Welcome And The Fatigue Question

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Shift work can be brutal, but it doesn't have to be. Welcome to a healthy shift. My name is Roger Sutherland, certified nutritionist, veteran law enforcement officer, and 24-7 shift worker for almost four decades. Through this podcast, I aim to educate shift workers using evidence-based methods to not only survive the rigors of shift work, but thrive. My goal is to empower shift workers to improve their health and well-being so they have more energy to do the things they love. Enjoy today's show. And welcome back to another episode of a Healthy Shift Podcast. My name is Roger Sutherland, and I am your guide on this shift work journey that you are undertaking and struggling with, aren't you? And that's why you're listening to this. The question I want to ask you today is why am I so tired after night shift? And why do I still feel exhausted after sleeping? And why does it sometimes feel like the harder I try to recover from night shift, the worst I actually feel? So many of you out there are searching Google for how to recover from night shift, how to sleep after night shift. Why am I always tired working night shift? Or how do I stop night shift fatigue? And if that's you, then this episode is for you. Because there's something that I want every night shift worker to understand. You're not simply tired because you work at night. Now there's a lot more going on inside your body. And once you understand what it is that's happening, the night shift starts to make a lot more sense. And I'm going to do a series in this where I expand on each pillar. But let's start off with an oversight of the whole lot. Welcome to a healthy shift. I'm Roger Sutherland. I'm a night shift and sleep specialist, a veteran shift worker of over 40 years. And I now help shift workers and 24-7 organizations to better understand the impact of working against human biology. And today I want to answer one of the biggest questions that night shift workers ask. Why am I so tired after night shift? And more importantly, what can you actually do about it? Well, the biggest misunderstanding about night shift fatigue, the biggest mistake we make when talking about night shift fatigue is assuming that the problem is simply sleep. You're tired. Therefore, you need more sleep, right? Well, that sounds logical. But night shift fatigue is much more complicated than that because your body isn't just dealing with sleep deprivation, it's actually dealing with circadian disruption. And these are not the same thing. Now, we've talked about this over and over again. You've got an internal biological clock and it operates on a cycle of approximately 24 hours. It's known as your circadian rhythm. And if your circadian rhythm helps to regulate an enormous amount of processes within your body, in fact, every single cell has a biological clock within it. And then there's a master clock that's conducting all of those. It has your sleep and wake cycle, your hormone releases, body temperature, digestion, alertness, metabolism, and there's many other biological processes that it controls. Now, the problem for our night shift worker is this that your work schedule is telling you to be awake, alert, and eating and performing at a time when your biology is expecting you to be asleep. Then when you finally get home and you go to bed, you're asking your body to sleep at a time when your biology is beginning to prepare you to be awake. Now, this is a battle, and this is what's called

Sleep Loss Versus Circadian Disruption

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social jet lag. We've all experienced jet lag, and as a shift worker, we get it all the time, but it's called social jet lag. Now, this is a real battle because your work clock is saying one thing, and your biological clock is saying something that is completely different. And when those two clocks are continually fighting against each other, we create biological chaos within our system because we end up with circadian misalignment. That's social jet lag. This is one of the main reasons why night shift workers can feel so exhausted, even when they think they're getting enough sleep. So why sleeping more doesn't always fix night shift fatigue? Because this is what we do. We lie around in bed longer. Oh, I'll just catch up on sleep. And this is where things become really interesting. Because what do most of us do when we're exhausted? We sleep in, we stay in bed longer, we try and catch up on sleep. And yeah, if you are sleep deprived, getting adequate sleep matters enormously. And I'm not suggesting otherwise, but I will tell you, by sleeping in and staying in bed longer, you create biological chaos. Further, you might feel better straight away, but you will feel better, feel worse long term. Why? Because your body loves rhythm, it needs consistency, it wants a predictable signal that really helps it. So when you wake at completely different times every day, and then you expose yourself to light at different times, eat all over the place with no regular time slot, and then move at different times, your biological clock is continually receiving conflicting information. Think about that jet lag. You fly across several time zones and suddenly your external environment no longer matches your internal biological clock, and you feel really tired at the wrong time. You're hungry at strange times, you're wide awake when you should be fast asleep, and you may experience gas bloating and all kinds of digestive problems. Brain fog,

