• Bonnie Koeppe

    Member
    April 8, 2022 at 11:13 am

    Hi Joel,

    Interesting topic.

    I think shift work is problematic for balanced health in general. I worked as an RN and did 12+ hr shifts. No breaks or regular scheduled mealtimes almost every shift, always dehydrated plus stress and lack of sleep is a huge career-long theme. The stress is immense with constant interruptions that are usually adrenaline-inducing. Colleagues that are always stressed. Your days off entail guilt-tripping phone calls to pick up more shifts. Im sure I picked the most punishing places to work… But sleep is such a huge obsession and at most on nights I would get around 4 -5 hrs…by the time you start to adjust into the nights routine, you need to flip to days. Honestly, I feel like sleep plays such a huge regulatory factor. I think of sleep deprivation as almost ‘sub-clinically’ truncating the follicular phase even if the timing is right for ovulation — the intricacies of what tasks get done in the follicular phase is probably just crappy ‘quality’ because daily yin/yang and autonomic system cycling being forced haywire.

    And with the pandemic, I found that everything amplified, and wearing N95s for 12 hrs up to 60-70 hrs a week made me personally more yin xu and more qi xu than ever before. Having said that, I did work with chemo-agents regularly throughout my reproductive days, and I had no fertility challenges. However, Im sure I’ll pay for all this one way or another!

    Bonnie