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Metabolic Health on the Night Shift Guide

Humans are diurnal animals (like lemurs and giraffes, not like owls and raccoons). We’re built to be awake and active during the day and to sleep at night—our so-called circadian rhythm. 

In a typical healthy person, the body uses environmental triggers—especially sunlight—to map out its daily schedule. A slew of cascading hormonal signals tells us when to eat, when to sleep, and so on. But when you’re working the night shift, your body gets conflicting information about what time it is (e.g. artificial bright light in the middle of the night) and you have to ignore its messages (e.g. by getting up when you’re tired).

The good news? If you don’t keep a standard work schedule, there are many important changes you can make to help your body make sense of what’s going on so it can operate as normally as possible. Here’s what you need to know about working the night shift.

Let’s look at some best practices to safeguard your metabolic health while working the night shift. Finding the best strategies will take patience and experimentation, but here are some good starting points, organized under the Four Pillars of Metabolic Health.

The night shift can cause major shifts in your diet. Key hunger-regulating hormones (like ghrelin and leptin) are disrupted, as are your stomach, liver, pancreas, and other digestive functions. This all leads to excessive appetite and cravings for sugary, low-fiber foods. Here’s what you can do about it:

  • Hydrate. Drink lots of water or other non-sugary, non-caffeinated liquids. Staying well hydrated can help you gauge your own hunger more accurately and feel more energetic. Always pack water with your meals to keep it handy.
  • Plan. Planning and preparing your meals ahead of time will free you from delivery services and vending machines. Some people find it helpful to cook and freeze a whole week’s worth of food in advance.
  • Eat before work. Some researchers recommend eating a meal just before work, then eating just enough to stay comfortable during your shift. This is an area where people vary a lot, so don’t stress if this pattern doesn’t work for you. 
  • Snack smart. Nuts are a great antidote to cravings, so keep some at your desk and dip into your stash in lieu of a trip to the vending machine. 

Surprisingly, there isn’t much evidence that working out directly affects your circadian rhythm. But it does help you regulate hunger, sleep better, improve your mood, ward off fatigue, and deliver countless other benefits. So this makes your year-long exercise pillar goal of 150 minutes of exercise plus two sessions of strength training all the more important. Here are some tips to help you stay on top of it:

  • Track your steps. Follow your step count in the Calibrate App.
  • Get a pre-work workout. If you exercise outside before going to work, you can get more of that crucial sunlight and avoid pumping yourself up just as you’re trying to wind down for the night. 
  • Mix it into your workday. For many people, it can be energizing to take little exercise breaks during work. Just ten minutes of moving around can get your blood going and increase your heart rate—all of which translates to more energy. Try going on a quick stroll, taking the stairs instead of the elevator, or doing some quick burpees in between tasks. Even a 5-minute walk has been shown to provide a meaningful mental and physical health boost. Keep these to the first ⅔ of your shift; you can start to wind down toward the end.

Obviously, working the night shift is deeply disruptive to your normal sleep cycle. Here are some ways to manage the impacts:

  • At the beginning of your shift: Get light--lots of it. This will help to stave off melatonin production. Fluorescent and halogen bulbs do the job well, but your best bet is a lightbox that’s made to treat Seasonal Affective Disorder. Keep a desk-sized version one or two by your computer. Studies show that about 15 minutes of lightbox therapy per hour for the first four hours of their shift gets the best results. 
  • Commuting back home: Avoid morning light after work by putting on sunglasses before you walk out the door. For safety, standard glasses are fine if you’re getting a ride or taking public transportation, but if you’re driving yourself, choose blue light blocking lenses. They enhance contrast, so you’ll see better behind the wheel.
  • At your house: The sooner you go to sleep, the fewer hours you’ll actually be shifting your clock. This will make vacations and days off (when you’re up in the day and sleeping at night) easier on your body. To keep light to a minimum in the bedroom, wear an eye mask or light-proof your environment as much as possible. Do this by covering or unplugging all devices with tiny lights, hanging blackout curtains under your decorative ones, and if necessary covering any door cracks that let bright hall light through. The body sleeps best in cool temperatures, so keep your bedroom at 68 degrees or below.
  • Waking up: Because you won’t be getting natural light to help you rise and shine, the trick here is to brighten your room as much as possible, as quickly as possible. Some alarm clocks now come with a timed light, to simulate the sunrise. Also, if you happen to have a lightbox at home, turn it on when you first get up.
  • If you’re taking weekends or other days off: Try this “compromise” sleep schedule. On the last night of your shift, restrict your sleep by two hours. Then, on your days off, go to bed around four hours later than when you’d normally go to work and sleep nine hours (so if you normally went to work at 10 PM you’d go to bed at 2 AM and wake up at 11 AM). This trick, developed at the lab of Charmane Eastman, PhD, director of the biological rhythms research laboratory at Rush Medical College in Chicago, helps people on night shifts avoid that jet lag feeling during daylight hours.
  • If you’re not going totally overnight, but just keeping tough hours: Don’t forget about napping. Though some recent studies have found that naps can be hard on people working normal hours (they can interfere with your ability to fall asleep at bedtime), studies on people working shifts found that they can be even better than trying to get all their sleep at once. 

Night shift workers—especially women—are at higher risk for poor mental health, particularly depression. It can also stress your relationships. And this can cascade into your dietary choices, your sleep and exercise patterns, and so on. Here’s how you can safeguard your emotional health while working the night shift:

  • Talk to a pro. Whether you see a private therapist, use an app like Talkspace or Betterhelp, or find a sliding scale provider, it’s almost always worth your while to get one-on-one mental healthcare.
  • Create a family/friends night. When you’re on different schedules, it’s tough to spend quality time with people you love. To compensate, you might need to do things that feel a little forced or artificial. Set up a board game night, a movie night, a weekly book club, or anything else that helps you feel grounded in your relationships.
  • Take up yoga, music, or meditation. There’s plenty of evidence showing that calming, focused activities bring down your stress and cortisol levels, which improves your sleep quality and protects your metabolic health. For more on these, re-visit our Guides on Meditation, Mindfulness Techniques, and Stress Busting.
  • Spend time outdoors. Being outside, even if it’s in the evening, has incredibly beneficial effects on our mental and emotional health. Stress falls away, thinking gets clear, and there are even boosts in empathy and cooperation. So on your days off or when you have a little time after you wake up, get out—in your neighborhood, on your porch, whatever makes sense for you.
  • Build a routine. A recent Canadian study found that women working shifts were least happy when their schedules kept changing. You can’t always control what hours you have to work, but what you can do is map out routines and game-plans within the rest of your day. This can sometimes be as easy as talking to your spouse at the beginning of the week about which responsibilities need to be divided and how.
  • Make a plan to help you sleep. Brainstorm with your family what you can collectively do to make sure you’re getting rest when you can. Small things like keeping shoes by the door when you’re sleeping, running showers and loud appliances in the evening versus the morning, and having a “no door slamming” rule can go a long way. Encourage creativity—anything your family thinks of themselves will help them feel invested in helping out.

Calibrate is here for you, no matter where “here” is—and that includes wherever your work might take you. If shift work is part of your daily life, the challenges that can pose to your metabolic system are significant. That’s okay. We can work through them together, starting with this guide. You got this, morning, noon and night.