My step-dad was a feeder driver for 28 years and never drove a single day shift that entire time. He retired 6 years ago and to this day he still stays up all night and sleeps all day. I guess 28 years of conditioning his body to be a vampire and it doesn’t go back overnight. My mom just doesn’t get it but she’s never worked overnight a day in her life. A couple of years ago while working for a motorcycle company as a show truck driver I worked in the machine shop there for a couple months over the winter and thought that working the night shift would be great, 4 – 10 hour days and 3 days off every week plus being home during the day. Well that was a disaster, I was walking death, my body was so screwed up that it took a week of sleeping to get back to normal (or at least normal in my eyes, everyone else thinks I’m screwed up
)
Anyhow, here’s what he told me to do during that time, said it took him 3 to 4 years to finally get adjusted:
First and most important, stay away from anything with caffeine for at least 6 hours before you go to bed. And to that you’ll be shocked at everything out there with caffeine in it such as over-the-counter pain medications and chocolate, check the labels. And of you smoke, that won’t help either but there are still some of us out there with that monkey on our back :smokin: but if you do, try not to have any an hour or so before bed time. And don’t eat a big breakfast then head off to bed, try and avoid anything fried as well.
Try and get yourself (most important) and your family to understand that when your home during the day covering a night shift that your not there to work on honey-do’s, help with school projects and so on. It’s also important to insulate yourself from as much of the day-to-day noise in the house because no matter how tired you are your going to find it tough to sleep through some of the stuff you used to hearing while awake. Get some blackout curtains for your bedroom so that no light gets in from outside while your sleeping because even though your asleep you body will see the light and think it needs to be awake.
Hope that helps a little, I’m sure glad to be back on heavy haul, the big yellow signs on the front and back of the truck are actually solar panels, when the sun goes down the truck stops running :clap: