Melatonin Sleep: Get a real job, will you?

Working in the graveyard shift is one of the toughest situations to be in especially when it comes to your career. One, it tells you that you are in a dead-end job because most of the good ones are during the day, and two, your social life, your health and most of all, sleep has to take a backseat to paying the bills.

A few years of working at night can change that way you live your life, for the worse, not unless you enjoy working at night. (I'm assuming that most people don't!)

Your daily habits also change with it, and perhaps this is due to the fact that there is an internal clock that governs patterns of waking up, sleep among several other activities that the body has to do on a daily basis, and which only recently was controlled by the pineal gland.

Yet another important function of the pineal gland also controls the amount of melatonin which is responsible for the function of sleep. And we all know how important it is to get in a few hours of rest, most definitely at the right time too. (I mean, at night!)

The Hormone known as Melatonin

This hormone for pertinent reasons has also been known as the "hormone of darkness" as the release of this very hormone induces sleep in a human being. Since most people's body cycles are accustomed to sleeping at night, it should be surprising to note that the levels of melatonin in your body begins to increase from evening all the way until night after which it remains at the same levels until the morning.

And which is when you wake up… but the real reason why you wake up in the morning is because with the exposure of light to the body, these melatonin levels drop as if by magic.

Yet another name has been bestowed on this hormone that our body produces such as "the body's sleeping pill",  and it wouldn't be very surprising to note that almost every insomnia patient that you will meet has low levels of melatonin present in the body in comparison to those without the condition.

So what you can glean from this is the presence or absence of light actually regulated the amount of melatonin in your body, and which induces sleep as a result. What you might have also understood by now is that when melatonin is not being produced by the body, it can also result in sleep disorders, one of which being insomnia.

Another interesting aspect of this hormone is that its release into the blood stream actually depends on the seasons as well, as it has been documented that in winter (when the days are shorter), this hormone can be released much earlier or later into the body. If things are out of balance, this leads to seasonal affective disorder or  winter depression because of the change in sleep patterns.

However, in order to cope with this, there are dietary supplements that have been put in place to help people cope with these conditions or in cases where they have to reset the clock when it comes to night shifts or even due to jet lag.

In Closing

And if you are dealing with any of situations or conditions as above, then you should consult your doctor to see if you can get some medication. And yes, getting a real job (in the case of a grave yard shift) would be a good idea too…