How to sleep when you work night shifts

Every other sleep problem on this site is a variation on an ordinary night. Yours is structurally different: you are trying to sleep during the day, in a room daylight is getting into, while deliveries arrive and neighbors mow lawns, at the point in your body’s cycle where it most expects to be awake.

Everything below is about the environment and the equipment. Shift work and health is a large subject we are not qualified to cover, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

What the published guidance says

CDC and NIOSH material on shift work and sleep notes that sleep experts recommend at least seven hours of sleep a day, and that over half of night shift healthcare workers surveyed reported six or fewer. It describes disrupted or insufficient sleep from irregular shifts as being associated with a range of health risks, and lists interventions including improving the sleep environment, taking a long nap before a night shift begins, and using bright light to help shift circadian timing.

Its training module for nurses goes further on scheduling, noting that night shift workers generally get less and poorer-quality sleep, and describing a compromise schedule: on nights you work, sleep as soon as you get home and sleep as long as you can; on days off, stay up until the middle of the night and sleep until early afternoon, rather than flipping fully back.

It also notes that severe, prolonged daytime insomnia or excessive sleepiness at night while awake may be a sign of shift work disorder, and suggests seeing a sleep specialist if symptoms persist for three months or longer.

Fix the room. It matters more for you than anyone.

The 2022 PLOS Biology consensus recommendations suggest keeping light at the eye under about 1 melanopic lux during sleep. A curtained daytime bedroom is orders of magnitude above that, which makes room darkness the single highest-value change available to you.

1. Window coverings fitted wider and longer than the window. Almost all daylight comes in around the edges, not through the fabric. A blind inside the recess is the worst configuration there is.
2. Block the gap above the rail. A pelmet, a board, or hang the curtain from the ceiling. This strip is the brightest leak in most bedrooms.
3. Seal under the door. Handles daylight from the hallway and some of the household noise at once.
4. Then a sealing mask, to catch what is left and cover you when you turn over. Which masks hold up against daylight.

The full free checklist is on how to make a bedroom dark for sleeping.

Then the noise, because the world is awake

Daytime noise is different in kind from night noise: more of it, more varied, and none of it considerate of someone asleep. Deliveries, traffic, construction, a doorbell, neighbors.

• Block, do not mask, the loud stuff. Foam earplugs handle a doorbell and a delivery van; a sound machine does not. Which earplugs.
• Mask the constant background. A machine playing brown noise handles the general daytime hum that earplugs leave behind.
• Tell people. A note on the door about deliveries, a word with neighbors, notifications off. Free and effective.

Waking up for your next shift

A real problem once you are wearing earplugs. A sunrise alarm is the wrong tool for a day sleeper - your room is already bright, and you have spent effort making it dark. A vibrating alarm under the pillow is the better fit, or sleep earbuds that sound the alarm inside the seal. The options, compared.

One thing worth knowing about the drive home

Bright morning light on the way home is a signal to your body that the day has started, at exactly the moment you want the opposite. Sunglasses on the commute home are a genuinely useful, nearly free intervention that a lot of shift workers use, and it follows directly from the same light logic as everything else on this site.