What a run of night shifts costs you
Sleep debt calculators assume you sleep at night. If you don't, the number they give you is wrong. Put in your block and see what it actually adds up to — and how many days off it takes to clear.
Nights worked in a row
Sleep you actually got each day
Day sleep, naps included. Be honest rather than hopeful — the number is only useful if it's real.
What you need on a normal night
Rotas change. So should the plan.
Sleepgoody works off the sleep you actually got, whenever you got it, so a block of nights followed by a run of days doesn't break the number.
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We asked more than 20 night shift workers how much they actually get. The average was 5.6 hours — and whether that clears comes down to the rotation.
Why day sleep comes up short
Daylight through the curtains, a warmer room, deliveries, traffic, family moving around the house — all of it works against sleeping in the day, and most people lose somewhere between one and three hours a day because of it.
The gap is easy to underestimate because each day on its own feels survivable. It's the run that gets you: three hours short across four nights is a twelve-hour shortfall by the time the block ends, which is more than a full night's sleep.
Count the block, not last night
The usual mistake is judging by how you feel after the final shift. What matters is the total across the whole run, because that's the number your days off have to clear. One bad day is a bad day; four in a row is a different problem with a different answer.
The first day off
Sleeping ten or twelve hours straight after the last shift feels like the obvious move, and it's usually the wrong one — you wake in the evening, you're not tired at bedtime, and you've spent the day you were trying to recover. A shorter sleep after the shift and an early night the same evening tends to get you back on a normal pattern faster.
If your rota rotates
Everything here applies to any schedule that moves: rotating shifts, early starts, on-call weeks, long-haul flying. The arithmetic doesn't care what time you slept, only how much you got against what you need. That's also the thing fixed-schedule sleep advice tends to miss.
When the number keeps climbing
If the shortfall grows block after block and your days off never clear it, that's not a recovery problem. It's a pattern that doesn't contain enough room for sleep, and no catch-up schedule fixes that.
Sleepgoody is a self-care tool, not a medical device. It does not diagnose or treat any condition. If you are persistently exhausted despite sleeping enough, or you fall asleep without meaning to, talk to a doctor.