Shift workers often find there’s not enough time between shifts to sleep and balance spending time with family and friends. But sleep deprivation can affect your health, mood and safety while working.

To avoid tiredness, shift workers need to get as close to 7-8 hours of sleep as possible. If you miss a couple of hours sleep a day for four days or nights, it can make you almost as tired as if you’ve missed a whole night’s sleep.

Here’s our top 10 tips and tricks to help you get a good night’s/day’s sleep and help your body to cope with shift work:

• Get your partner to help: Shift work not only affects you, it will have an impact on your whole family. Make sure your partner understands how it will affect any parental responsibilities and household chores. He/she will also need to be aware that they may not be able to spend as much time with you while you’re working shifts.
• Get your body clock ready: If you’re about to start shift work, start to alter your sleep pattern around three days before your work schedule begins. So postpone your sleep time by a couple of hours each day until you reach your new sleep time to fit in with the new shift.
• Make your sleep a family effort: Talk to your children about your sleep needs. Explain why you need to sleep at a different time. Then ask them not to come into your room unless it’s an emergency (and make sure you explain exactly what an emergency means!).
• Get enough sleep: Aim to have at least four hours sleep at the same time every morning/night to help your body clock regulate to your new sleeping pattern.
• Set the right sleep environment: Make sure your bedroom is as restful as possible – make sure it’s not too warm. A cooler bedroom will help you to get to sleep and stay asleep. Try to block out as much light as possible if you are sleeping during the day – blackout curtains or an eye mask will help with this.

• Cut down noise: Try to make your bedroom as soundproof as possible. Heavy curtains and double glazed windows will help with this. You can also use earplugs too.
• Avoid stimulants: don’t have caffeine, large meals or do strenuous exercise for at least 3-4 hours before you go to bed.

• Need a little help? If you’re having trouble dropping off to sleep there are several herbal alternatives that are said to promote sleep: lavender, orange blossom, camomile and peppermint. A milky drink before sleep can also help you to drift off into the land of nod.
• Let everyone know: Let friends, family and neighbours know your shift patterns so that they don’t disturb you when you need to sleep. And make sure that if you’re using your mobile phone as an alarm, that you put it into ‘Do Not Disturb’ mode so that alerts etc. don’t disrupt your sleep. Ideally, keep your mobile phone away from your bedroom all together.
• Get extra sleep whenever you can: Use the weekend/days off to get in some extra recovery sleep.

We have lots of jobs available with varying hours to suit everyone, check out our online job search here.

And for more tips on coping with shift work visit the Health and Safety Executive’s website.