Peace and quiet, no distractions

Even if I’m at home, there’s other stuff going on during the day. At night everyone’s asleep, no noise or messages or anything.

I’m a night owl. My body wants to go to sleep around 6am and wake up at like 2pm, and if it doesn’t get to it will rebel. I used to struggle with resetting my sleep schedule all the time. Falling asleep during the day, gradually drifting later on my days off, and usually feeling kinda shit.

Went back to working nights, driving a cab 5p-12a or 3p-12a depending on the day. I love it. I feel so much better. My body is never easy, but it’s a hell of a lot easier than it was. One less thing to worry about.

It is hard to make appointments, and companies are always trying to call my firmly muted phone at 9am when I tell them not to, but it’s a lot more comfortable. I see all kinds of neat crepuscular animals and there’s like no traffic.

I think it very much depends on your body’s natural rhythm. People like to chalk it up to ‘insomnia’, but that’s just pathologizing normal behavior. Nothing wrong with being nocturnal.

I love it, but I have delayed sleep phase disorder. I’m a natural night owl. I feel the most awake at like 1 am. I love the fact that it’s cooler, darker, and quieter, and I feel like the most interesting people come out at night.

But I mostly work days, because that’s how to get promoted, sadly.

I worked nights for 7 years, I currently work swing shifts

Nightshifts were brutal, especially during the winter

It’s hard on your mental health, it’s hard to sleep, you don’t see the sun enough

There’s few things as terrible as stopping and realizing the last time you saw the sun was months ago due to your work schedule.

Working days again (though it as early as I’d like) let me feel human again.

And for those currently working night shifts, get your vitamin D levels checked. They’re low, trust me.

Loved the commute, the night atmosphere, staying up late and sleeping in during the day.

Days off are hard.

Like heaven. It was heaven. Nobody expected me to get up in the morning, I never had to turn on the alarm, I was getting up when I had a good sleep, not when the sun got up or whatever. Happiest years of my life.

i only had a nightshift job for a relatively short period of time, so my insight is minimal. personally, it mostly felt like being exhausted all the time, bcause the rest of my life refused to make any allowances for the adjustment in my sleep schedule. like, friends still only wanted to hang out when i should have been sleeping? same with setting up appointments, going shopping, etc etc.

otherwise, i felt like if that wasn’t the case, i would have been pretty happy with it. mostly because there were less people overall to interact with in my waking hours, which was nice.

I had 4 consecutive months of only night shifts. It was more relaxing at work but it felt like my perception of day/night was being distorted. Had short moments were it felt like day time was fake and it doesn’t exist, reality is not real, and other wierd sensations that I have no clue how to explain.

Graveyards are awesome depending on where you are in your life.

Hated working them in my twenties, wouldn’t mind so much in my thirties. I have always enjoyed the night, I grew up in a loud house and night time was the only time it was quiet and I could do what I wanted peacefully.

Only issue I had was my day not lining up with other people or businesses. 24 hour grocery stores are wonderful however.

It’s amazing, like living under an enchantment. Everything just sounds different, the colors are more muted, the temperatures are brighter. Given my druthers, I’d be fully nocturnal.

This is going to depend enormously on what your body clock is like, and how flexible it is. Mine is extremely flexible and infinitely reconfigurable so I find shift work is a doddle and I dont get jetlag at all. I’m on a shift right now, and loving it. But some people really struggle with anything that even slightly messes with their natural circadian rythyms and will really struggle with working shifts and it can actually seriously impatc their health. Such people should never be forced into shift work

I worked night shift for 2.5 years (9:30pm-4:30am M-F) straight out of college. I’ll never do it again.

I actually didn’t mind being up and working late, I’m a night owl, it was everything else though. I think people look at the hours and go “well I’m up till 5am anyways”, but it’s not like you get home and fall asleep right away. You shower, eat, decompress, watch tv for a bit, it’s usually 8am before you’re actually falling asleep. Hungry after work? There’s two places open 24 hours in town, get used to eating those a lot. You can make a meal at home, just be careful not to wake up your roommates. In fact just be careful of that in general.

Friends wanna do something on Friday night (or any night)? You either can’t or have to call it quits early to leave for work. Drinking more than a beer is out. Friends want to do something Saturday at noon? You’re either joining them late or you’re a zombie all day. Everybody’s going to that movie you wanna see, but it starts at 6 and is 2.5 hours, you’re not gonna be able to make it. Got a girlfriend? She’s gonna feel a little lonely, especially if she works an evening shifts at a restaurant or something. You’re gonna be scrambling just to find hours to be together. Saturdays and Sundays you can kinda recover and live a normal life but you don’t wanna get out of rhythm too much because you have to go back to work Monday night. You just feel so off from everyone else, like you’re living in two separate worlds, it’s a weird quasi-isolation. You’re kinda depressed and in the winter you’ll go days where you barely see the sun. I lived with my best friend and some days the only time I’d see him would be the 30 minutes after he’d get up to go to work and I would be going to bed. Your coworkers become your best friends because they’re the only ones who really get it, which has its benefits if you work with cool people, but for me personally I kinda wanted to have a separate work and leisure life.

Some people enjoy it. Some people look at all the stuff I laid out and go “oh well that doesn’t really apply to me. I don’t have roommates or a gf, I don’t go out with friends and like being alone, I never see the sun much anyways”, etc etc, then maybe it’s for you. There are some positives. Driving is incredible. There’s a serenity to nobody on the road and it cuts your commute in half. Summer heat? Literally never have to deal with it.

And at the end of it all, I made it through and look back and laugh. But I’m not doing it again.

I worked 6pm to 6am for 4 years. I loved working nights. Easy commute, no boss, more pay, quieter at work (not less busy just quiet). There are two huge downsides. I feel like it decimated what little social life I had and ruined my days off. I also feel like it was rough on the body and mind. Always tired and depressed.

It’s taken a few years to feel like me again. Maybe an 8 hour night shift or 4pm to midnight would be okay but 6pm to 6am was rough.

I agree with a lot of the things people are saying here having worked nights for around 12 years.

I loved the calm and having a completely different schedule to everyone else etc however the forced depression can be pretty horrible. Especially during the winters in the UK when I would often go weeks without seeing any daylight at all. This can really affect your mood and general feeling of well being negatively over time.

Working days now I don’t really get any of those similar feelings, instead however I have to work with people and I dislike people generally, especially having to work with them so instead I have entirely different issues. Add on top of that having to do 5 day weeks as opposed to 3 or 4 I was used to working nights and I can’t choose which is better / worse.

I miss working nights bit don’t miss that depressed feeling.