Trips, shifts and late nights

Does melatonin help you sleep after a night shift?

By GyroscopeUpdated November 14, 20266 sources

A little. In a 2014 Cochrane review of trials in shift workers, melatonin added about 24 minutes of daytime sleep after a night shift, on low-quality evidence, and didn’t help people fall asleep any faster. We’d start with a dark room and very dark sunglasses on the way home, and treat melatonin as a small extra.

After 12 hours on your feet, falling asleep at 9am should be easy. Often it isn’t, because your body clock still thinks it’s morning. Daylight on the drive home tells it the same thing, and so does a bright bedroom.

We’d fix the light first, with the same sleep hours every work day, a blacked-out bedroom, and very dark sunglasses on the way home if they’re safe for your drive. If you try melatonin, take the smallest dose you can find, 0.5 to 1 mg, once you’re home and before your day sleep, never before driving. On days off, it has no role.

Day sleep after a night shift is like swimming upstream. You can get there, but the current is your own body clock telling you it’s morning.

What the trials found

The 2014 Cochrane review pulled together 15 randomized trials with 718 shift workers, 9 of them on melatonin. Melatonin was linked with about 24 minutes more daytime sleep after the shift, but not with falling asleep faster, and the reviewers rated the evidence low quality. A second 2014 review, of 8 studies with 300 participants, found the results inconclusive and made no recommendation.

Why we’d start with light

Light at the eyes holds back melatonin and moves your body clock. In a 2011 study, ordinary room light during the usual hours of sleep cut people’s melatonin by more than half in 85 percent of the tests. Morning light pulls your clock earlier, which is the opposite of what a night worker going to bed at 8:30am needs. That’s why Eastman and Burgess’s jet lag advice uses very dark sunglasses and a dark bedroom or eye mask to block light at the wrong hour, and the same tools work after a shift.

A shift, worked through

Say you work 7pm to 7am and get home at 7:45am in daylight.

• Sunglasses on from the door at work all the way home, if it’s safe to drive in them.
• In bed by about 8:30am, in a room as dark as you can make it.
• Sleep until about 3:30pm, the same hours every work day.
• If you take melatonin, 0.5 to 1 mg once you’re inside, and never before you drive.

Will it mess with your own melatonin?

Not in the study that measured it. In 1997, 21 night shift workers took 0.5 mg or a placebo at bedtime for a week, and their own melatonin came back at the same height.

If you’re too sleepy to drive home, don’t drive. Don’t drive after a dose, either. Put your shift into the planner below for your own day-sleep block and light plan.