Types of Shift Work Induced Sleep Disorder

Changes in your established sleep cycle and daily routine give rise to two main shift work induced sleep disorders - namely insomnia and excessive daytime sleepiness or EDS.

Insomnia

Insomnia takes two fundamental forms - transient and chronic.

We've already established that transient, or temporary, insomnia usually passes as soon as your body adjusts to new environmental cues and a new daily routine.

Such adjustment is slightly easier for jet lag sufferers, because they are simply re-aligning their circadian rhythms to a new pattern of daylight and darkness. As a shift worker, however, you essentially find yourself at constant odds with this pattern, staying awake during darkness and sleeping during daylight hours – a situation that, more often than not, generates some level of insomnia and leads to sleepiness and loss of mental clarity while at work.

Also, because it goes against your natural instincts to sleep during daylight hours, the quality and duration of the sleep that you do get can be compromised.

If you don't seek an effective remedy for this situation, or you allow it to persist for longer than a couple of weeks, you can accumulate a significant amount of sleep debt, putting you at risk from the more serious consequences of sleep deprivation.

When it comes to insomnia, shift workers tend to have trouble with all three phases of insomnia depending upon the length, time and duration of their work shift.

If you work an all-night shift and are forced to sleep during the day, it is likely that you will suffer from what is called "initial insomnia", a form of insomnia that is characterized by difficulty falling asleep.

If you find that you are taking thirty minutes or more to fall asleep after your shift, you are probably struggling with initial insomnia. Middle insomnia, or difficulty maintaining sleep or staying asleep, may also be a problem for you, especially if you sleep in a room that is not very dark.

Workers scheduled for very early morning shifts may find that they have trouble with late-phase or "terminal" insomnia, a condition that is characterized by waking up excessively early (and often being unable to get back to sleep), as well as middle insomnia.

If you know that you have to wake up early to go to work, the subconscious stress of knowing that you have to wake up during what is traditionally the deepest period of the sleep cycle may not allow you to completely benefit from a the full sleep cycle.

Before moving on to see how to solve this problem let's take a moment to look at sleep deprivation. >>>