Ask Lemmy

As someone who was forced to do this for a couple months when I was in the Army, rotating shifts destroys your ability to get good sleep, its horrendous to actually experience. It took about 2 months before people started getting so sleep deprived that people started failing PT (physical training) tests and it took the brigade commander looking at our battalion and asking "wtf is going on over there?" and hearing what our battalion had done to our shift schedule and put a stop to it. He called over every single soldier who failed their PT test to hear our excuses, and when most of us were first time failures and we all had the exact same complaint, by the time he got to me, he was like "You've been on rotating shifts, unable to sleep, and were forced to take this test after a shift when you're completely exhausted like everyone else?" "yes sir" "ok, don't expect that shift rotation to last, I'll be talking to your battalion commander after this. Send in the next person." Dude was ready to just start ripping into us but changed his tune right quick after hearing about the fucked up shift schedule and lack of any common sense in the leadership's ability to plan properly. One of the few times where shit actually rolled uphill. Suffice it to say, before I even finished the drive back to my barracks, I was being called by my platoon sergeant that we'd have to a new schedule tomorrow and to just show up for swing shift like we normally would be on.

In the prison I worked at we would usually rotate shifts every 6 months, but our commander heard complaints about people being on day shift for so long at one time that they were getting burnt out dealing with 90% of the problem times with inmates, and instead of changing it to every 3 months, changed the rotation to every 2 days. Literally, 2 days on Day shift, 2 days on Swing shift, 2 days on Night shift, 1 day off, then back to days. And that last day was getting off shift at 6AM, doing PT until 8AM, Barracks Maintenance until 10 AM, then because of the rotation, we'd have to be back in at work at 5:30 AM the next day, so our 1 day off a week was only 19.5 hours, and you're exhausted but you can't sleep yet, otherwise you'll be up all night before work the next day, so you force yourself to run on fumes, getting a haircut, getting food and supplies for the next week, etc. Then sleeping, so there was literally never any time to relax. It fucking sucked.

those other 2 weeks you can live semi-normal and thus have friends.

I don't think you're thinking about how hard this will absolutely fuck over your sleep. There is no way you can be a functional human being for those two weeks with this consistent and drastic of a schedule change.

I'd rather work third shift consistently, I'm a night person.

2nd shift is great if you don't have a family. You're asleep when the kids go to school, you're at work when they get home. Can't have dinner as a family. I like 3rd, I go in after the kids go to bed and I wake up in time to pick them up.