It seems that doctors find that being a night owl is completely unacceptable. True or not?
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There’s a lot of confounding effects that happen alongside having a nocturnal schedule without being caused by the act of sleeping during the day.
Like the fact that 99% of people aren’t on that schedule, so your socialization with others will be different. Or that your sleep will be different and possibly worse because it’s louder during the day.
I think you’re probably exaggerating that doctors believe it to be “completely unacceptable”. Just like a lot of things, a doctor can say that something is “a risk factor” or is “correlated with negative health outcomes” without themselves making a value judgement like you say in the text.
Without knowing exactly what information you’re getting it’s hard to answer the question.
Some people have great difficulty sleeping during the day. Between the light and the noise, some people just can’t get good sleep. There’s also the problem with nothing is open during a night worker’s “day” so in order to interact with most of the rest of the world they have to dig into their normal sleep time. I also know from my time working an overnight schedule that people have zero respect for the fact that it’s your midnight and will think nothing of bothering you in the middle of the day when you’re just lazing about anyway – and that’s for the people who actually know! There’s all kinds of people who will bother you at ‘midnight’ because that’s when they’re legally permitted to, like door-to-door solicitation, maintenance requests if you live in an apartment, things like that. And if you have roommates that aren’t on the same schedule as you that just exacerbates the problem.
I haven’t seen the numbers, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some degree of sleep deprivation was endemic to the overnight worker demographic. And sleep deprivation is incredibly bad for you.
There may be other health effects which are unique to overnighters, but I bet that’s the big one.
And one *can* sleep during the day. Some are just better at it than others. I have no problems getting a full nights sleep during the day, even without taking extra effort to go full blackout. The noise doesn’t bother me, the light doesn’t bother me. I can sleep anywhere anytime, much to my wife’s dismay.
I had a friend who couldn’t sleep a wink if there was any natural light *at all,* even a single ray poking through the foil he put up was enough to wake him up.
Long time ago I worked 23:00 – 06:00. At first I went to bed by 09:00, got up around 16:30. Never felt rested.
Then I had to stay up one day, went to bed at 15:00, got up at 22:00, felt rested. That became my schedule.
No, I never did get the weekend figured out.
Can you? Yes, if you are disciplined enough to do it.
I worked 2nd or 3rd shift from 1989-2015. I worked 1st shift from Aug 2015-Mar 2023. I just went back to 2nd shift at the beginning of April.
My mental and physical health was at its lowest during those 1st shift years. I hated everything about it. From the hours i had to live to the people i had to deal with, it all sucked.
The key to working nights is consistency. You need to have a set sleep-wake schedule, and you don’t want to deviate from it any more than absolutely necessary.
The problem people have with working nights is they’ll live one schedule on the days they work, then they’ll try to flip their schedule to a day shift schedule on their days off. That bouncing around of their sleep schedule just ensures they’ll spend about half the week not getting enough sleep. And that’s where the health issues come in.
No, you can’t. The biological circadian rhythm in your body isn’t that great at keeping time, people in caves have their circadian rhythm drift a great deal.
The key factor is setting your circadian rhythm is getting bright lights in the morning. And no artificial lights don’t even compare to an over clouded day. There are special lights for people with SAD, so if you do have to wake up when it’s dark then those lights can help set your circadian rhythm.
Also I think all he evidence around nigh owls really mean and hour or two difference. So no it’s not normal for anyone to be awake all night.
So I think it will be impossible to counter all the bad effects, but your best bet is to use special SAD lights when you wake up, and use strong blinds and stuff to make sure it’s dark when you sleep.
If you are on a varying schedule than melatonin might help.
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