Why Sleeping In Can Backfire

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poor concentration, and night workers, night shift workers, we actually experience a very, very similar mismatch. Think about it that brain fog, those digestive issues, that poor concentration, that brain fog. Now, a traveler eventually adjusts to the new time zone. And how do they do that? Whereas the rotating shift worker may continually move backward and forward, day shift, then afternoon shift, day off, night shift, afternoon shift, days off, back into a day shift. And then we wonder why the body struggles. And this is why I keep saying something that shift workers so desperately need to hear. You do not need all of these random tips, so stop searching for them. What you need is a system and a system that works for you. There are four areas that every night shift worker needs to fully understand. After over 40 years of working shifts and now working with hundreds of shift workers on their health, sleep, and performance, and working with organizations around this, I keep coming back to four key areas. And these are the areas that I want to focus on. Number one is sleep, number two is daylight, number three is movement, and number four is nutrient timing. And I'm calling these my four pillars. And the reason they matter so much is because they all provide key information to your body. They are signals. And if there's one thing that I want you to take away from this episode, and one thing that I want you to learn from me forever from today forward, it's this your body is literally only responding to the data that you're giving it. Your body is constantly looking for the right information about what time it is and what it should be doing at that time. Should I be awake? Wait a minute, should I be asleep? Should I be digesting food? Should I be active? Should I be recovering? Should I be sleeping? What should I be doing? The problem is that many night shift workers are unknowingly sending their bodies severely conflicting signals against their normal biology. And that is where I want to talk you through each of the four areas. And I'm just going to touch on them

The Four Pillars Explained

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in this episode, but we'll expand on them in a series over the next four. Pillar one is sleep. And let's start with it. It's an obvious one. Sleep. One of the most common questions that I'm asked is, Roger, how much sleep should I get after night shift? Well, I think we need to ask a much better question than this. How can I create the best possible conditions for sleep after night shift? Because daytime sleep goes completely against our own biology. You're trying to sleep when the world's awake. There's daylight, there's noise, there's family responsibilities, deliveries, neighbors, phones, and your own biology, literally, even if you've created the perfect environment, your own biology is perfectly working against you. And this is why your sleep environment matters and routine matters as well. Your bedroom needs to support sleep. Stand at the door, look into your bedroom, and does that look like a calm, dark, cool, quiet, and comfortable, cruzy place that you want to sleep in. Not exhausted, flop on the bed, oh my God, haven't been able to wait until I get here. I want you to stand in the doorway and look in your room. Is it uncluttered? Does it look comfortable? How old's your mattress? How old are your pillows? Have you got a sleep mask? Are you wearing earbuds? How much light is coming into the room? Is it quiet? I want you to ask yourself all of those questions because each one of those adds a percent of difficulty to our sleep. Now I want night shift workers to stop treating daytime sleep as if it's just like you've

Pillar One: Set Up Sleep

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got to get seven to nine hours. You don't. You're different. I want you to treat it as I'll sleep until I wake up and then I'll just get up. We've got to get in and out of night shift as quickly as possible. This is a good sleep opportunity, but it's a good time for us to work on routines and stick to those routines as well. We don't get into bed, take melatonin, and scroll on our phone until we fall asleep. That's exhaustion and that's very different. And taking melatonin when you get home to go to sleep can actually throw your circadian rhythm further out by over two hours and cause more problems. So I need you to protect your sleep accordingly, but I need you to take that sleep anxiety out of it as well. I'm just gonna sleep until I wake up, then I'll just get up and get going. It's night shift. I shouldn't be asleep anyway. And you'll be surprised at just using that terminology, how much better you sleep. Now remember, consistency. Your body loves a predictable rhythm. And while perfect consistency is almost impossible for most of our rotating shift workers, we can still create those anchors. We can create repeatable behaviors around sleep and waking instead of allowing every single day to just become biologically random with no idea. Because biological randomness creates problems. I want you to remember your body is only responding to the data that you're putting into it. You know Jenny at work and how she's thriving? Yeah, that's because she's working with her biology and not against it. And you can do the same. She's doing the same job as you. You can do the same. So let's look at pillar two, daylight. And this is one of the most overlooked areas in our shift work health. I speak about this all the time on my social media. Light is the strongest signal to your biological clock. Our body is set up to see light, to work out where it's at in time and space. And yet, so many of our night shift workers crawl out of bed and flop on the couch and watch TV and spend most of their lives indoors. They wake up, they drive to work, they work under artificial light, drive home, close the blinds, sleep, wake up, do it all again. How does your body know exactly where it's at in time and space if you're not getting daylight? Not light. It's gotta be daylight. Daylight is 10,000 lux of light. It is 10,000 times stronger than the daylight, than the lighting inside your house. You need to get some form of daylight. Even just sitting on your back doorstep with a coffee for 15 minutes is going to tell your body where it's at in time and space. Really important. Natural outdoor light is the most important signal that is available to you as a shift worker. Now that doesn't mean you stand there and stare at the sun. You don't need to do that. And it doesn't mean doing anything extreme or stupid. It just means get outside and expose your eyes and body to the daylight. Light will help to signal alertness, and darkness

