There’s been a lot in the news lately about people who work the late shift and have trouble staying awake, in particular about air traffic controllers. One group of people who seem to have developed a system to avoid the same problems of falling asleep on the job, even in the face of extreme sleep deprivation: nurses.
Their system, however, may be seriously confusing their bodies. According to a recent article, many nurses go without sleep for 24-hours in order to adjust to their late-night shifts. Not only is this ineffective, it’s also potentially harmful:
- When you don’t sleep for that long, your sleep/wake patterns end up out of sync with your biological clock
- This leads to a misalignment of your circadian rhythms
- This kind of circadian misalignment has been associated with increased risk of developing cardiovascular, metabolic and gastrointestinal disorders
We have a set of internal rhythms that repeat roughly every 24 hours: the sleep-wake cycle, hunger, the ebb and flow of hormones, the rise and fall of body temperature, and other subtle rhythms that mesh with the 24-hour solar day. In fact, a lot of people’s sleep problems can be attributed to an internal clock that has become out of sync or mismatched with the day-night cycle. Sometimes your body’s clock just doesn’t quite match up with society’s 24-hour clock.
