What I Learned Working Shift Work for Over 20 Years: 5 Tips for Coping

I worked shift work for more than twenty years. Twelve-hour nights. Underground. I am not going to sell you a “night-shift lifestyle.” It was torture. Your body knows it is supposed to be asleep. The job does not care.

If you are on nights now, you already know. These are five things that made 12s survivable. They are not a cure. Nights never got easier. I got slightly better at not letting them own the whole clock.

1. Treat sleep like the job

Blackout curtains. A room the house treats as closed. Not a nap on the couch with the game on. The people you live with have to learn it: the day after a stretch of nights, you are not available. Family will test it. Friends will test it. The phone will test it. Protect that block the way you would protect a lockout. If you keep giving it away, nights will take the years off you faster than the work will.

2. The drive home is the dangerous part

People worry about falling asleep on the job. I worried about the parking lot at 6 a.m. after twelve hours underground. Coffee is not a personality. If you are nodding at the wheel, you are not tough. You are a hazard. Pull over. Call someone. Do not be the story they tell at the next safety meeting. Getting home in one piece is part of the shift, even after you badge out.

3. Eat like a human at 3 a.m., not like a vending machine

Nights wreck your gut if you let them. Pack food. Eat on a schedule even when you are not hungry. Energy drinks will get you through a week and cost you a decade. I am not a dietitian. I am a guy who watched night crews live on sugar and then wonder why they felt sixty at forty. You cannot out-supplement a 12-hour night. You can stop making it worse.

4. Keep one thing in your life that is not the schedule

A kid’s game. A round of golf. A walk in actual daylight on your days off. Nights isolate you. The world runs on days — banks, schools, the people you love. If you do not put something on the calendar that belongs to you, the job will own every hour. It does not have to be noble. It has to be yours.

5. Fatigue is not a personality flaw. Use the language.

Twelve-hour nights are a health-and-safety issue, not a badge. If the rotation is breaking people, if overtime on nights is being handed out like candy, if someone is falling asleep on the job, that is a union conversation. Hours of work, rest periods, scheduling language — that is in the agreement for a reason. If fatigue is landing on a disability or a medical restriction, that is an accommodation problem, not a toughness problem. Toughing it out is how crews get hurt.

Nights never loved me back. I got better at defending the hours around them. Steal your sleep like it is wages. Because it is. If you are walking into nights for the first time — or you are a steward still on them — I put the first three things I would actually buy in UnionRep Recommends.