Pillar Two: Use Daylight

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will help to support sleep. It's pretty logical, really. The challenge for the night shift worker is managing these signals around a schedule that is already working against them and working against normal human biology. And that is why simply telling a night shift worker get more daylight isn't enough. It's got to be about the timing. You need context, your roster, it matters. So whether you're going into night shift, working through a block of knights, or you're coming out of night shift, it matters. And again, you need a system, not a random advice. And I help people with this. Pillar three is movement. It's a really important pillar because it also signals to the body when it should be awake. And I deliberately use the word movement rather than exercise. Because when you tell an exhausted night shift worker that they need to exercise, all you think about is I cannot be bothered. Putting on my gym gear, getting in the car, driving to the gym and going to the gym. I don't have that energy. I don't have that in me. But all you gotta do is just get outside. It doesn't have to be a hard gym session. Taking yourself for a walk, just getting outside. There you are. There's two key timekeepers. Get up, have your coffee, go out and go for a walk. Even 15 minutes, just walk around the block a few times. I know we're good podcasts. Just go outside, move your body after waking. This really matters. Resistant training does matter. I'm not saying don't do that, but I'm just saying when you're chronically fatigued, that thought can put really put you off. And yes, exercise plays an important role in your physical and your mental health. But timing is important as well. And I see night shift workers making this mistake all the time. They finish night shift completely exhausted and under pressure, they force themselves through an intense workout on the way home. Stupid. Your body is already under stress. You might not feel it, but your body is already under stress. The first thing you should be doing when you get out of work is making a beeline for home and bed. You desperately need

Pillar Three: Move After Waking

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to sleep. But instead, you're adding more stimulation by going to the gym. You're stimulating your nervous system. But what you've got to remember as well is at that time of the morning, cortisol is being released into your system and you are not cashing in on the adaptations from that training. So don't do it. Just go home, go to bed, then get up and train. You'll be much better off. I know you don't feel like it, do you? So go for a walk. Just take yourself for a walk. Much more beneficial. Now, once again, I'm not saying that exercise is bad. It's just about understanding the context of it and what type of movement you need, how intense and when. And I help people with that as well. Pillar four is nutrient timing. I could talk about this for hours, but we won't. This is another area where night shift workers have been given absolutely terrible advice. Because most nutrition advice focuses on one question. What should I eat? And yes, hundred percent food quality matters. Of course it does. But for shift workers, another question that's incredibly important. When should I be eating? Because your digestive tract has its own daily rhythms. Your metabolism has a daily rhythm. Your insulin sensitivity changes across the 24-hour cycle. And your body does not process food the same way at 2 a.m. in the morning as it does at 2 p.m. Yet this is what happens on night shift. We're tired, we're stressed, we're surrounded by highly palatable food, we're craving it. Damn, Jenny brings in that chocolate or her cake, and someone orders takeaway. And then all of a sudden, the vending machine's starting to look like a Michelin star restaurant at three o'clock in the morning. And we grab snacks and we eat, oh, it's just one packet of biscuits or chips or biscuits. It doesn't matter. It does. It adds up. Not necessarily because we're genuinely hungry, but generally just because we're trying to stay awake. We're eating out of boredom and chronic fatigue. Sometimes we're bored, sometimes we're stressed. Sometimes eating is the only enjoyable part of the shift. And I understand that. I lived it for decades. But food

Pillar Four: Time Your Food

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timing does matter and it will catch up with you. And one of the most important things I teach shift workers is that night shift nutrition is not about calories, it's about timing. We need to time it in a way that it better supports your biology. Now, why those random night shift tips don't work? I want to bring all of this together because you may have listened to podcasts before or you follow people on social media. You could probably saved hundreds of posts. And you know all about blackout curtains and blue light and caffeine and meal prep and exercise and supplements and breath work, and you're still exhausted. Why? Because information without a system is only going to create more confusion. You try one thing for three days, and then you that didn't really work. You try another thing. Then someone tells you the exact opposite. And then you work four night shifts, then you're back on days, and then the kids want you, then you've got activities. Then life happens, and then everything just completely falls apart, so you give up. This is why I don't believe the answer to night shift fatigue is simply giving shift workers more information. We need to teach shift workers exactly how their biology works. Then we need to help them to build repeatable systems around their actual roster. The roster's not the problem. Shift work's not the problem. It's the data that you're putting into your system that is. Your life does not look like someone that's working Monday to Friday from nine to five. Generic health advice will fail a shift worker because it was never designed for a shift worker. So where do you start? Where do you start if you're constantly tired after night shift? I'll tell you where the first place is that you start. You don't try and change everything. You don't go, right, Monday I'm doing all of this. That

Why Random Tips Keep Failing

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is a mistake. You'll leave a podcast like this feeling motivated, and you'll say, right, I'm gonna go and change my sleep. I'm gonna fix my diet, I'm gonna go to the gym five days a week. I'm gonna stop drinking coffee, I'm gonna meal prep everything that I eat. I'm gonna get daylight every morning, I'm gonna meditate for 20 minutes, I'm gonna do an infrared sauna and a cold plunge. And how long does that last? Exactly. Instead, I want you to identify your weakest pillar out of the pillars, out of sleep, daylight, movement, or nutrient timing. Identify which one's your weakest. Which one's creating the biggest problem for you right now and start there. Just choose one behavior that you can repeat. Not occasionally, consistently. Maybe it's creating a darker bedroom. Maybe it's managing your caffeine earlier. Maybe it's getting outside after waking. Maybe it's walking for 20 minutes. Maybe it's stopping the constant grazing through your night shift. Just pick one, one behavior and repeat that consistently. Because the goal is not perfection. The goal is to reduce the biological chaos that is created by working against your natural biological rhythm. And the big question? So let's return to the question that we actually started with. Why

Pick One Habit And Repeat

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am I so tired after night shift? And the answer is it may not simply be because you need more sleep. Yes, your sleep matters, but your circadian rhythm matters more your exposure to light, your movement, your food timing, your roster, and the signals that you are repeatedly giving your body. And this is why two people can work exactly the same night shift roster and feel completely different. Because one Person may be unknowingly creating more circadian disruption and sabotaging everything, and the other may have a system in place that better supports their biology that they do by habit. And that is what I want more night shift workers to understand. You're not powerless, you may not be able to change your roster, and you may not be able to stop working nights. And I get that. You may not be able to control the demands of your workplace, but you can better understand your biology, and you can build a system that will work with your shift working life. And this is what I do with shift workers. And I've done it successfully for years, and they can't believe just how simple it is. Once we look at your life, your social life, your working life, your home life, and we build a bespoke routine for that, everyone starts feeling better. It's incredible the difference that such simple strategies make. And you can ask any of my clients, they're more than happy to speak to you. It's so simple, it is ridiculous, but you're overcomplicating it, and I can help you with that. All you gotta do is reach out, and there's a link in the show notes, and it's a free 15-minute coaching assessment call that we can have, and I'll listen to what you got to say and how you're going about it, and what we can do is we can put a plan in place that will help you. Alright? The link is in the show notes. Reach out, book that call. It's free and it's obligation free. If you found this episode helpful, because you search for help with night shift fatigue or anything around night shift, or you listen to it regularly, how to recover from night shift or how to sleep better after night shift. I sincerely hope this episode has helped you. I'm here to help you. I'm here to help you to understand that there is a lot more going on than simply being tired. It's the data that you're putting in, and we can fix that. Night shift is complicated, but the solutions are not. So start with the four pillars. That's where I start: sleep, daylight, movement, and nutrient timing. Understand the signals that you are sending to your body and then start building systems around your roster. This is how we stop simply surviving night shift and start learning how to manage it properly. And that's my mission. If this episode helped you, please follow a healthy shift wherever you listen to your podcasts. Hit follow so that you get and turn on your notifications so you get notified when the next episode drops. And send this episode to a nurse, a paramedic, police officer, firefighter, dispatcher,

Free 15 Minute Assessment Call

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call taker, or anyone else who's a shift worker who's constantly saying, I'm just tired all the time. Because they may not need another coffee. They may need to finally understand why they're exhausted. I'm Roger Sutherland, and I want to say thank you for listening to a healthy shift. And I'll talk to you on the next episode. It would also be ever so helpful if you could leave a rating and review on the app you're currently listening on. If you want to know more about me or work with me, you can go to ahealthyshift.com. I'll catch you on the next one.