How Can Light Therapy Help You with Your Night Time Schedule?

 

It is not always possible that you manage to have a job that offers you the opportunity to work during the daytime only. Again, there are many who prefer to work during the night and choose to work at night shift. But carrying out a night shift isn’t an easy task at all. When people have their sleep, you have to go on with your job, and that can be really hard for many. If you are a night shift worker, you already know all the hassles a night shifter has to deal with. From not getting proper time for oneself to not having needed an amount of sleep, there are numerous problems to go through.

 

 

Despite all that, they have to go through the job to make a living. But there are some ways you, as a night shift worker, can make your work easier and more bearable. It never matters how much you sleep during the morning, considering you get to have a sound sleep in the morning and during the daytime at all. You will always feel sleepy during your shift at night, and you will feel all your energy has been drained, and you are finding no will or motivation to carry out your work.

 

Why Working at Night Shift is Hard

There are various reasons why you feel like this. Our bodies function in a way that we are supposed to remain awake during the daytime and sleep when the darkness comes down, or in other words, at night. There is a hormone in our body called melatonin, and it controls the energy and sleepiness of our body.

 

The generation of melatonin is controlled by sunlight, as during the day we get exposed to sunlight, our bodies don’t produce melatonin. But at night, when there’s no sunlight, the generation of melatonin gets increased in our bodies, and then it causes sleepiness. It also drains all our energy, so in short, it makes us feel tired and sleepy and gives us the signal that we should go to sleep.

 

So no matter how much you manage to sleep during the day, you will still feel tired, energyless, and sleepy at night and find a really hard time working. And as our body doesn’t generate enough melatonin during the day, we won’t be able to fall asleep easily, despite being awake and tired all night.

 

As a result, your rest and sleep get hampered regularly, and carrying out your work becomes more difficult. In fact, you have to rely on weekends to get proper rest and restore the energy that you lost over the week, which actually hampers your plans for the weekends too. So, it is really hard to maintain a cycle that will perfectly align with your nighttime schedule. But it is still possible to maintain, and you can go through some measures for doing so, and among all the measures, light therapy can be the most effective one.

 

Taking Help from Light Therapy

You can think of many quick solutions to help you go through the night shift, like changing different habits, maintaining a special diet, taking necessary caffeine, etc. Some of them can work as a short time solution, some of them might do the job for you as a long-term solution. But you can actually change your complete body cycle if you want. You won’t feel dizzy during the night and energetic during the day anymore, and exactly the opposite will happen if you do so. And light therapy can help you in reversing your body cycle.

 

As mentioned earlier, your body’s internal clock or the circadian rhythm’ is controlled by the sunlight. Light therapy can reset the circadian rhythm of your body and change the time when you feel the urge to sleep. You can use a lightbox to take the light therapy, and you can do so either at your home or your work, even if it suits you. And the light therapy process is really easy, and you can take it any time. You just need to make sure that the lightbox is emitting around 20,000 lux of light.

 

It is best if you take the light therapy for quite some time, for 20-60 mins as per your needs, before going to your work. Here, the bright light will work as sunlight for your body and stop the generation of melatonin. Hence you won’t feel sleepy and drowsy during work and feel completely energetic. And at the end of the shift, you can return home and easily fall asleep after a full night of work. But make sure that you have darkened your room with heavy curtains or blinds before sleeping. Otherwise, outside light can hamper your sleep.

 

You can take light therapy during your work hours, too, if you need it. As taking light therapy is a really easy and hassle-free task, you can keep working while taking the therapy. Just make sure that your body is as exposed to the light as needed. Keep the lightbox at your eye level, but in a way that the light doesn’t hit your eyes directly. Enough amount of light will decrease the melatonin light as sunlight does and make you really energetic to carry out your nighttime job perfectly.

 

Final Words

Light therapy has been a revolutionary method to help people with different problems, and helping with sleep schedule is one of them. If you need help with your sleep cycle, even if you don’t work at night shift, you can resort to light therapy so that you might get the expected result. Light therapy has been a really successful method so far in this area.