Why Working 9 to 5 Might Be Bad for Your Health

Nancy Ancowitz, Salary.com contributing writer

Not everybody is cut out for the 9-to-5 workaday world.

Mounting evidence demonstrates half a million Americans have biological reasons for needing to work alternative shifts. In this fourth story (read Part I, Part II, and Part III here) about delayed sleep phase syndrome (also DSPS, or delayed sleep), you’ll meet Julie Peggar, an ethnographer who suffers from this type of circadian rhythm disorder. Peggar, the president and chief storyteller at Gaze Ethnographic Consulting, Inc., shares insights from her world as a highly functional night owl who adapts her work schedule to her sleep needs as much as possible.

Switch from the Day Shift to the Evening Shift

When Peggar was in college, a doctor at the campus medical center suggested her unusual sleep habits could actually be delayed sleep phase syndrome.

“I had been working the 3 p.m. to 12 a.m. shift at a homeless shelter, but I got promoted,” she says. “That involved moving to a day shift, 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. I was only sleeping a few hours a night after the promotion. And after taking a history, the doctor suggested it could be DSPS. I quit that job and demoted myself to go back to the evening shift.”

Balancing a Night Owl’s Needs with Career Demands

How has Peggar balanced her night-owl’s needs with the workaday world?

“It’s been a challenge,” she says. And it wasn’t until graduate school she realized she could do meaningful work outside traditional work hours. “I’ve done a lot of freelancing, consulting, and now I own my own company,” says Peggar. She says that being self-employed helps, but adds, “It’s still tricky when you have to meet the needs of your clients, especially those in a different time zone.”

A Night Owl’s Career Path

“I decided against several potentially interesting career paths solely due to the fact that they required early morning hours,” says Peggar, who considered medical school, law school, and teaching high school, and rejected them all for that reason. She adds, “In the end though, I think it led me to a more independent way of working that I might not have given myself the freedom to pursue otherwise.”

Peggar says she’s tried to hold down in-house research jobs with normal working hours, but “not only does that fail to work with my sleep patterns, it’s not a good fit for the type of research that I do anyway.” She says she’s a better ethnographer when she doesn’t feel like she has to stick to traditional business hours. Instead, she can spend time with participants when it makes sense to do so—which is often after their working hours or on weekends.

However, she notes some exceptions: “Of course there are times I may be studying how people eat breakfast or how people work within an office with traditional hours, so I have to power through it. When that happens, I just plan a rest day after the fieldwork to catch up on sleep.”  Continue reading . . .

Article by Nancy Ancowitz and courtesy of Salary.com