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    21 Tips For Beating Fatigue And Improving Your Health, Happiness And Safety
    21 Tips For Beating Fatigue And Improving Your Health, Happiness And Safety
    21 Tips For Beating Fatigue And Improving Your Health, Happiness And Safety
    Ebook93 pages55 minutes

    21 Tips For Beating Fatigue And Improving Your Health, Happiness And Safety

    By Dr. James C. Miller

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    About this ebook

    Do you feel tired? Worn out?  Do you need more sleep?  You don’t have to feel miserable when you understand how to take care of yourself!  Even if you work long hours, night shifts or juggle long and sporadic work and family schedules, you can use Dr. Miller’s insights to improve your health, feel happier at work and keep yourself safe along the way.


    Although it has been proven in numerous studies over the past 30 years that working nights or on rotating shifts as a career may be damaging to your health, there are specific measures that you can take to reduce the risk.
    The first five tips provide information about the biology of sleep and fatigue, the pattern of daily rhythms in mental performance, and the ease with which we are able to disrupt sleep, even without working at night. The next four tips deal with shiftwork schedules and their interactions with daily life. Tips 10 through 20 deal with specific fatigue countermeasures that you may be using now, seeing others use, thinking about using, or wondering about. The final tip is a caution about getting home safely after a night of work.

    LanguageEnglish
    Publisher21 Book Series
    Release dateDec 6, 2013
    ISBN9781497716841
    21 Tips For Beating Fatigue And Improving Your Health, Happiness And Safety

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      Book preview

      21 Tips For Beating Fatigue And Improving Your Health, Happiness And Safety - Dr. James C. Miller

      Introduction

      These tips are aimed at you, the shift and/or night worker.  The tips here focus on improving your health and safety by minimizing the effects of fatigue on your work performance and driving home after a night shift.  I have written another book aimed at shiftwork schedulers and teams involved in fatigue risk management systems (FRMS) for 24/7 operations (80).  I focus here on the following kinds of work (116):

      - Systems with night work but without weekend work, and

      - Systems with both night and weekend work, or continuous shiftwork.  These systems are also called 24/7 systems.  They include:

      —Regular fixed shifts;

      —Regular rotating shifts; for example, four crews with rotating eight-hour shifts; and

      —Irregular shifts with varying numbers of crews and shift lengths.

      There are a number of reasons that these tips may be helpful to you.  First, working nights or on rotating shifts as a career may be damaging to your health.  Relevant health data were summarized in the mid-1970s (2,105,114,133).  Dozens of studies followed.  In 1997, the U.S. National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) published a useful guide called Plain Language about Shiftwork (111).  A 2006 study concluded that health effects of night shift work included sleep disturbances, excessive daytime sleepiness, acute and chronic shift-lag syndrome, and psychoneurotic, cardiovascular and gastrointestinal diseases (54).  The investigators also concluded, The effects on women are much more pronounced because of their reproductive function and family obligations.  Second, there are obvious family and social interactions that you must consider.  Most studies of shiftworker health have also looked at what may be called work-to-family conflicts (6), quantifying many problems that may be well-known to you already.

      Third, there is the issue of job satisfaction.  What characteristics should you look for to help you identify good and bad shiftwork schedules?  Finally, what fatigue countermeasures might you use to keep yourself safe and productive at work, and then get you home safely after night work?

      The first five tips here provide information about the biology of sleep and fatigue, the pattern of daily rhythms in mental performance, and the ease with which we are able to disrupt sleep, even without working at night.  The next four tips deal with shiftwork schedules and their interactions with daily life.  Tips 10 through 20 deal with specific fatigue countermeasures that you may be using now, seeing others use, thinking about using, or wondering about.  The final tip is a caution about getting home safely after a night of work.  Numbers in parentheses are citations of the scientific and technical articles that are listed in the References section.

      1 – Sleep Is Fragile

      Sleep is not a passive or vegetative state, as many people assume, based upon such sources as folk tales, scripture and Shakespeare.  It is a complex set of states generated by the brain.  Consider several of the complexities of sleep physiology.

      First, three kinds of sleep are identifiable with scalp electrodes (electroencephalogram, EEG):  slow-wave sleep (SWS), rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep, and stage 2 sleep.  Generally, about half of a good quality, normal night of sleep is spent in stage 2.  SWS and REM each occupy somewhat less than one-quarter of the night.  The remainder of the night is made up of drowsiness (stage 1) and wakefulness (stage 0) (103,132).

      Second, the occurrence of SWS is associated with a release of growth hormone from the brain (129).  Thus, we assume that SWS is a period during which some repair of muscle and nerve cells occurs, following their use during the preceding waking period(s) (7).

      Third, the occurrence of sleep is associated with memory consolidation (10,11).

      Fourth, the proportions of sleep time spent in SWS and REM sleep depend quite a bit upon the degree and nature of sleep debt.

      Fifth, the sleep stages mentioned above occur in an orderly manner with a 90-min cycle.  I have illustrated a rough depiction of the 90-minute sleep cycle here.

      Description: sleep histogram

      Rough approximation of an eight-hour sleep histogram, showing the 90-minute cycle of sleep stages that occurs throughout the night.  Copyright 2013 James C. Miller.

      The brain regulates the amount of sleep that we need.  This regulation operates somewhat like a thermostat:  when we are too sleepy, we are driven to fall asleep; and when we have recovered enough, we are driven to awaken.

      The need for sleep is a physiological drive, much like the drives for food and water.  I may starve myself to death voluntarily or refuse to drink and then die of dehydration.  However, continued sleep deprivation eventually causes each of us to fall asleep, initiating automatic recovery.

      [N]o one gets used to not getting enough sleep.  They might be able to do it, but they never overcome the drive for sleep or the consequences that invariably follow sleep restriction (23).  Sleep debt has been compared to borrowing from a bank (87).  People who sleep less than eight hours per 24 hours are taking little 'loans' from their sleep banker.  ...  You know that your dangerously moody sleep banker may call in the loan when you are driving at 79 miles per hour on the freeway.  You should deposit eight hours in your sleep bank every day.  The normal range of sleep need for adults ages 25 to 70 years is seven to nine hours per night.

      Sleep inertia occurs normally in the morning after awakening.  This grogginess is noticeable usually for only about five minutes but may be noticeable for up to 30 minutes if you have a large, previous sleep debt.  However, sleep inertia is more insidious than

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