Out-Sleep the Competition: Part 3

The 80/20 Guide to Owning the Night

Let’s face it.
Not everyone gets to sleep from 10 PM to 6 AM wrapped in a $300 bamboo blanket listening to Tibetan wind chimes.

Some of us are emergency doctors, ICU warriors, night-flight medics, trauma surgeons, parents, or all of the above.
We work against biology. Against light. Against clock time.

But we don’t get a pass on sleep.
We get the consequences.

Night shifts destroy circadian alignment. Shift work has been declared a probable carcinogen by the WHO. Sleep deprivation increases your risk of heart disease, cancer, infertility, obesity, depression, and error.

So let’s talk about how to survive—and even perform—when your job runs against the sun.

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Top Tips to Surviving Shift Work

1. Own Your Autonomy

If you don’t own your schedule, your schedule owns you.

You are not a passenger in the shift work machine.

• Group your most disruptive shifts—back-to-back nights are brutal, but they’re less disorienting than flip-flopping.
• Don’t scatter nights randomly. You’ll never recalibrate.
• Avoid the dreaded evening-morning combo—it’s a cognitive car crash.
• If you’re in a big enough group, match shift patterns to chronotype. Some are natural night owls, others are morning larks. Lean into the design.

Autonomy is a performance enhancer.
Control what you can—then sleep like your life depends on it.

2. Use Jet Lag Science to Your Advantage

Your circadian clock only shifts 1 hour per day.

Staggered rosters sound smart—until you realise your biology isn’t keeping up.

Going from day to evening to night over 3 days is a trap.

You’re better off clustering your shifts or nights, then giving yourself 3 full days to recover. Think of it like flying across time zones: shift, land, and settle. Don’t keep jumping planes.

3. Own Your Exit Strategy

After nights, sleep opportunity begins the moment the shift ends.
Don’t chat. Don’t scroll. Don’t “just decompress.”

• Sunglasses on before you leave the hospital.
• Block the blue light. Morning sunlight crushes melatonin like a hammer.
• Head straight to bed. No food. No phone. No delay.

4. Anchor Sleep Like a Pro

After nights, aim for:

• A 5–6 hour core sleep block
• A 90-minute nap (aka “anchor nap”) before your next shift

NASA’s power nap study showed:

• 26-minute nap = +34% performance, +50% alertness.
  If you can’t do 90, even 20–30 minutes helps.

Just don’t nap after 3 PM post-nights—it’ll delay your recovery.

Sleep doesn’t need to be perfect. It needs to be protected. I’ve personally used the nap tactic when on a string of evening shifts and pwered down in the afternoon prior to work. Naps are not weak. They’re aviation-grade safety gear.

5. Recovery = Priority

After a block of night shifts, you need 2–3 nights of unrestricted sleep to recover.
Not just 1. Not just a sleep-in. Three.

Give yourself grace. Cancel plans.
Your brain has work to do. Spindles to spin. Synapses to prune. Inflammation to kill.

This is recalibration, not indulgence.

6. Engineer a Cave

Environment is everything.

• Blackout curtains
• Cool room (~18.3°C)
• White noise or earplugs
• Melatonin 1–2 mg after night shifts (short-term use only). It shifts your circadian rhythm, not knocks you out. And long-term use can mess with endogenous production. Short, strategic. Not forever.
• No screens, no food, no delay—straight to bed post-shift

Sunlight is the enemy after nights. Wear dark sunglasses on your way home. Don’t stop at the café. Don’t scroll on your phone.

The bedroom is for sleep, not debate, drama, or email drafts.

7. Nourish for Night Ops

Avoid the sugar-fat-bomb of midnight nachos.

• Keep meals light, protein-rich, and low GI
• Eat on shift early. Not post-shift.
• No caffeine after 2–3 AM.
  (Caffeine has a 5–7 hour half-life. Still on board at 10 AM.)

Alcohol to knock you out after nights?
Nope. It sedates, fragments sleep, and erases REM.

8. Light is a Drug—Use It Intentionally

Bright light = cortisol. Dark = melatonin.

• Shift-start: Use bright white light to wake up your brain.
• Shift-end: Kill all blue light. Try red light bulbs at home.
• Use apps like f.lux or Iris to block blue light on devices.
• Get sunlight on your skin and eyes first thing on days off to realign your clock.

Shift work isn’t just tiring. It’s disorienting.
Light is your steering wheel.

9. Bonus: Protect the Team

• Check in with your colleagues.
• Don’t drive home impaired. One 20-minute nap before you leave is safer than white-knuckling the drive. Consider a taxi or Uber.
• Flag who’s running on fumes. Microsleeps don’t announce themselves. They just kill people.

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Need more persuasion to sleep

REM promotes creativity and problem-solving.

Examples include Mendeleev and the periodic table, which he described as God’s abacus.

Paul McCartney in the song Yesterday and Let It Be came from REM sleep.

Keith Richards in the song Satisfaction was also from his sleep, and Mary Shelley attributes dreaming about the story Frankenstein.

John Steinbeck said a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.

Edison was famous for holding steel bearings in his hand over a metal pan below. He would then write down his creative thoughts when he was woken as the steel bearings fell out of his hand during sleep and hit the metal pan.

Final thoughts from the Dalai Lama:

Sleep is the best meditation

Sleeping well is better than 10 years of meditation.

There is nothing more impactful than 30 minutes of sleep. Try getting 8 hours of quality sleep.

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Reference:

The sole academic reference to these sleep posts comes from Dr Matthew Walker from his book Why We Sleep. If you have the time, it’s a must read, and he doesn’t mind if it puts you to sleep!

• Dr Matthew Walker: Why We sleep – unlocking the power of sleep and dreams. 2018
• The Matt Walker podcast

Sleep Series:

• Out-Sleep the Competition: Part 1. Sleep as a Peak Performance State
• Out-Sleep the Competition: Part 2. The 80/20 of Elite Sleep
• Out-Sleep the Competition: Part 3. The 80/20 Guide to Owning the Night