Many of us work on nightshift. Do we sleep well and maintain good health. No so, according to a recent chat I had with British neuroscientist Russell Foster. Essentially, he says, our bodies are governed by a 24-hour biological clock which guides us towards the best time to sleep, eat and think. And light is pivotal to optimizing the quality of each day. This is particularly acute with nightshift workers.

Nightshift workers have trouble adjusting their sleep time during the day, and it’s wrongly assumed that their body clock adapts to the demands of working at night. In all the studies that have been done, we see that 97% of individuals do not adapt to the demands of working at night. Why? That’s because they’re exposed to fairly dim light in the workplace and at night.

Foster explains that these workers experience bright natural light on the journey home or on the journey to work and the clock always defers to the brighter light signal as being daytime, and therefore the body clock of nightshift workers doesn’t adjust.

So the quality of their daytime sleep is usually very poor, around five hours or less, which for most people is not sufficient to sustain their capabilities.

"The important issue is that when the nightshift worker is working, their entire biology driven by the body clock is saying, 'you should be asleep'."

And to override that huge biological drive to sleep, we activate the stress excess, and sustained activation of the stress excess is what causes many of the problems in nightshift workers such as obesity, diabetes type 2, coronary heart disease, high risk of cancer, mood changes and so on.

For most of us who are on the dayshift, Foster has many rules of the thumb. For the light itself the most essential for body clock is to start the day by exposing yourself to the morning light. Prior to bedtime, reduce your light levels 30 minutes or so. 
Good night!

Forster, an Oxford University professor is the author of Life Time: The New Science Of The Body Clock, And How It Can Revolutionize Your Sleep And Health