Creator002 said:
Starting my new job.
It's night shift (12 am to 7 am) and I have trouble with sleep. I just got used to waking up in the morning and now I have to change it back.
Afraid I won't sleep enough, which is causing me anxiety which is preventing me from sleeping. Coupled with the fact I'm trying to cut back on my "medicine", it's going to be hard until I get used to it.
I just thank God I'm not an insomniac and I feel for those that are.
I feel your pain. I just got off a 2-month stint working from 23:30 to 08:00. I, too, just got used to waking up in the morning right before I was hired for this new job. That was for holiday "Peak" hours though; my schedule only recently changed from midnight to 04:00.
On my days off I would find myself waking up at 9 PM and staying up until 8 AM anyway. I was off sync from the rest of the world, and I felt physically exhausted on my two days off, so badly that I might as well have gone into work. Everything else in my life fell by the wayside. I found myself taking 2-3 hour "naps" at random. Other times I could sense in my brain that I was about to pass out, just as one could sense when you're about to sneeze.
Other ill effects included waking up at 6-7 PM and having a mild panic attack because I didn't know if it was morning or evening. And my eyesight started to fail because I didn't see sunlight for so long. It's gotten better though.
Since my schedule just changed, I tried this trick I learned a few months ago to reset my sleeping patterns. It didn't work so well this time as I find myself sleeping only for 6 hours or so a night.