Biological clock: shiftwork

BIOLOGICAL CLOCK: SHIFTWORK
A similar situation occurs when a day shift worker has to do a night shift He is sleeping at the wrong time according to his biological clock. It has been shown that, after working night shift for a while, the biological clock is reversed and the body temperature is maximum in the middle of the night, which is opposite to the normal day shift body temperature pattern. It will take a few days before the biological clock can be reset to the new shift. Sleeping pills are recommended if one cannot sleep after a change of shift duty. The longer acting sleeping pills are preferred, as most shift workers find they can fall asleep after the shift but are unable to maintain sleep. The pills can speed up the resetting of their biological clock to the clock of the new shift, provided they wake up at the same time each day. Sleeping pills should not be used after one week as the biological clock should have been reset by then, and there is always the possibility of addiction. Perhaps those people who still have sleeping problems after a week should look for work that does not require shift duty.
It is much easier to delay the time of going to sleep than to advance the sleep time to an earlier hour and try to sleep when you are not sleepy at all. Dr Charles Czeisler of the Harvard Medical School recommends that shift workers should rotate into a later shift rather than into an earlier shift. Hence a worker should rotate from a morning shift to an evening shift and then to a night shift and back to the morning shift, and so on. He also recommends that shift workers should stay at the same shift for at least three weeks at a time before rotating to another shift.

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