hi been offered 4x4 at night.for no matter how much per hour i cannot see myself working 4 nights then sleeping 4 nights .thats surely not healthy isn’t?
No it’s not healthy. Never will be. It’s damaging.
Worse is nights to days, to nights reversals. Comes down to individuals. Maybe you’ll find you cope ok.
joker83:
hi been offered 4x4 at night.for no matter how much per hour i cannot see myself working 4 nights then sleeping 4 nights .thats surely not healthy isn’t?
Never done the shift pattern driving but I did 4 on 4 off nights as hotel security.
I had to say goodbye to any sort of normal human contact and hello to knowing all the local prostitutes by name. The 4 nights at work were just as bad as well!! [emoji6][emoji6]
Seriously, unless you are planning on do it for a good while it’s not worth the hassle. I ended up so out of sync for my nights off that I would be waking up at 11 in the evening. I only did it for 4 years and it’s been 2 years since I’ve stopped now but I still feel the effects every now and again to this day.
You do 4 nights then re adjust to being awake in the day for the 3 nights your off,the hard part is getting enough sleep to see you through your first night back,my brother is an engineer and does 4 on 4 off and he loves it…4 days holiday gets you 12 days off remember!
My brother will finish his last night,go home and maybe sleep for 5 hours then get up around 11am then treat the next 3 days as “normal” awake in day sleep at night but then on the 3rd night it’s a case of staying up as late as possible normally til 1-2am and gets up early so the next day when he is due to go back into nights he is tired enough in the day to get a few hours sleep before he goes to work.
But,he also does a physical job where he is constantly doing something,this keeps you awake to an extent too but as for HGV driving I’d imagine it’s a whole different ball game as let’s face it your main job is to sit in a comfy chair in a heated box mostly doing nothing more than holding a steering wheel straight,that could be lethal if you ain’t managed to get adequate sleep.
This is course becomes more difficult in the summer when it’s hot and depending on where you live by a busy road or noisy area in terms of whether you could come home off nights and sleep all day.
thanks thats really helpful info chaps.f##k that basically.cheers
Easiest way to do it is not to switch back to trying to live on day sleeping patterns on your nights off, rather go to bed around 2-3am and get up around 10-11am. When you’re working go to bed when you get home from work instead of staying up and trying to go to bed in the afternoon.
I’ll give you a worse case example to do to the body clock and it’s probably what I’ve experienced. I work deep nights, followed by days and cross 24 time zones in anywhere from 6- 11 days. In between sometimes we have sensible rest periods of 36 hours or 72, occasionally 4 days. But my next work schedule is a series of deep nights, then days crossing all time zones with 12 hour, 14 hour and 24 hour rests for the first week before a 48 hour rest then a reversal of clock to head out at night. Sometimes our duties are 20 hours long. Each time you have a rest period that is 24 hours long you loose a whole sleep period and can end up having been awake 2 days with only 8 hours sleep
Got that starting tomorrow with a “round the world” string trip. I’ve just had 7 days off and had a round the word prior and spent the first 3 days off feeling very ill. You have done everything by that point to destroy your body clock - deep nights, to days, 24 hour slips and jet lag. It doesn’t always get me but this time it did. Sometimes it does, sometimes after a day I’m sort of OK.
Jet lag is far worse than shift work though for various complicated reasons with alsorts of undesirable and yucky physical and mental symptoms 
, but the two together are not good.
Not of course that you’ll have to worry about jet lag and its affects on the body thank god . But nights or shifts alone are bad for the health. Some people like shifts but they’ll never be good for your cells. If it didn’t mean leaving the career I’m in I’d choose to never work nights again. I do wrestle remaining doing what I’m doing knowing it IS most likely killing me is very short sighted and ask myself how can I take such a gamble? I’ve had 4 work colleagues pass away just close to retirement this last year due cancers etc. It can’t not be linked.
I work 4 on 4 off nights and it was the best move I ever made - having 4 nights off in any 8 day period never gets old.
I’m a nightowl by nature, so I stay up til about 3 or 4am on my 4 off. When I’m on shift, I get home about 5:15am and go straight to bed. My bodyclock is well adjusted, but I can’t imagine how trying to get onto a day pattern on my 4 off would affect me. Badly I think.
Try living life as a nightowl for a while, you might like it. Just try and keep your bed-time roughly the same each day and you’ll be fine.
Oh, and buy earplugs for sleeping through the day too.