Does anyone work Swing Shift and feel the social isolation associated with it?

How do you feel about working nights when most of the world is getting home for the evening when you're just starting your shift? How does it impact your social life, marriage, dating, family?



In many ways, I think the swing shift (3 or 4 until 11 or midnight) is even worse than working midnights (12 until 8 am). How do you deal with this, particularly if this is not your shift of choice? Would you take a significantly lower paying job to get on a better shift?|||My husband worked nights and I worked days for 5 years. We made it work, but when he finally took a different day job, it really messed us up - we had 2 children at the time, and when he was home now all of a sudden, the kids resented it because "he messed up our routine".... Also, when he worked nights, I made all of the sports events, etc., alone. Since I was not from the town we lived in, but my husband was, when our kids were small and beginning baseball/softball and for the longest time, everyone thought I was divorced. I have had several friends whose spouses work changing shift work, and it causes alot of isolation and fights. One is depressed all of the time because the kids are grown and she is alone, the other is overwhelmed because she has to do everything... It is just tough... Got to have a strong relationship to begin with. And yes, we initially took a lower paying job to get out of it, and now are better off with a better job and relationship.|||i dont work the graveyard shift but i do work the 12:30 - 9 shift sometimes, im in food service, it doesnt matter what type of shift im in , if people dont want to be friends with me, i wont have friends to hang out with anyways, so at least i have something to do this way|||I did. I came home and went right to sleep. I would wake early and do things or take classes. The graveyards shift was the worst. I had to find others on the shift to socialize with. I found many people in the food service industry that had a schedule like mine.|||58Steve Pavlina, a self-improvement blogger wrote a series of posts about a sleep schedule that causes him to be awake all hours of the day. He deals with a lot of similar issues although the parts about sleep/diet may not interest you.|||I often work night shift, which is usually 5 or 6 p.m. until 1:30 a.m. or 6:00 p.m., depending if we're on 8's, 10's or 12's. When I work this shift it's because I choose to. It's a hard adjustment to make at first, but work is much quieter at night, you get more done, you have less people breathing down your neck, and you still have daylight hours to accomplish things, like go to the bank, etc. I also get paid more for working nights -- not a significant amount, but when you start adding up overtime and double time, it's a definite benefit. If it's not your shift of choice, try to hold out and wait for a day shift opening, or put in a request for day shift, if at all possible. I personally would not take a significantly lower paying job to get on a better shift, but that's a personal financial decision for you. If I were younger and still partying, I would probably be a lot less enthused about working night shift and I probably would feel socially isolated.|||I never worked a swing shift but I did work every possible shift over a period of time. I worked straight nights for over eight years and my sleep schedule has never recovered from that. They moved me to the evening shift after eight years and I couldn鈥檛 stand it. It took me less than a month to find a new job and quit the one where I was working evenings. Nights throws off your schedule but if you are working evenings you might as well go out in the wilderness and become a hermit because that is what your life is like working evenings. My son works evenings now and he makes excellent money and has stuck it out long enough so that he will soon have enough seniority to bump his way into the night shift. I鈥檓 very proud of him for doing that because I never could have. In my case I did take a lower paying job just to get off of evenings. I wasn鈥檛 married at that time and if I had stayed on evenings I probably never would have been. When I was a kid we always planned our vacations around dad鈥檚 swing shift so that he would be taking his vacations when he was supposed to work evenings. He hated that shift too|||Worked at the newspaper as a typesetter and as you know, their deadline is usually around 8 p.m. to have the next morning's paper printed and ready to be shipped out across the country and further afield. Half of those 17 years were spent on an afternoon shift of around 12 p.m. noontime to 8 p.m., with lunchtime half-hour squeezed in of course. Later the hours were around 5 p.m. to 1 a.m. or so, schedules were very flexible for our group and most had different hours.



Yes, social and family life suffered and some co-workers even quit because of losing their friends socially but I hung in there as I had responsibilities in several areas and it was a top paying job, so for financial reasons I went along with it. However, to this day I still feel a regret at not having the normal family life that could have been. Well, life isn't perfect and we do the best we can.



In a number of ways I rather preferred the afternoon and late shifts mainly because there was less traffic on the road when going home at 1 a.m., and of course I could sleep in late as I wished to since I didn't have to start work until later in the day. Many co-workers grumbled about missing their social and family life but I seemed to be happy enough, or 'resigned' is a better term, obviously am the self-sufficient type.



I don't know about the health effects of working the late hours and I've been reading recently that it can be a cause for cancer to work the 'graveyard' shift, something to do with lighting and upsetting one's regular sleep pattern. As I'm retired now I don't have to worry about that.