The night shift
"Rotating shift work is frequently fingered for causing negative health effects. The assumption is that shifting the body clock throws things out of whack hormonally, which jerks physical systems around until the body doesn’t know which end is up. End result: bad things happen to health."
In keeping with October’s focus on breast cancer, a news story in October of 2001 connected working at night with increased breast cancer risk. The theory was that working the night shift causes hormones to run amok, triggering changes in the body that just aren’t that good for you.
What if we look at this as a mind-body issue? Where would we look for clues about why women who work rotating night shifts tend to have breast cancer more than the general populace? What didn’t the studies consider as possible contributing factors that could have some application to this health problem?
Here are some ideas about how working at night could amplify feeling stressed in ways that threaten health:
- Working at night interferes with social connections with friends and family who don’t work at night. It disrupts a normal connection to the daily cycle of life. This can lead to feeling separated from every day pleasures others take for granted.
- Working at night puts you out of touch with your significant other who is sleeping, eating, playing, and getting on with life without you. This can lead to affairs, fights, less closeness, and feeling isolated and alone.
- Working at night can seem lonely, weird, creepy, cheerless, and awful in many ways. It could prompt the depressed to feel more depressed as they focus on how out of step they are with the rest of the world.
- Rotating night shifts are particularly disruptive to life because you can’t even fall into a routine. By making no routine the only routine, rotating night shifts are often a recipe for personal, family, and relationship stresses of every sort.
- Most women who work rotating night shifts do so because they think they have to, not because they want to. Doing such work is often accompanied by idea that the wife and mother should sacrifice her happiness and comfort for the sake of others, a belief that doesn’t seem to promote health.
I worked for a year and a half on the graveyard shift at Motorola when I was an undergraduate (billions of years ago). Because I was in college, a time when life is often strange, unpredictable, and rearranged at whim, working graveyard didn’t affect me the way it did the women I worked with who had families. But it didn’t take disrupted social ties to make me realize that the graveyard shift was not something I’d want to make into a career. The sense of disconnection from regular life never diminishes, even though it becomes routine.
For a student, bizarre distortions of everyday life can seem interesting and thought provoking. Some people who work night shifts enjoy the way being out of sync keeps them from taking life for granted. Others like the variety that comes with not having a set schedule. Still others may relish their freedom from the conventional constraints of ordinary routines and the routine demands of social and relationship ties.
Not everyone working rotating night shifts suffers from doing so. From a mind-body perspective, the negative health impact of shift work is dependent upon how you react to its effects in your life, not how it affects your hormones. Those who find shift work leaves them with a sad, lonely, long-suffering feeling might want to think about shifting to a routine that puts them back in closer touch with ordinary life.