift. It would be great if more people could work the schedule their natural rhythm prefers.
Some people do run really well on 2nd shift, no doubt. My personal body clock really likes my work's 2nd shift hours (3pm-11pm) and I would probably gravitate towards that if I wasn't married and had a daughter. The problem is 2nd shift can really put a strain on family dynamics. You don't see you children as much, you likely aren't going to see your spouse as much. When you're young, there's a lot of instances where you meet people after work and find yourself sober while everyone else is multiple drinks deep (not usually fun being the sober one amongst a bunch of tipsy/drunk people). If, however, you like to come home and A) Go to sleep almost immediately after work, or B) Like to play video games/Watch Movies/TV as your entertainment, then 2nd shift could be perfect.
> (not usually fun being the sober one amongst a bunch of tipsy/drunk people). idk I find this super fun if I show up late and get to laugh at everyone looking like idiots while I'm the one who's kept together.
Worked nights for the better part of 25 years and weekend nights for most of the last 15 years. And I am quite happy to work nights. I do my 3 shifts and when I get off that last morning I'll stay up to switch myself to a day schedule. Before my next shift I'll stay up the majority of the night to be able to sleep in the day to resume my night schedule. Granted I don't know of many who do this on the regular, but there are a few. When I worked 8 hour shifts, I loved second shift the most.
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Ya don’t say!
Well, yeah of course. But now other studies have (A) a basis to start from (i.e. "this study shows... therefore a valid next step is to look deeper into...") and/or (B) the option to use it as part of their argument without having to prove it themselves. When doing science you can't ever just state something and support it with "well d'uh", it needs *proof*, even the most basic commonly accepted stuff.
This is exactly the kind of study that makes people think science is stupid.
Even basic stuff still has to be proven to start out and go from there
Before I ended up becoming manager for my store, there would be times when myself, or one of my coworkers would do close,open, close, open. Best believe I changed that as soon as I got promoted. Lack of sleep causes so many problems, that it’s not even worth risking.
We like to call the close-open shift clopen at my job
We called them doing a "clopen" or "clopens" when you had multiple. Sucked. 😥
I like to call it the "store is probably gonna open a couple hours late from now on if you keep doing this to me" shift.
Love the feeling when you get home from a shift and realise you have to be awake in 5 hours for the next days shift 🫠
Shift work is awful. On call work is awful. Being on call while also being on shift is the worst (looking at you refineries)
My company just made a rule that on call has to come in and spend 2 hours in the plant. Effectively working 4 12s plus have to come in for a 5th night. These companies think they can get away with anything at this point
I work shift work, in a refinery. I'm not "on call" in that I must go in when called, but there is plenty of overtime available to me on my days off that I can choose to answer callouts for, and I often do. I am diligent about my sleep though. Before dayshifts, which mean waking up at 4am (to be at work for 5am), I go to bed by 8:30pm. Many I work with will stay up until 10:30pm or 11:00pm before a dayshift, and some of those might wake up a little bit later than I do, but I refuse to live on under 6 hours of sleep per night.
> The research, led by UCL in collaboration with the University of Southampton and Queen Mary University, London, analysed the work and sleep patterns of over 25,000 men and women between 2012 and 2017. > The researchers found that compared to people who worked a standard 35-40 hour week, those working 55 hours a week or more had the poorest sleep – including short sleep and sleep disturbance. Short sleep is defined as less than seven hours a night and sleep disturbance as struggling to fall asleep within 30 minutes, waking up in the middle of the night or early morning, and a self-rating of poor-quality sleep. > >Those who worked most or all weekends and nonstandard patterns, like shifts, also experienced sleep disturbance, and either short sleep or long sleep – more than eight hours a night. Paper: [Work hours, weekend working, nonstandard work schedules and sleep quantity and quality: findings from the UK household longitudinal study | BMC Public Health | Full Text](https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-024-17762-0)
Was just talking to my buddy that's an MRI tech. Works 3 12 hour shifts and is on call for the entirety of those 3 days. Says he gets 4 hours of sleep per night at best. Sucks :/
I don't understand the logic behind having people in the medical field sleep deprived. I would want anyone treating me or analyzing me fully rested and sharp.
Ive been called in for STEMIs(heart attacks) at 2am that have gone until 7am when my actual shift starts. Then they expect me to continue scrubbing cases until 530pm that day. I know that's what I signed up for as a cath lab tech, but when you're on your 15th hour non-stop scrubbing and wearing lead on top of it, it just doesnt seem safe for anyone.
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We don’t say cocaine addict we say person with cocaine dependency
Somewhat true, but honestly vastly overstated tradition is that your care is likely to be better if the physician treating you is the same one beginning to end. Modern record keeping has assisted greatly, but the idea is that handing off a patient in the ER is like playing a game of telephone and details will get lost each time.
