Like I’m not getting ahead no matter how hard I try
Only issue I had was my day not lining up with other people or businesses. 24 hour grocery stores are wonderful however.
It sucked during covid, so many went to closing at night.
And haven’t gone back to 24hr operations.
I love it, but I have delayed sleep phase disorder. I’m a natural night owl. I feel the most awake at like 1 am. I love the fact that it’s cooler, darker, and quieter, and I feel like the most interesting people come out at night.
But I mostly work days, because that’s how to get promoted, sadly.
I don’t know if I have the same disorder, but I definitely feel this. It’s so much nicer at night. A lot of people fuck up their sleep schedule on the weekends. I keep the weekends the same as my work week and have no problems being sleepy.
But I’m considering applying for a new position at my organization which will mean I have to shift back to days. I’m not sure if the promotion is worth the headache of early mornings and the commute.
The key is, if you take like 2 weeks off work, and sleep/wake whenever you want, what times do you tend towards?
Nights absolutely. With 2 weeks off, I easily stay up till 5 in the morning without even realizing it’s that late. I’ve always found it hard to sleep at 10pm like other people, and I won’t start get tired until 3am.
Unfortunately the shift I’m on right now is 12 hour shifts, which means I’m up till 8-10am. Which is a little later than I like, but I still feel better than waking up at 6am. Working 6am-6pm is way rougher on me than 6pm-6am
Yep, sounds like DSPD.
It’s amazing, like living under an enchantment. Everything just sounds different, the colors are more muted, the temperatures are brighter. Given my druthers, I’d be fully nocturnal.
Actually productive for study, as there are no interruptions and much less ambient noise.
Its like another world
Working at Night is peaceful. I work till 3-4 … I have to bc of my insomnia. Can’t sleep so I rather work than just stare to blank space
I’ve done the graveyard shift for a couple jobs now.
Usually for medical IT.
Its usually quiet, I don’t see my boss very often, and for the most part just run the entirety of IT stuff by myself.
I know how much I value my sleep, so I try not to escalate issues in the middle of the night.
In a lot of ways its made me a more creative problem solver and just a better more rounded tech.
Some things I just don’t have permissions for, and have to escalate. Sucks, but I get it.
It helps that my wife works similar hours to me.
We can both go to bed in the afternoon, though I’m jealous of her getting to sleep later than me in the moments I’m first awake, but I leave work first so its a fair trade I guess.
I work until 10pm. It’s feels quiet, comfortable. The only back draw is that after a long period your social life starts to get affected.More if you have family.
Peace and quiet, no distractions
Even if I’m at home, there’s other stuff going on during the day. At night everyone’s asleep, no noise or messages or anything.
Loved the commute, the night atmosphere, staying up late and sleeping in during the day.
Days off are hard.
During the winter up north it’s bleak and cold for the trades, I’ll see the sun for an hour or so when I wake up. Personally I wake up every other hour during daytime sleeps, so I’m rarely well rested.
But the pay bump is quite good, and there’s way less supervision micromanaging you.
I worked 6pm to 6am for 4 years. I loved working nights. Easy commute, no boss, more pay, quieter at work (not less busy just quiet). There are two huge downsides. I feel like it decimated what little social life I had and ruined my days off. I also feel like it was rough on the body and mind. Always tired and depressed.
It’s taken a few years to feel like me again. Maybe an 8 hour night shift or 4pm to midnight would be okay but 6pm to 6am was rough.
I’m a night owl. My body wants to go to sleep around 6am and wake up at like 2pm, and if it doesn’t get to it will rebel. I used to struggle with resetting my sleep schedule all the time. Falling asleep during the day, gradually drifting later on my days off, and usually feeling kinda shit.
Went back to working nights, driving a cab 5p-12a or 3p-12a depending on the day. I love it. I feel so much better. My body is never easy, but it’s a hell of a lot easier than it was. One less thing to worry about.
It is hard to make appointments, and companies are always trying to call my firmly muted phone at 9am when I tell them not to, but it’s a lot more comfortable. I see all kinds of neat crepuscular animals and there’s like no traffic.
I think it very much depends on your body’s natural rhythm. People like to chalk it up to ‘insomnia’, but that’s just pathologizing normal behavior. Nothing wrong with being nocturnal.
It is the same for me, except that I’m not in a position in which I can afford to wake up that late. I don’t want to let my sleep habits be shaped by society, but lectures and work say otherwise.
As far as we know you only live once. Personally, I’m not waiting around to hope for another go before I live my life the way I want to. Everything has a cost, but to me the cost is well worth not having to deal with all that bullshit.
I worked night shift for 2.5 years (9:30pm-4:30am M-F) straight out of college. I’ll never do it again.
I actually didn’t mind being up and working late, I’m a night owl, it was everything else though. I think people look at the hours and go “well I’m up till 5am anyways”, but it’s not like you get home and fall asleep right away. You shower, eat, decompress, watch tv for a bit, it’s usually 8am before you’re actually falling asleep. Hungry after work? There’s two places open 24 hours in town, get used to eating those a lot. You can make a meal at home, just be careful not to wake up your roommates. In fact just be careful of that in general.
Friends wanna do something on Friday night (or any night)? You either can’t or have to call it quits early to leave for work. Drinking more than a beer is out. Friends want to do something Saturday at noon? You’re either joining them late or you’re a zombie all day. Everybody’s going to that movie you wanna see, but it starts at 6 and is 2.5 hours, you’re not gonna be able to make it. Got a girlfriend? She’s gonna feel a little lonely, especially if she works an evening shifts at a restaurant or something. You’re gonna be scrambling just to find hours to be together. Saturdays and Sundays you can kinda recover and live a normal life but you don’t wanna get out of rhythm too much because you have to go back to work Monday night. You just feel so off from everyone else, like you’re living in two separate worlds, it’s a weird quasi-isolation. You’re kinda depressed and in the winter you’ll go days where you barely see the sun. I lived with my best friend and some days the only time I’d see him would be the 30 minutes after he’d get up to go to work and I would be going to bed. Your coworkers become your best friends because they’re the only ones who really get it, which has its benefits if you work with cool people, but for me personally I kinda wanted to have a separate work and leisure life.
Some people enjoy it. Some people look at all the stuff I laid out and go “oh well that doesn’t really apply to me. I don’t have roommates or a gf, I don’t go out with friends and like being alone, I never see the sun much anyways”, etc etc, then maybe it’s for you. There are some positives. Driving is incredible. There’s a serenity to nobody on the road and it cuts your commute in half. Summer heat? Literally never have to deal with it.
And at the end of it all, I made it through and look back and laugh. But I’m not doing it again.
