26 Night Shift Workers Share the Surprising Benefits Of Working Overnight—Despite Its Bad Reputation

Grocery shopping at 9am on a weekday is so much more peaceful.

There are no downsides, if you ask me.


Management is gone


Far higher pay


*Far* slower pace, since no one's riding you


Grocery stores are deserted when I go after work at 7am


I get a running excuse to decline invitations 
because they're almost always my sleeping hours


I personally don't suffer any ill effects from my weird sleeping hours. Probably will when I age


Way cooler coworkers- misfits and people with interesting pasts work night shift .

Less traffic to and from work would be one perk that immediately comes to mind.

Working a traditional Mon-Fri 9-5 makes it very difficult to do anything that must be done during the week (think renewing a driver's license, doctor's appointments, etc). When I'm on nights, I'm technically free Mon-Fri from 9-5 (though obviously sleeping for most of that) so I can schedule stuff way easier than most people.

Usually its a lot quieter and calmer, everyone just wants to chill and get on with their job, nobody has the energy for any b******t lol. Also the quiet walk home at 6 AM when the sun is coming up and the streets are empty is really nice.

Pros: More pay, no bosses around... cons: fcks up your sleeping schedule.

As a nurse I love night shift. It's either nutter city and it goes by fast or it's chill and you can relax in between patients.

As others have said , biggest perks are zero senior management running around micromanaging and making things worse, and traffic home is awesome.

I work 3 12's weekend nights. Fri-sun. It means I have all the time I need with my kids during the week and I don't pay for child care. Also, my hospital pays a good bonus for night shift. So more money. No child care costs. The Sunday to Monday transition can be rough though....

Enjoying the fresh, light mornings on the way home in the summer knowing you’re off while most people are just starting their day.

For me, being autistic with OCD who is also an introvert. I don’t have to interact with the public. I do my job. And I do it well. When I am done, I go home. I make my own schedule. That is as long as I get my responsibilities done. I don’t take advantage of the clock.

As someone who has worked all shifts for years:

The camaraderie.

Night shift workers tend to work well together and form close bonds.

Less drama too. Probably the best kind of people to know.

As everyone else has mentioned, traffic is amazingly quiet both ways to work. Less management around (I was the manager) means cruisy atmosphere.

Ran a tight ship so to speak, and let the production crew do what they needed to do (frequent smoko breaks as long as no one complained and their quality/output was good).

I got through ridiculous amounts of movies and tv shows in my office. The crew didn't have me micro managing them and just called me if they needed anything, which I was straight on to. I'd do walk arounds of course to check on things, and then straight back to media. It was great and couldn't be achieved on day shift.

Also the money was better. Extra $20k annually helped out the bank account when I needed it, and I didn't mind being nocturnal.

Honestly the only two downsides were that my social life took a hit for obvious reasons, and sometimes noise outside would keep me up during the day instead of sleeping.

I'm at work right now. You see what I'm doing? I'm sitting here eating Cheetos and typing an answer to a question on Reddit. There's nobody here. I could strip off my shirt and smear orange Cheeto dust on my chest and nobody would even know.

I get paid to work a 10 hour shift and actually only work for about 2 hours.

It’s quiet.

You don’t really appreciate how loud the day is until you’re awake all night lots of nights in a row. And not just human stuff either, but all the natural stuff as well that’s never loud enough to be heard over the cars and the talking and the moving but that your brain notices anyway.

3 am, I can hear things a mile away, easy. And it’s so much easier to think without all that noise.

I miss working graveyard. The world is so tranquil then.

I had a friend while studyin, who was doing watchman/guard service at night in several places and in a period of time in the mall downtown, which had a lot of food and beverage outlets and retails, culinary shops, food court and such. I often joined him on his watch just for fun, nothing better to do. He and the other guys were free to use the training center as much as they wanted, and all the food outlets had cleaned up, or were, by the time they met for the shift, and they had put out all sorts of delicacies for them. We lived like kings every night, noodles and soft drink, icecream, chocolate, snacks and crisps and large baskets of fruits from the juicer shop. It was not uncommon that two-three guys and I would feast throughout the night, to end up filling a garbage bag of trash after us. At first it was because the food was going to be thrown out anyway, but over time, they made deliberate servings for us. I got to talk to a lot of the cooks, in the evening before they went home, and they learned what we liked, and even in the daytime when we dropped by, we could often get a free lunch.

There's really something about night shift if you get to have such relations with the day people.

When you say nighr shift, do you swing shift from around 4:00pm to midnight? Or do you mean graveyard - or overnight?

For swing shift the main benefit is you have plenty to time to deal with doctors appointments and anything else where you deal with businesses open 9-5 Monday through Friday. If you work 9-5, dealing with this stuff usually means using your sick time and/or pto.

I haven't worked a ton of graveyard shifts, but i hated them when i did because you're literally running on a different schedule from most of the rest of the world.

If you live in a city, swings or graves probably arent too bad because there is a whole subculture of people who work the same shifts. You can lead a pretty normal life, including a social life.

In a small town it can be pretty isolating because there aren't usually a lot of people working similar shifts, and many social hangouts are going to be closed when you're off. If you need child care it can be hard to find.

Most of the management goes home.

For some reason, most night shift i work with are pretty chill and cool people. Do work, go home, less drama.

Not having to wake up super early.