A hard day's night

IMAGINE that walloping feeling of jetlag, day after day. Being zippily, speedily, glarily awake, then dragged down into sleep.

IMAGINE that walloping feeling of jetlag, day after day. Being zippily, speedily, glarily awake, then dragged down into sleep in a way that's beyond your control; your body insisting you lie down, urgently, compelling you to shut your eyes no matter what needs to be done.

You're held hostage by the torments of sleep - the craving for it, the lack of it. Imagine setting your clock for 3am, then tossing and turning with growing panic as the minutes tick by towards the shrill of the alarm; you can't fall into slumber no matter what. It's 2am. Still not asleep. Pillow punched in frustration. Finally, finally, you fall ... then the alarm blares and your heart pounds as you drag yourself up in the thick velvety darkness of everyone else asleep. You think, "I cannot do this, cannot get up." But the adrenalin kicks in...

Welcome to the world of the shift worker. Australian sleep research scientist Dr Carmel Harrington says it's a work regime that throws up all sorts of health issues, and they need addressing. Her book, The Sleep Diet, details the punishing effects of it: increased incidences of obesity, cardiovascular disease, breast and prostate cancers, diabetes and depression. The problem is the jarring disruption to naturally occurring body rhythms. The effects can feel obscene, driving you to irrationality, altering your personality.

I did 4am starts at the Sydney ABC newsroom and overnights at the BBC World Service in London - and never got used to either. It was women I observed the most: some stopped menstruating, others struggled to conceive or miscarried, others needed medication for depression. Says Harrington: "It's amazing that so many people who work shifts suffer these consequences and so often are unaware that it's due to the hours they work." She says the incidences of breast cancer are 60 per cent higher in women working nights (starting after 7pm), most likely because of the improper production of melatonin - the hormone produced in the dark hours. Your body feels like it's never, quite, catching up. Imagine finishing your working day at 7am and emerging into the mewly London light just as the great stream of people are heading into the metropolis, into the opposite world to you. The right one. And my night-shift pattern was one week on, two off (as in one week of nights, two weeks of days), so I never adjusted to a steady rhythm.

My father worked shifts for 60 years, on and off; he's just come off a coal mine where he walked 13km a night doing safety checks. He says it's the modern regime of altering shift patterns that has the most adverse effects. "In the old days it was five days of eight-hour night shifts, Monday to Friday," he says. "So your sleep pattern was repetitive. It didn't knock you around too much; you'd recover on the weekend. But with the introduction of massive mines in remote places there are all different rosters. Seven on, seven off is the most popular." He's worked 28 on, 14 off in Indonesia, and has seen blokes who work in different mines on their days off. "It's a recipe for disaster. Tiredness is endemic, you're under stress, isolated, bored - it makes the workers difficult to control. They're stroppy; just not as productive now. They're too brain dead." Then they have to get themselves home.

Yesterday I spoke to my grandmother's doctor - she's 99, in hospital. I'd caught the medico at the end of his night shift, about to set off on a 90-minute drive home. "Be careful," I said softly, because I know what it's like to navigate your way after a gruelling shift. Dad, once, ended up with his car in the bush - he'd fallen asleep at the wheel. Anyone who doesn't have to do shift work - who's not held hostage by the tyranny of the alarm clock in the early hours, or worse, at four in the afternoon should be grateful. It's a bloody hard existence.

Shift workers of Australia, I salute you.