Hey Coach: What If My Schedule Is Never “Normal”?

Self-appointed health experts love to say that “we all have the same 24 hours.”

We absolutely do not.

Technically, sure, there are 24 hours in everybody’s day. But those hours are not equally available, equally flexible, or happening under remotely equal conditions.

A person who works 9 to 5, sleeps at night, and has predictable mornings does not have the same usable 24 hours as someone working three 12-hour night shifts and regularly flipping their sleep schedule back and forth.

This edition of Hey Coach is for the night-shift workers, rotating-shift workers, and anyone else whose “normal” changes every few days.

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Hey Coach,

I'm an RN and work three 12-hour night shifts a week, usually 7 p.m.–7 a.m. I feel like most health advice assumes you have a normal daytime schedule, and I can't figure out how to make any of it work for me. 

On work days I basically work and sleep, then on my days off I try to flip back to daytime so I can see my husband and friends. I never know when I'm supposed to exercise or even what counts as breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

I spend my whole shift taking care of other people while feeling like I'm doing a terrible job taking care of myself. I'm tired all the time and I just don't feel good physically. I want some kind of routine that works whether I'm working or off instead of feeling like I need to wing it every day.

— Living on Night Shift

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Table of Contents

Hey Living on Night Shift,

Trying to apply what everyone else seems to be doing to your life is like using a map of Manhattan to get around Chicago and blaming yourself for getting lost.

Let’s get you a new map.

How Routines Work With a Changing Schedule

Here’s the first thing I’m noticing: you’re treating routine, schedule, and consistency like they all mean the same thing. They don’t.

A schedule tells you when something happens: 7 a.m. workout, noon lunch, 10 p.m. bedtime. That works well when your days run on predictable clock time. Yours don’t.

A routine is different. It’s a repeatable sequence of actions, and it doesn’t necessarily care what time it is. Wake up → eat → move. Finish a shift → come home → wind down → sleep.

And consistency doesn’t have to mean doing the same thing at the same time every day. It means having a predictable way of responding to the kinds of days your life actually gives you.

That’s the mismatch making you feel like you’re winging it. You’re measuring consistency by sameness, when what you actually need is repeatability.

So instead of forcing a schedule like: I exercise at 8 a.m.

A supportive routine might be: I exercise after I eat my first meal of the day.

One is anchored to the clock; the other is anchored to an event that reliably happens, even when the time changes.

Think about how you already live this way in other areas. You probably brush your teeth after you wake up whether it is a work day or not. While the clock time moves, the sequence stays recognizable.

That’s the kind of consistency we want to build here.

You Don’t Have One Routine (Nobody Does)

Most of us talk about our “routine” like there is one master sequence we follow every day. There isn’t.

You already have a collection of routines, and which one you use depends on the context you’re in and what you need from that part of your day.

You have a morning routine: wake up → bathroom/brush teeth → coffee → get dressed.

You have a bedtime routine: change clothes → brush teeth → plug in your phone → get into bed.

You probably have some version of a leaving-the-house routine too: fill your water bottle → find your keys → grab your bag → check that you have your phone → lock the door.

The routine changes because the context changes.

A work morning calls for one sequence. A slow Sunday morning may call for another. Getting ready for bed calls for something completely different. You’re not being inconsistent when those routines look different—you’re responding appropriately to different circumstances and different needs.

And routines don’t even have to happen every day to be routines.

Think about what you do when you fly somewhere. Maybe you only travel a few times a year, but once you get to the airport, you probably follow a pretty recognizable sequence: park or get dropped off → check your bag → go through security → find your gate → figure out where to get water or food → wait to board.

You don’t have to relearn how to airport every time you travel just because you didn’t do it yesterday.

The context tells you which routine to pull out, and your health behaviors can work the same way.

So the goal is not to somehow force one routine to work across all of them. It’s to build a small collection of routines for the contexts that repeat in your life—and make each one fit what you actually need in that context.

Now let’s apply that to the thing you’re actually trying to figure out which was: when the hell are you supposed to exercise?

Build a Flexible Week, Not the Perfect Day

I would stop looking for the ideal time of day to exercise. You may not have one (a lot of people don’t).

Instead, zoom out and look at the week.

For adults, the U.S. Physical Activity Guidelines recommend 150–300 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity per week, or the vigorous-intensity equivalent, plus muscle-strengthening activity on at least two days.

By design, the guidelines tell you how much movement to work toward across a week. They do not prescribe what your Tuesday has to look like. This gives you flexibility to make it work for you.

Take just the 150-minute aerobic exercise target. That could be:

• five 30-minute sessions

• three 50-minute sessions

• two 45-minute sessions plus four 15-minute walks

• one 60-minute class, two 30-minute workouts, and two 15-minute walks

And those are just five combinations I came up with while writing this. There are approximately a bajillion and a half others.

This is why I’d much rather have you ask: What kinds of days in my week actually have room for exercise?

You have three 12-hour workdays. Those days already contain 36 hours of nursing before we count commuting, getting ready, eating, sleeping, showering, or doing literally anything else required to keep a human body operational.

I don’t want to decide for you that workdays are automatically “bad” workout days—or that days off are automatically better ones.

They might be. But they also might not. You’ll need to decide what is true for you.

Maybe you feel surprisingly good after a shift and a short workout helps you decompress before bed. Maybe exercising before work makes you feel more alert going into the night. Maybe both of those ideas sound absolutely miserable and the only time you have any real energy for exercise is after you wake up on a day off.

And even your days off may not all feel the same. The first day after a stretch of shifts might be mostly about sleep and recovery, while the next one feels much more like an actual day off.

The goal is not to identify the time you should exercise. It is to notice, without judging yourself for the answer, when exercise tends to feel most doable in your actual life.

I’d pay attention to things like:

• When do you usually have the most physical energy?

• When does exercise feel like it adds something to your day rather than drains the last bit out of you?

• Which options sound good in theory but almost never happen in practice?

• Does movement before a shift help you feel better, or does it make the night harder?

• Does exercising after a shift help you unwind, or are you just trying to force yourself through it because that feels like the “disciplined” choice?

• Are there certain days or times during the day where you reliably have more capacity than others?

There is no gold star for choosing the hardest possible slot. What matters is that the pattern reflects what your body, energy, and schedule are actually telling you—not what you think a “good” exercise schedule is supposed to look like.

Then you can build around the pattern that keeps showing up, instead of repeatedly trying to make yourself fit one that doesn’t.

By The Way… Breakfast Doesn’t Care What Time It Is

Which brings us to the other question you asked: what the hell counts as breakfast, lunch, and dinner when you wake up at 5 p.m.?

Whatever you want. Seriously.

“Breakfast,” “lunch,” and “dinner” are useful labels for restaurant menus. They become a lot less useful for people because you do not need to decide whether the food you eat after waking at 5 p.m. is technically breakfast or dinner before you can eat it.

Instead of organizing your food around conventional meal names, you might think about the eating opportunities that reliably show up in your day. For example Meal 1, Meal 2, Meal 3 might make your brain happier and make it easier for you to keep track of whether you’re eating enough regularly.

The label is not the important part. The useful question is whether you have a way to reliably feed yourself across the hours you’re awake instead of expecting your body to follow a meal schedule built around someone else’s waking hours.

Same principle we used with exercise: start with the life you actually have, then build the behavior around it.

Different Doesn’t Mean Wrong

There’s one thing I don’t want to let you walk away believing: that because taking care of yourself looks messy right now, you’re doing a bad job at it.

You work 12-hour nights taking care of other people. Your sleep moves. Your meals move. Your energy moves. Of course your health habits are not going to look like someone whose days follow a neat, predictable schedule.

You’re not missing some secret stash of hours everyone else figured out how to use better. You just need to use a map that actually includes the roads you’re traveling.

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