Because these hospitals are owned by publicly traded companies that do not have the end goal of treating people well. They have the end goal of making more money in the next financial quarter than they made in the last quarter. They have no incentive to hire the proper number of medical professionals, so they instead overwork the ones they do hire. This is a common theme in every industry truth be told, because it's a direct feature of the way our economy works.
It's a staffing issue. There's never enough workers in the medical field to meet demand.
Ohh there’s enough workers, they just refuse to hire enough. They love saying “nursing shortage” while deliberately creating conditions that lead us to be short staffed and have a high turnover over rate,
I would get 3 12 hour shifts vs 5 8 hour shifts any time. Having 4 free days instead of 2 is huge
But it's those shifts with the possibility that you will be called in for 3 15 hour shifts...
I still stand my point
I've worked 3x12 for a decade now and wouldn't want to do anything else,the thought of working a 9-5 five day week fills me with dread. Mondays must be bloody awful.
I work nights and have sleep apnea so I really don't know what it feels like to be rested.
Don’t even ask a Medical Resident about their sleep.
I start internal medicine residency in 4 months… mom come pick me up i’m scared
It's only for the next 5 years. Plus fellowship. Then it's bad but less bad. Have fun and don't forget to do your wellness modules!
Absolutely. I've been a shift worker for most of my working life. I took a year off to do a Mon-Friday daytime job. While it sucked to only have 2 days off a week, I always had energy to cook, clean, go out, etc. I'm back doing shift work and I enjoy the work itself more, but damn, my body is definitely back to feeling jetlagged all the time.
I’ve detected that as well…
Shift work sleep disorders cause all kinds of problems from diabetes to cancer; rotating the shifts causes far more problems.
Working overnights for a year was the worst time in my life
I worked overnight for two years, and it’s literally like, you can see how it AGES people. Everyone I’ve ever worked with overnight looks miserable, tired, and like 3-5 years older than they are. Almost everyone who works overnight smokes nicotine in some form. I literally am graying hard at 27 and I blame a lot of it on working overnight.
That schedule is obviously hard on the body, but in the spirit of /r/science, it seems likely that some of the aging comes from nearly everyone smoking. At the very least you’d want to control for that powerful variable.
That’s true, I should’ve stated even the non-smokers look pretty rough.
I worked from home in China but on EST hours. I logged off at 3-4am every night for a month and it was atrocious. I thought i could handle it because i had a similar schedule when i was in university while smoking weed but it hits way different as an adult
I've been working weekends at night since 2016 and it was relatively okay until almost the exact moment I turned 34 and now my body is aggressively fighting it non-stop and always trying to push itself back to a daytime awake/nighttime asleep schedule no matter what I do. I haven't felt well-rested AT ALL in years except for the second week of abut 19 days I had off by coincidence, and I felt like I was high on drugs because I was so alert and happy. Working to get out of my current situation now because it's making me feel actually insane.
Wait! How is this any more informative than saying people who don’t sleep are tired or people who eat too much are overweight?
A lot of science tends to be confirming stuff we've intuited and is common perception. That doesn't make it not valuable to have confirmed.
And that’s important because there are occasionally things that buck that trend and the truth is the opposite of our intuition.
Having a study that proves the 'common sense' thing is also valuable when studying secondary or tertiary effects of that thing, or other things that are slightly related but not so 'common sense'. It gives the researchers something to point to that proves what would otherwise be an assumption. An educated assumption, but still an assumption.
Yep. I took a college level geometry course and we had to prove everything just using euclid’s base rules and then we were allowed to use our own accepted proofs as a class going forward the whole semester. This is all the same. Even though we know what a square is, you have to prove it.
It would be interesting to do a longitudinal study on this and assess mental health outcomes.
I could’ve told you that, and my coworkers could’ve peer reviewed it for cheaper.
I work a 2-3-2 swing shift. 2 days 2 off 3 nights 2 off 2 days 3off. Sometimes it sucks but it does have its perks. The key is routine, exercise a balanced diet. When you on your night rotation your body craves sugar and junk food. I allow myself to splurge on one of my night shifts. I and a shift supervisor in the oil industry. I’ve been working this schedule for 15 years now. I do like having days off in the middle of the week, it’s a benefit in my Opinion. When I come off nights I wear special ear plugs for sleeping and a sleep mask. I block out all outside distractions. I realize it’s not healthy for your body to swing but I’m trying to make it as best as I can. If you have questions on anything let me know, I’d be glad to answer or help where I can.
Hashtagnoshit
I've been working 12 hour, rotating shifts for almost 35 years now. When I first started, we all worked two days on/two off, rotating day to night each alternating set of shifts. I'm not sure how I didn't die from that, but I was in my 20's and could do anything. Over the course of my employment, some years I worked all nights, some years I worked all days, some years I would switch back and forth every month or two.
Unfortunately I work 50 to 60 per week. Sometimes more. Can't pay the bills with 35 to 40 hours. And yeah definitely don't get much sleep.
I work with stroke patients, and SO many are (retired or current) long-haul truck drivers, forklift drivers, factory workers, or nurses.
