Posted by Honest Abe on March 29, 2004 at 13:47:19:In Reply to: Swing Shift , Help Needed posted by Liza Wake on October 10, 2003 at 16:05:30:
Liza,
The best way I have found to be able to sleep AND feel somewhat "normal" when I'm awake is to wake up a little later each day and go to sleep a little later each day. The key is to try to get a good night's rest every night and recharge those batteries! For your schedule I would do the following (I only put wake times so figure out when you should go to bed depending on how much sleep you need, I recommend 8 hours :) Basically you should stay up an extra 3.5 hours each day and wake up 3.5 hours later.Sunday: Wake 4:00 AM
Monday: Wake 7:30 AM and try to take a short nap before work
Tuesday: Wake 11:00 AM
Wednesday: Wake 2:00 PM
Thursday: Wake 5:30 PM
Friday: Wake 9:00 PM
Saturday: Wake 12:30 AMMondays might be tough since you're waking up at 7AM and going into work at 3PM so try to take a nap or at least come close before work so you're not too tired at the end of your shift.
Downside is that your offdays Thursday and Friday you will be sleeping during the day but that just means you can party all night.
First time I tried this schedule was for a temporary shift - 3 people had to cover 24 hours for a week. We wanted a fair way to distribute this (so that one person wasn't on days the whole week and another on nights) but didn't want to have to struggle to adapt the sudden changes. So we worked 9 hour shifts, basically coming in 3 hours later each day. (If I came in on 8am monday then I come in on 11am Tuesday). It was not easy for others to remember but it worked well. My coworkers/shift team loved it and called it "the ultimate shift schedule". I have seen support for this on the web, they say it helps your circadian rythms adjust slowly.
Give it a whirl, hope it helps.