As someone who is being on night shift for the last 8 years and many times before that, I suggest that you get blackout curtains for your sleeping area.

Make sure to sleep in increments of an hour and a half, which is the approximate length of a sleep cycle. If you need to take time, release melatonin pills.

Eat your meals the opposite way that you would working during the day. Wake up, have breakfast in the evening, have lunch at work and dinner when you finish in the morning. Go to bed a few hours after dinner. This helps turn your biological clock to night shift work.

It isn’t perfect but it definitely helps make it bearable. If you are eating excessively to stay awake and you’re probably going to gain a lot of weight, you might also end up getting diabetes which is very prevalent in night shift workers as is cancer.

If you are using alcohol to try to get to sleep, do whatever you can to get the hell off night shift. It’s not a good way cope with this shift. It isn’t for everybody, the only reason it works really well for me is because my brain doesn’t work properly anyways and I need to sleep apnea machine to keep breathing so it doesn’t much matter to me when I sleep as long as I have that machine.