After packing a 40-hour
workweek into just three days, and with several projects still to get through
in the four remaining days, I had to take a deep breath and think about how I
was going to make it to the end of the week and still have my sanity. Every so
often, no matter what’s on our plate, it’s important to make time to look out
for number one and make sure that all those hours, and all that pressure, don’t
catch up to you and knock you down. One of my favorite health podcasts recently
took the opportunity to address this very question about how to stay healthy
while doing shift work. While the podcast is specifically addressing people who
work off hours, most of the tenets of health outlined in the podcast are
universal.
It’s all about the Melatonin
Melatonin is a hormone
that’s naturally produced by the body that regulates the body’s natural
sleep-wake cycle. During the day melatonin is naturally low and high at night,
and is a result of millions of years of evolution of our bodies working in
harmony with light and dark cycles. This rise and fall in melatonin secretion
is related to our circadian rhythm and what happens when we work late into the
night is we expose ourselves to artificial light which disrupts melatonin
production, raising cortisol (also known as our stress hormone), and
interfering with our body’s natural rhythm. The health effects of this hormone
disruption are significant.
Some frightening statistics
Every cell in the body
seems to be affected by this disruption and shift work is associated with a
wide variety of problems including insomnia, depression, and gastrointestinal
disturbances, as well as an increased risk for cardiovascular disease,
decreases in fertility, increased risk for diabetes and other metabolic
disorders, increased risk for cancer, and an overall increased risk of death.
More specifically, rates of prostate and breast cancer in men and women who do
shift work rise 40% to 70%. There’s also some evidence suggesting that one’s
risk of stroke rises by 5% for every year of doing shift work.
The deeper problem
Obviously it’s not as
simple as just hormone secretion. What we find is that people who do shift work,
or who work late into the night, also adopt a number of poor lifestyle
habits. For example, shift workers are
more likely to eat at restaurants or eat poor quality fast food instead of
cooking at home. They’re also less likely to seek an adequate amount of
exercise. Mixing poor lifestyle habits with hormone disruption appears to be a
recipe for poor health.
What can you do?
Well the obvious answers
here are to make sure you’re eating a healthy diet, getting adequate sleep,
getting enough exercise, and, when possible, obeying our body’s natural
rhythms. Less obvious is a handy trick called light control. That is, first,
ensuring that when you’re sleeping during the day that you’re blocking out all
light sources and sleeping in total darkness. Second, while working at night
it’s important to use the right kind of lighting, and when working at night you
should be using very bright LED lighting at full power. The idea here is
essentially to trick your body that
night is day and day is night. Chris Kresser also recommends that when leaving
work in the morning when the sun is beginning to rise, that shift workers
filter out blue wavelengths of light by wearing amber tinted glasses. By
filtering out these blue wavelengths you are sending signals to your body that
nighttime is coming, even if it’s not.
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