Shift‑Work Schedule Intervention for Extending Restart Breaks after Consecutive Night Shifts: a 5‑month study in nurses
Summary
This 5-month study in a Japanese hospital tested a simple schedule change for 30 nurses: after two night shifts in a row, add one extra day off so the recovery break stretched from about 31 hours to about 55 hours. Nurses completed sleep diaries and short wellbeing surveys, and the team also tracked work hours plus simple tests of alertness, stress, and sleep using sensors under the mattress. With the longer break, nurses got more chances to sleep between the last night and the next shift and reported feeling less exhausted and less stressed, and they rated the new schedule as better for fatigue, sleepiness, and sleep quality. The objective tests did not show clear changes in alertness, sensor-measured sleep quality, or stress markers, and total work hours and days off didn’t increase overall.
Why It Matters For Night Shift Workers and Night Owls
If you finish a block of nights and feel wiped out, building in a longer recovery window before your next shift can help you feel better—even without cutting shifts. A straightforward tweak like adding a day off after two consecutive nights reduced nurses’ exhaustion in this study and didn’t require more total time off. It’s a practical change workers can ask for and planners can adopt to support recovery. Keep in mind the benefits here were mainly how people felt, from a small single-ward test, so larger studies are still needed to show effects on performance or long-term health.
Notes
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (2022).