Some people are simply night people. I’m one. I usually feel sluggish throughout the day and only really gain momentum after the sun goes down. Even without a night job I usually stay awake nearly to sun up.

I’ve been a bartender most of my life, usually working shifts till 5am. It just works for me. I wake up at my leisure and run my errands while everyone else is at work. No rush hour, no lines. I still have days off to spend with friends.

Frankly, I don’t understand day jobs. When I wake up I’m usually still tired for a few hours. Then I gotta work all day which makes me tired. Go home and be too tired to do shit. Go to bed because I’m tired and do it all again the next day. That feels like not having a life to me.

We’re all wired differently. Maybe you’re just not a night person. You should do what works for you if at all possible. If you have no choice in the matter then I say embrace it. Don’t try to reset yourself too hard to a daytime schedule on your days off. You are getting up around the time most people are getting off work or school so you should be able to find time to spend with friends or family. If you commit to it you just might be able to find a way to make that schedule work for you.

I worked 3rd (23:00-07:00) shift for years and really enjoyed it. Shift premium was great, workload was low. Almost no management in place (hospital). I’d socialize in the evening and then go to work after. Didn’t have any problem sleeping during the day. It’s also true that I was a bachelor so no kids or pets depending on me.

I hear my coworkers who do night shift complaining about this same issue, but they still pick up night shifts, which I don’t understand.

In a word, capitalism.

Well, I’m no longer working.

But I used to prefer night shifts since I’m a notorious insomniac and tended to do better that way.

For most of my twenties and into my thirties, I would work 60 - 80 hour weeks spread out between home health (nurse’s assistant) and bouncing for a couple of club/bar owners, plus some less steady side gigs.

Having a life was difficult. But nobody can work every day without breaking down, so I’d usually make sure to have a day or two a week for myself. Usually lol.

Since my default, most refreshing sleep range was and is from about 2 am to 10 pm, I would usually not be too far off from that most of the time. So I didn’t have that constant sense of being off that working a standard 1st or 2nd shift would give me.

That brimming being said, the pay differential is what pulls people to 3rd and other night shifts. Things like a Baylor shift are often a great way to get paid as much or more, while having a little more time away from work too. So that’s a big perk if you can sustain it.

I didn’t keep myself healthy though. Oh, I ate well enough; I was hiking, camping, lifting weights, doing martial arts. But I was also averaging out to maybe 6 hours of sleep a day. That grinds you down, no matter who you are. I reached a point towards the end of my working life that I was frazzled, grumpy, not thinking clearly. My body wasn’t recovering properly either, so there was always some injury or another nagging. Which, since I was bouncing places that had a proclivity for outright attacks against customers, that could mean stuff that was pretty bad.

My mental health deteriorated as well. Depression was with me since I was a kid. So was PTSD. Doing mostly end of life care, and seeing as much violence as I did exacerbated the depression, added new layers to the PTSD, which also came with anxiety and panic attacks. Nightmares I’d wake up screaming and punching from. Shit got pretty real.

But I did manage to have a life. A very busy and sometimes crazy one. I made time for dating as well as my hobbies. I managed to keep my shit together and help raise one of my friend’s son after his father died. Did some partying along the way. Went to school twice (once to go for my RN, then for psychology), but couldn’t manage to finish either time.

I packed twice the years into those twenty years. Every time I think of it now, I’m amazed I survived it all. There were a horrifying number of close calls tbh, what with the fights and pushing myself alone in the mountains. I’m fifty, and have been disabled for as long as I worked, since I started working at 17.

But it was taxing, and definitely not worth it overall. Didn’t ever make enough money to do more than get by at the official jobs, and my side gigs weren’t reliable enough to make up for that.

Since you’re here asking this, you definitely need to avoid night work if you can. I naturally default to being awake at nights, so it wasn’t even that bad for me. If I’d been the typical daytime kind of person, I’d have fallen apart even sooner. If you keep doing it, you’ll be accelerating the eventual end of your ability to work.

Years ago I had a job where we had a “graveyard” shift. It was a solo gig, started at 11pm and finished at 7am when the morning shift took over. You’d work it for seven days and then have seven days off. We shared the shift, so that everyone did it a few times a year. You’d think with seven days off it would be popular, but no. No-one wanted it.

I hated it. The worst part was the isolation. There were duties to carry out, but it was mainly checking things. Alone. It was difficult to sleep when I got home and it messed with my head, I felt like a zombie. I’d meet up with friends in the evening and struggle to make conversation. It took up to five days to recover. Very, very unhealthy.

More recently I worked mostly 5pm to 2am, and that was much more manageable. We were a team, and we often met up during the day for sports or a movie. It was awkward socialising with other friends though; I’d be working when they weren’t.

The only thing i don’t like about night shift is that you daytime nerds hoard all the business and fun stuff for yourselves.
I shouldn’t have to flip my schedule to go snowboarding but noooo Breckenridge has to shutdown at 4pm. 🙄

A long time ago I worked from ~10pm to ~6am. I would wake up at 9pm and inhale some food before taking off. When I got home I would eat my “dinner” and then see everyone else waking up to start their day. I would typically hang out and take care of human existence stuff until like 1pm at which point I would go to sleep.

I was single and living with family at the time so it didn’t mess up my social plans too often since my gamer buddies all kept terrible hours anyways so on my days off I would just play all through the night with them.

I actually prefer being awake while most of the world sleeps. I find it oddly comfortable knowing most people aren’t out and about. It almost feels like a weight off my consciousness at night.

But if you require social planning flexibility having flipped sleeping hours with the rest of the world can be a really big problem.

I work 2nd shift, 3pm-11pm and love that time. I’m not a morning person so I wake up and go straight to work then go to sleep between 3 and 6am.

I would say that it is harder to have normal social interactions. Pretty much all interactions are made over the weekend. I won’t say it didn’t affect my marriage, but I don’t think it was the main cause of my divorce.

The “having a life”-aspect isn’t applicable to me, as I worked night shift while I was offshore. This inirially meant midnight->noon. But since this was isolated from the rest of the world, the only real difference was that midnight snack served as breakfast, breakfast as lunch, and lunch was dinner. Afterwards the rest of the shift and I would usually watch a movie.

After a while I started doing a special shift from 1800 to 0600 (nicknamed Vampire Shift), so that I could cover for the chief tech during his off hours. I loved it: It was quieter, cooler temperature (I’m an Arctic guy, and we were operating in a tropical climate), generally a lot more relaxed.

As for circadian rhythm, it didn’t matter, as it was five weeks straight. And I was normally severely jetlagged after traveling to/from work anyway.

I choose to work nights when I can because I don’t have a life anyway and prefer nights to day. I also actually like mornings; I just don’t like waking up. Working nights allows me to enjoy the morning time, without having to deal with the 4 hours of feeling like shit (just how long it takes for me to feel energized after waking up) wasting the best time of day.

Also, a lot of places now offer a 10% increased pay differential if you work the night shift.

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I worked for a year 6-6 12h shifts on 24/7 assembly line.

It was OK, 14 days night and 14 day shifts it is better that way because you get used to it and you still have loads of time left for other things.

I work an odd schedule - two jobs, one WFH Sat-Tue from 8PM to 3AM, then a hybrid (2 days WFH) dayjob (Mo-Fr) from 10AM to 6PM. It’s been this way on and off but so far I’m at over a year with this particular schedule, but I’ve had similar schedules in the past.

I would say I have a life, but my hobbies are more introverted anyway. Am I healthy? No, bit I wouldn’t say that’s entirely related to the schedule, I have other conditions.

It can be taxing at times but most of the time it’s just life.

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