10 Survival Tips for Night Shift Nurses

Survival 101- Tips for New Nurses Working Night Shifts

How do you survive a 12 hour overnight shift? Though being a nurse is an incredibly rewarding job, you would not be able to avoid working the night shift and that could be very taxing. It’s a career that keeps you up on your feet since you are going to have to take care of people and make sure that they are doing alright. Here are some survival tips for nurses working the night shift:

How do nurses survive nights?

1. Snacks

Always have snacks. Depending on the health facility, there are some hospitals that do not have a cafeteria that is open for 24 hours or any stores where you could buy snacks nearby. To keep it safe, you could bring a few snacks that you could nip on while you are working so that you could complete the entire shift.

2. Sleep

Before your shift, you have to make sure that you have had at least 8 hours of sleep. It could be hard to sleep during the day but you could make sure that the room that you are sleeping in is far and quiet, turn your phone off, don’t drink coffee, and possibly use a sleep mask.

3. No Sleeping Pills

Understandably, you want to be able to sleep before you go through the journey that one night-shift nurse would go through, and it may seem like a great idea at that time, but sleeping pills have their negative effects and could confuse your body’s rhythm. 

4. Wear a watch

You should always have a watch with you at all times because it could be a way for you to keep yourself on top of all of the tasks that you are going to have to do while you are working your shift.

5. Plan Ahead

It is important to stay on top of things, including your personal life. To keep a form of normalcy and keep your social life, you could organize and schedule everything ahead of time, make a checklist on what needs to be done, mark all of your plans outside the hospital in your calendar and put alarms up.

How do I prepare for night shift nursing?

6. Demands

You must understand the demands of this predicament, not only the demands of pay some hospitals do but the physical, mental and emotional demands that you are going to go through in the next 12-hours that you are in the hospital. Since it’s nighttime, our body would usually need to hibernate, but since you are going to be working, your body is going to take time to adjust to the change of schedule. This could be emotionally, mentally, and physically taxing for people.

7. Family and Friends

When you are about to work a night shift, there are going to be changes in your home life since you are essentially going to be working at night and sleeping during the day so your schedule would be different from everyone else’s. You need to talk to the people around you about what is going to happen so that they know what is happening and hopefully make a schedule that fits both if you are planning to hang out and so that they could give you support while you work through this.

8. Breaks

In the night shift, you are going to have a few breaks where you could eat and maybe rest a little bit. Take advantage of these breaks and get as much nutritious food in you as possible and take a power nap so that you could feel more alarmed and awake.

9. Hydration

Water is important, and keeping yourself hydrated would decrease your feeling of being tired so you could always keep a water bottle so you could hydrate yourself whenever you feel tired. A concern might be having to make more trips to the restroom, but it would help your body function properly. If you want to stay awake, caffeine is not the way to go. You are going to be awake for a while but you are likely going to crash after that is gone.

10. Move

When you are on a 12-hour night shift, you have to keep moving so that you can effectively stay awake. Keep walking, find something else to do, standing still and just sitting down when you are feeling tired would only make you more tired.

 

Working the night shift could be hard, and that in itself is its own journey, but it is incredibly rewarding in the end.