To comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Capital, please head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter. She explains that night shift working can suit certain personality types: “I would say the kind of person that prefers or exclusively does night shifts is someone who is a little more introverted by nature.” She adds, “there’s less exposure to the public so you tend to find the people that prefer nights are the people who prefer to be left alone to do their job.”īut has doing 17 long years of night shifts not had any effect on her physical or mental health? “Well I sure spent a lot of it tired!” she laughs. “I’m very cognisant of my sleep schedule, I’m very cognisant of my physical activity and what you’re eating and I will cancel things in lieu of recovery time to make sure I try and mitigate it as much as I possible.” “I knew what I was getting into,” she continues. I work a long week but then I have seven consecutive days off and that’s seven consecutive days with my children and to make plans.” “The schedule we have right now works quite well for my family… I get two weeks off every month. So why do it then? When there is so much evidence about the health risks of working the night shift, why would you put yourself through it? Well, many people don’t have a choice, and paramedic Tracey Loscar points out it does have its perks. “In the UK, we find that a lack of sleep costs the economy up to £40bn a year," he says, "which is roughly 1.8% of the UK GDP – that’s a mix of lost productivity and mortality effects.”Īre governments actually taking any notice in terms of making public policy? Marco Hafner says it’s at the early stages but “we know that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (in the US) has looked at this and has actually proclaimed insufficient sleep a public health epidemic, so there’s increasing awareness of lack of sleep being a public health problem.” “Ultimately this is not great for obesity or conditions such as type 2 diabetes,” points out Foster.Īll that sleep deprivation carries not just a health cost but an economic one too, according to Marco Hafner, a senior economist at the research institution Rand Europe. It makes us hungry and encourages us to reach for sugar and carbohydrates. And interestingly, there is research to suggest that carbohydrate consumption can go up by 35-40% after only four or five days of restricted sleep due to the increased level of a hormone being released called ghrelin. “So, you constantly have to override this sort of biological drive from the clock saying you should be asleep.” And it doesn’t matter if you are working night shifts on a regular basis either, he adds, unless you can hide yourself away from the light completely once you have finished your shift and the day creeps in.Īs anyone who has worked through the dead of night knows, it’s not easy to get your hands on healthy food. He says night workers are exposed to low light levels during the overnight shift, but as they encounter bright natural light on the journey home, their internal clocks lock on to the normal light-dark pattern that day shift workers are on. “The key problem is we have this internal biological clock which is set to the external world as a result of exposure of the light/dark cycle.” “From (Thomas) Edison’s production of the first cheap commercial lightbulb, we were able to invade the night at low cost and sleep was the first victim,” says Russell Foster, a sleep expert and Oxford University professor. So how did working all night start anyway? There are few official figures but according to a study by Princeton University, an estimated 7-15% of the workforce in industrialised countries were engaged in some form of night work, despite the World Health Organization having classified night work as a probable cause of cancer due to disruption of circadian rhythms. It’s very daunting.”Īround the world, millions of people work nights. “If your reaction time or observation time is a little slower, it certainly increases our risk while we are working. “Night time is more dangerous on a variety of fronts,” she says. But in her line of work it’s also potentially hazardous. There’s less people on the road, the variety of calls, the pattern is different, less commercial businesses are open,” says Tracey.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |