Why Nobody Teaches Shift Work

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Think about everything that you were taught when you first started your shift working career. You were taught how to do your job, how to use the equipment, the policies, the procedures, safety, reporting, communication. You were taught who to report to, how to get to work, where to park, where to leave, maybe weeks or even months of training before you were even considered competent enough to work on your own. But if that job involves shift work, there's a pretty good chance that nobody ever sat you down and taught you how to actually work shifts. Nobody explained what working at 2 a.m. does to your biology. Nobody explained how to transition from day shift to night shift or what to do after your final night when you needed to get yourself back into days. And I'll bet nobody taught you when light is your friend and when it can work against you. You probably weren't taught how meal timing changes when you're awake and working through the biological night. And you certainly were never taught how to protect your days off so they don't simply become days where you spend the whole day recovering. Instead, you were given the roster and somehow you were expected to work the rest out for yourself. After more than 40 years of working shifts, I think that that's one of the biggest gaps that we have in a 24-7 workplace. Because working shifts is a skill in itself, and it doesn't have to be this way. Whether you're a shift worker, trying to feel better, or a leader responsible for the people who keep your organisation running around the clock, you're in the right place. Welcome to a healthy shift. I'm Roger Sutherland, and after more than four decades of working 24-7 shifts with Victoria Plus, followed by years of studying nutrition, circadian biology, human performance, and working with literally thousands of shift workers, I've made it my mission to change the conversation around shift work. Because healthier people create stronger teams, and stronger teams build better organizations. And it all starts by understanding how to work with your biology and not against it. Let's get into today's episode.

Trained For The Job Not Roster

SPEAKER_00 2:55

I'm a night shift and sleep specialist, and I am the creator of Shift Work Champions. You are more than welcome, and I'm thrilled that you're actually here for this episode. If you're a shift worker, this episode is really about something that I wish somebody had taught me when I first walked into a 24-7 career 42 years ago. And if you're an organizational leader listening to this, I really would like you to think about what your own shift workers are being taught when they join your organization. Because we can teach people almost everything that they need to know about doing their job safely and effectively while overlooking something that they're going to have to manage every single day of their career. And that is the biological reality of working when the human body is designed to sleep and trying to sleep when the rest of the world is awake. So let's talk about that. Now we train people for the job, but we don't always train them for the roster. I spent more than four decades working around the clock in policing on the front line. And when I think back to the training I've received over that career, it's actually extraordinary. I've been taught legislation, law, operational safety, defensive tactics, firearms, driving, communications, how to investigate, crime scenes, specialist skills. When I became a police dog handler, there was obviously another whole layer of specialist training involved in that. Highway. And rightly so. Organizations have an obligation to prepare people for the work that they're actually asking them to perform. But here's the strange part. For decades, I was also repeatedly, for decades, I was also repeatedly asking my body to remain awake, alert, make decisions, eat, move, and perform during a period when human biology is pushing me to sleep. Then I'd finish work in the morning, travel home while fatigued, and try to sleep while daylight and the world around me were signaling that it was daytime. And I don't ever remember anyone properly teaching me. In fact, no one ever taught me how to manage that. I learned shift work the exact way I bet you did. Trial and error. You watch what the person beside you does. You work out which coffee gets you through 3 a.m. You eat when you get the opportunity. You sleep when you're exhausted enough to sleep. You try different things. Some work, some don't. And eventually you develop a routine and think, well, this must be just what shift work feels like. But there's a problem with that. Your biology doesn't operate through trial and error. There's literally a system that is running underneath all of this.

Your Body Responds To Signals

SPEAKER_00 5:56

Your body can't read the roster. And it doesn't know what on freaking earth the roster is saying. One of the most important things that I now teach shift workers is lit is really incredibly simple. Your body can't read your roster. You might know what you're working. You know you're working nights tonight. You know you're on day tomorrow. Your circadian system doesn't know because somebody put an N on your roster. Your body is literally only responding to the signals. And light is the most incredibly powerful cue to it. Daylight. But so are the timing of sleep and wakefulness, food intake, when you move, and the routines that we repeatedly create around each and every one of those. And this is why generic advice can become so goddamn freaking frustrated frustrating for shift workers. Get eight hours of sleep, they say. Great. When? Exercise regular. Okay. When might that be the most practical time around this block of shifts? Eat a healthy breakfast. Right? What exactly is breakfast when I've been awake all night and I'm about to go to bed and it's 8 a.m. Get some morning sunlight? Usually excellent advice. But what if I've just finished night shift and I'm trying to protect my ability to sleep shortly afterwards? You see, context really matters. And for a shift worker, timing matters enormously.

Why Generic Health Advice Fails

SPEAKER_00 7:33

And that's why I keep coming back to four areas in my education. Sleep, daylight, movement, nutrient timing. There used to be seven pillars, I'm down to four. And that's them. Sleep, daylight, movement, nutrient timing. They're not magic hacks, they're literally a fundamental biological and behavioral signal that we as shift workers all need to be educated and learn how to work with a lot more intelligently. So understanding changes the decision. And this is where I think education is fundamentally different from giving somebody just a list of rules. If I was to tell you, don't do this, you might follow the instruction. But what happens when your roster changes? What happens when your child is sick? What happens when you're called in for OT? What happens when you can't follow the perfect routine that your PT gave you? See, the rule falls apart. But if I was to help you to understand why we're trying to achieve something, now you can actually make a decision. Let's use light as a simple example. Because if somebody tells you, tells a night shift worker, you've got to avoid light after work, that's a rule. And you've got to push against it. But if that person understands that light is an important signal to the circadian system and that bright light on the commute home may actually promote alertness at exactly the time that you're trying to prepare for bio prepare your biology for daytime sleep. Now you start to understand the reason behind the strategy. So when the circumstances change, you can actually think wait a minute, what is my objective here? Am I trying to prepare for sleep? What signals am I actually giving my body? That's completely different. You can't just say, okay, it's bedtime. Your body can't read the clock on the wall. In fact, the clock on the wall means nothing. It's the internal body clock that you've got to be checking and getting right. And importantly, shift workers don't need to become chronobiologists either. You'll leave that to me. We don't need people walking around talking about phase response curves during the tea break. We need to take good science and make it practical enough that somebody working at 3 a.m. can actually use it. Shift workers are pragmatic. They just want to know this is what the science tells us. What can I do about it? That's it. You don't have to go into the great amount of detail. Now the roster changes the application. And this is why I have become increasingly opposed to teaching shift worker shift work as though every shift worker has exactly the same problem. Because they don't. Someone working permanent nights has a different challenge from someone rotating between days and nights. A nurse doing three consecutive 12-hour night shifts has different circumstances from a police officer moving through in a regular roster. Someone working two days, two nights, and then four days off has to think about transitions repeatedly. Even two people working exactly the same roster have a completely different life outside of work. One's got young kids, the other one lives alone. One has a 15-minute commute, the other one takes an hour to get there and back. So good shift work education should not say, here's the perfect shift work routine, because I honestly and sincerely don't believe there is one. But it should teach people the principles, and then it should really help them to understand how those principles apply to their roster and their life. And that is the difference between spoon feeding information and giving people useless, useful education.

Days Off Are Part Of Work

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Now, your days off matter significantly. They actually matter more than you realize. And this is another part of shift work that we really do not talk about enough. Because the job doesn't end when you clock off. If you spend the first half of your days off exhausted, sleeping at odd times, trying to get your appetite back under control and feeling disconnected from your family, then that's the part of the impact of shift work too. I've spoken to so many shift workers who effectively accept my first day off is a write-off. Sometimes there will be there will absolutely be a recovery requirement. I'm not suggesting for one minute that we can somehow eliminate the biological cost of working through the night. But there is a difference between recognizing that cost and simply accepting that nothing can be improved. Now, the whole point of education is not to promise that shift work can be made biologically harmless because it can't. It's to actually ask how can we work within this reality more intelligently? How can we improve sleep opportunities? How can we use light more strategically? How can we think about when we're reading rather than only what we're reading? Where does movement fit in? How do we transition out of our last night? How do we protect some quality of life on the days that we're not working? You see, those are skills, and skills can literally be taught. Have you been taught any of those? No, you haven't. And that's why it's a write-off for you because you've never been taught.

Fatigue Is Not Just Personal

SPEAKER_00 13:41

Now, this isn't just the shift worker's responsibility. Because there's one other thing that I want to make very, very clear here. We can't just put the entire burden back on the individual, on you, the shift worker. It would be incredibly easy for organizations to say, well, we've taught you how to manage fatigue, now it's your responsibility. And that is not what I am advocating here. Fatigue risk has organizational, operational, and individual components to it. You see, roster design matters. Workload matters. When you get your breaks or break opportunities, matter. Staffing matters. Workplace culture matters, and education really matters. Teaching someone how their biology responds to shift work does not remove an organization's responsibilities today. It actually gives the worker another layer of understanding and practical capability within the things that they can influence. And that's an important distinction. Now, what I wish I'd been taught, when I look back across my own career, I sometimes wonder how differently I might have approached shift work if someone had explained all of this to me on day one. Not with a 50-page fatigue policy, not with a poster telling me you've got to get seven to nine hours sleep. But by sitting me down and working with me, Rog, you're about to spend a significant part of your career working against some very powerful biological signals. Now, here's what's happening. Here's why you're going to feel certain things. And here are some practical strategies that can really help you to manage it. Can you imagine receiving that education from your manager or leader before you spend 10 years developing habits purely through survival? And that's where I think we need to get to today. Because if somebody's going to spend 10, 20, 30, or even 40 years working around the clock, teaching them how shift work affects their biology, should not be an optional extra. It should literally be part of preparing them for a career.

Building Capability With Shift Work Education

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And you see, this really sits at the heart of why I created a healthy shift to start off with. And this is why I have combined everything that I've learned, combined it with what I've done in my 40 years, combined it with all of the coaching of hundreds of people that I've actually coached along the way. And what I've learned through education. I've invested and invested and invested tens of thousands of dollars in education. And as a result of all of that, I've now built the Shift Work Champions framework. Because education creates understanding. And understanding gives people the opportunity to make far better decisions. And when organizations reinforce that understanding from within rather than allowing the education to disappear when the presentation finishes, we then start moving from information towards genuine capability. And my goal has become extremely simple now. I want every shift worker to receive the education that I wish I got on my first day. Because shift workers aren't failing because they can't follow generic health advice. They're being asked to live and work in circumstances that most health advice was never designed for. And if we're going to ask people to keep our hospitals, our emergency services, factories, transport systems, aeroplanes flying, and countless other 24-7 operations running through the night, the very least that we can do is teach the staff how to better navigate the biological reality of actually doing it.

Share It Forward And Close

SPEAKER_00 18:00

Now, if you are someone listening to this and this has really resonated with you, and you think that your leader or manager needs to hear this, I beg you to forward it on. It's the purpose of this podcast. It is less than 20 minutes out of their day for them to listen to it to get them thinking. We need to do more. You need to do more because the behavior that you walk past is the behavior that you're accepting. I don't want to hear whinging if you're not doing anything about it. It doesn't have to be this way. I'm Roger Sutherland. It doesn't. I'm Roger Sutherland, and this has been a Healthy Shift Podcast. I promise I will talk to you again next time. Please forward this on. And don't forget, give it a rating and review if you get a moment as well. I'd really appreciate it. If today's episode resonated with you, don't let the conversation stop here. Share it with a colleague, a manager, a friend, a leader, or someone who has the opportunity to improve the lives of people working in a 24-7 environment. Because real change starts with awareness. And awareness changes conversations. And conversations change organisations. And organizations change lives. So thank you for spending this time with me. And until next time, I want you to remember this. It doesn't have to be this way. Take care of yourself and take care of each other.