Are late nights making you a part-time shift worker?

On Huberman Lab (March 2023), Satchin Panda, a professor at the Salk Institute who studies body clocks, was asked by host Andrew Huberman about his study of firefighters. Before he got to it, he widened the frame to include almost everyone listening. He said it in that conversation as a line he often repeats.

I always say that each of us is a shift worker or has lived the life of a shift worker

Satchin Panda, Huberman Lab, 2023

A definition that may include you

There's no universal definition of shift work, Panda explained, but several European definitions point the same way: being awake and active for two or more hours during your usual sleep time, which he put at roughly 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. Active means working, studying or otherwise engaged, not lying in bed worrying. Getting up two hours earlier than usual counts too.

Why would one late night matter? Because you don't sit in the dark when you're up. You switch on lights, and light resets the clock. In Panda's account, after a night like that the clock spends the next couple of days catching up. A late night every week can mean your body is out of step with your days for a good part of the week.

By that measure, he counts late-working students, new parents and many delivery and ride-share drivers alongside nurses, firefighters and bakers. He estimates that about one working adult in five is a shift worker in the classic sense, and that around half of adults live this way at any given time. Those are his spoken estimates on a podcast, not survey figures, but the pattern will sound familiar to anyone with a standing late Thursday.

What the research says

A 2019 review by chronobiologist Till Roenneberg and colleagues describes the everyday version. Most people's body clocks run too late to wake on workdays without an alarm, so they build up a sleep debt during the week and pay it back on free days. The gap between workday and free-day timing is what researchers call social jet lag, and later chronotypes carry more of it.

Public advice points to the same remedy. The NHS tells people not to sleep in after a bad night and to stick to their regular sleeping hours instead. A late night is easier on your clock when the morning after looks like every other morning.

How this fits the Better Sleep program

The 1h Protocol for Better Sleep builds your plan around a get-up time you keep, morning light and an evening set to your own times, and it adapts if you work fixed nights or rotating shifts. If your answers point to the Mistimed pattern, a body clock running late, you start with light and timing. In "Tonight, again", you check the plan against your real week, including the night that's different, like a late meeting or a dinner out, and decide in advance how you'll handle it. The first chapter is free: find your sleep pattern.

Source: Huberman Lab, Dr. Satchin Panda: Intermittent Fasting to Improve Health, Cognition & Longevity, 13 Mar 2023 Research: Roenneberg et al., chronotype and social jetlag, critical review (2019) · NHS, Insomnia (2024)