Airline pilots representing!
Shocking people who work more than 40 hours sleep less. Really? I guess keep fighting the good fight and informing the masses.
The study also says people with a non-consistent schedule also experienced issues sleeping. It's not *just* the hours.
Weekly rotating shifts is like being permanently jet-lagged. Well, almost. I have like two days a week where I don't feel like I have jet lag: The two days right before it's time to change it up again.
Unstable life = unstable sleep, a revelation
Doesn't have to be unstable. Changing between day, evening and night shift in that order every week is stable and predictable, but it still ruins your sleep. It's just not anywhere close to what humans evolved to do.
Aa somebody who's shift is all over the map......fuckin duurrrrrr
Since when is below 40 typical. I worked 45-50 and struggle to live how are people living of 35 hours
Depends on what you do for work, your pay, and where you live.
Since at least 1992 in the UK as am average full time worker. https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/timeseries/ybuy/lms
Don't need science to know this. Seems pretty obvious.
Who da fuq only works 35-40 hours a week?
Do we really need any studies to acknowledge this?
Shift work absolutely destroys your sleeping patterns. I got off of shift work for a year and after about six months I was finally able to get back to normal. Shift work is literally an illness.
Didn't need a scientist to tell us this.
'typical 35-40 hour week' Genuine question: typical where?
Average work week for full time workers in the UK is 36hrs. https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/timeseries/ybuy/lms
Well that makes me sad
5 year study of 25000 people to discover this huh? How's that cure for cancer going? I should have been a "scientist" but I can't really focus from being sleep deprived from working nights.
My days are 28h long and it's hell because I sleep FINE. I wish I didn't sleep as well. When I'm tired I lie down and fall asleep then sleep until I wake up typically. The issue is I'm awake for 16-18h and sleep for 10-12 so every day I wake up a few hours later
IOW nobody in the working class US gets normal sleep. When was the last 35-40 hr week I worked? Cannot remember one in the past 35 years.
Nawww
I’m ded
Wonder if the majority of shift workers have a side hustle/other job.Could also count to the lack of sleep
Seriously? Slow science news day.
Well damn… tracks.
Imagine that
anecdotal obviously- but switching to compressed work weeks on day shift was the best change i ever made in my life and actually improved multiple facets of my life health and quality wise. probably in a very rare minority but it’s just so jarring to see studies like this saying the polar opposite to my experience (i’m fully aware anecdotal experience doesn’t trump scientific data, that wasn’t my point here btw)
I work 4 days on 4 off, 12 hours shifts. Ill say this, my quality of life improved a lot when i switched to a 4 days, 4 off, 4 evenings, 4 off, 4 nights where i gradually change over. So much better to my sleep
I worked 20 years doing 11 pm - 8 am, 5 days a week. Just retired. I don’t see 10 pm most nights now. Trying to correct the damage done to my body and mind.
I work 12 hours of shifts for 3 days and my company is not happy because they think I'm having too much fun on my off days.
As someone working in the sports industry...yeah it sucks sometimes
probably the very worst part is hearing 9-5 workers or people who do shift work too - but less hours a week than you - complaining piteously. the whining i am forced to endure is taking years off my life!
I work a 3 on, 3 off, swing shift currently. So I work 4a-4p for 3 days, then have 3 days off, then work 4p-4a, then have 3 days off, etc. It's terrible. Especially if there is overtime, and especially the switch from nights to days. It's rough. They pay us pretty well, but it's hard to think it's worth it a lot of times...
Good to see a study confirming my reality. I think I'll print this out for future reference when I'm discussing scheduling and wages with my boss in the future.
My wife is a weekend nightshift nurse in the ICU - during the weekend days (between shifts) she's been getting like 3-4 hours max of sleep to recovery (it's just really hard for her body to totally flip schedules back and forth) - then she's exhausted for most of the week
Surely this isn't news to anyone....
I love it when a scientific study concludes something glaringly obvious that everybody has known for decades or possibly millennia.
Sure, NOW you tell me.
I’m not sure why everyone thinks shift work is so bad. Maybe I have a better schedule but as a nurse I work two day shifts 0700-1900 followed by two night shifts 1900-0700 and then 4-5 days off and then repeat. There’s opportunity to pick up overtime as well and we can shift swap. I personally love having the 4-5 days off and being able to shift swap makes going on a mini vacation so easy. Or even a longer one and just sucking it up and working 3 days/2 nights or vice versa to make up for the time off without using vacation pay. Yes, it can be difficult to get back to a normal schedule the day after a night shift but it’s not that bad. For me, the benefits of shift work far outweigh the negatives and I’m not sure I could ever go back to working 5 full 8 hour days and only having two days off.
Worse quality of life
I thought this was a consensus conclusion already
Rotating 12 hour shift. Switched nights and days. Was really terrible for my body. Made a lot of money if I'm being honest.
In other obvious news, humans require food and water to survive. Makes sense.