Adjusting to night shift life can be tough, especially when trying to figure out what to do with your days off. But as long as you have the right sleep schedule and game plan, you’ll totally be able to do it!
How to Prep for Your First Night Shift
First off is learning how to prepare for your first night on. You’ll need to know how to get the best sleep during the daytime, how to build up your stamina, and what snacks to eat that help keep you awake. Visit Adjusting to Night Shift for the full run down.
Getting Through Your Shift
From assessments to medication pass, your whole night is going to be pretty busy with scheduled medications, as needed medications, and hourly rounds. Visit What Do Night Shift Nurses Do? An Hourly Survival Guide and How to Organize Your 12-Hour Nursing Shift for an hourly breakdown.
What to do Immediately Post-Shift
Each night-shift nurse is going to have a slightly different post-shift schedule, but everyone does the same basic things. For example, some nurses might go out to breakfast after their shift or go run some errands. While others, including me most of the time, go straight home.
Once home, you’re going to want to change out of those dirty scrubs and hop in a nice hot shower. Typically, I run through a drive thru on the way home since my commute is pretty long, but if not, I’ll come home and make myself some breakfast. Then straight to bed it is!
Figuring Out the Sleep Schedule
Figuring out my sleep schedule depends on if I work the next night again or not. If I do work the next night, then I’ll sleep all day. Usually after a long shift I don’t have any problems going to bed, but if you do, take some melatonin to help fall asleep and stay asleep longer. I also always have my Amazon Alexa play brown noise while I sleep. It’s like white noise but it’s even better at blocking out sounds!
If I’m lucky enough to not work the next night, then I’ll do pretty much the same routine, however I’ll wake up around noon or 1pm for lunch time, eat lunch, and I won’t go back to sleep. I do this to help launch me back into a daytime wake schedule. This way I’m not awake all night on my night off and I’m able to get more chores and errands ran during the daytime.
Transitioning Back to Nights
Once I have a few nights where I don’t work and I’ve transitioned back to a day wake schedule, it’s time to transition back to night shift! Even when I’m on my day wake schedule, I still typically stay up a little later and sleep in as well. For example, I won’t go to bed until around 2 or 3am and I’ll sleep in till around noon or 1pm. Doing this helps me transition back much easier. Once I wake up around noon, I’ll eat a small lunch and then try to rest or nap in the afternoon so that I’ll be ready to go for work and be up all night.
What do you do on your days off as a night shift nurse? Comment below!
And don’t miss out on these helpful posts for new nurses:
- Charting Tips for New Nurses
- Organizational Brain Template for New Nurses
- Start of Shift Plan for New Nurses
- How to do a Quick yet Effective Head-to-Toe Assessment
- Nursing Bag Essentials for New Nurses
- Essentials of a Good Bedside Handoff Report
- Imposter Syndrome as a New Nurse