Shiftwork damages our sleep, sometimes with long-lasting effects | 4 minute read

When Paulette G, a retired army nurse, wakes early she reaches under her pillow, re-sets her Zeez Pebble and goes back to sleep. A simple enough process but before she acquired the Pebble, the drill was – wake up in the early hours, get out of bed, go downstairs and do the ironing. Keep ironing through to morning. A non-scientific sign of Paulette’s success with her Zeez Pebble is that the ironing is now piling up in her kitchen.

Now working as a nurse with homeless people, thirty years ago Paulette was serving in the first Gulf War as part of the Queen Alexandra’s Royal Army Nursing Corps. The shift patterns nurses were required to follow impacted on her sleep. Twelve hours on, 12 hours off was at one point changed to four night shifts, followed by four day shifts with a day off in between. Then, just as nurses were getting used to this pattern, it was all change again to seven nights on-shift, followed by seven days on shift. Paulette has no idea who thought of that last arrangement, but it had a deep effect on her. ‘Your body got used to being on nights, and then you got thrown back on to days,’ she says. The effects lasted for years.

After leaving the Queen Alexandra’s, she moved into community nursing but having rarely enjoyed more than six hours’ sleep a night, she was now making do on three or four. She’d have no problem dropping off but would wake suddenly and be wide awake. Hence the habit of ironing in the wee, small hours. Under this regime, she felt groggy by lunchtime. While all this was building up, she was diagnosed with fibromyalgia. Fibromyalgia is a painful condition* linked to altered brain chemistry. It is chronic and creates pain all through the body along with tiredness and ‘mental fog’. Paulette believes her debilitating condition was caused by sleeplessness. They physical and mental toll on her was intense and it seemed intractable. And then, she saw the Zeez on the Gadget show.

Far from being an epiphany, it simply looked like ‘something new to try’. Having embraced mindfulness without much benefit, frankly she was at the point where she’d try anything. Paulette got her Zeez Pebble around Christmas 2021 and she reports that the effects have at times seemed like ‘a slow slog’, in her words.

For some users, the Zeez Pebble brings immediate relief. Sleep at once. For others, the benefit is cumulative. In Paulette’s case, her sleeping hours didn’t dramatically increase but the quality did, within two weeks. Then, five months on, she slept a whole six hours! She woke up at the end of a dream – the end, not the middle - which she can’t remember doing in years. She feels her sleep is still evolving.

Life intervenes, as it does, and she reports being knocked off course by the death of one of her homeless clients. Nothing can override shock, or grief, but the Zeez Pebble can gently re-instate a disrupted sleep pattern. Silently working under the pillow, it copies the alpha, theta and delta frequencies generated by the brain of a good sleeper. Whenever Paulette wakes in the night, she resets her Zeez and goes back to sleep whereas before, she’d have to get up and . . . yes, that pile of ironing was waiting. 

The pay-off of being a Zeez Pebble user for Paulette – along with getting to the final scene of a good dream - is more energy, and more enjoyment in every day. As her sleeplessness recedes, her chronic fibromyalgia is reducing too. Paulette speaks about noticing nature more as she goes about her life, and no longer struggling to concentrate. Previously, she’d switch on the tv and it would be moving wall paper. Now she can engage with the plot. She has recommended Zeez to others and says she’d love to see it adopted by the NHS and the Royal College of Nursing. Ambulance Crew would really benefit, in her opinion, as many frontline staff are stressed and not sleeping.

Whether that happens, right now the Zeez Pebble is quietly improving sleep of one hard-working nurse.

*Learn more about fibromyalgia here https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/fibromyalgia/   Two well known figures living with this condition are Lady Gaga https://bit.ly/3vt8Gnl  and Kirsty Young, BBC broadcaster  https://bit.ly/37ZpF8I