Generally, people working night shifts in "normal" settings have worse health and cognitive outcomes than people on equivalent day shifts. (Swing shifts are evi

Generally, people working night shifts in "normal" settings have worse health and cognitive outcomes than people on equivalent day shifts. (Swing shifts are evil, and do far more damage than either.) There seem to be two main factors driving that. One is simply that we arrange the world for being awake in the day: night-shift workers get less sleep due to daytime tasks (e.g. going to the bank), and worse sleep because isolating from light and noise is much harder during the day. The other is a bit more subtle: even with a bright office and blackout curtains, nightshift workers get hammered with conflicting time/light signals every time they commute home or go near a window. It's like a vastly worse version of checking staring into a computer screen right before bed. There are other impacts, too - I've heard of nightshift workers getting something like SAD, and Vitamin D deficiencies are probably common. But all of that applies to people in wholly-artificial light cycles (e.g. submarines or the Arctic), and yet those people seem to cope far better than 'regular' nightshift workers.