Working crazy hours and constantly changing shifts does a lot more than make people tired. For workers in high-stress occupations such as law enforcement and 911 dispatching, repeatedly disrupting the body’s natural clock can have serious physical and mental consequences. Under conditions of severe and prolonged sleep deprivation, it can even contribute to psychotic symptoms such as paranoia, hallucinations, perceptual disturbances, and confused thinking.
The problem is easy to underestimate because fatigue is so common in public safety. Working nights, switching between days and nights, staying late, working overtime, and coming back on what was supposed to be a day off can become accepted as simply part of the job. But common doesn’t mean harmless.
Our bodies operate according to a roughly 24-hour internal clock controlled by a part of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus. That internal clock helps regulate sleep, wakefulness, hormone production, body temperature, and other biological functions. When an employee repeatedly moves between shifts, the body may struggle to adjust to the new schedule.
Consider a patrol officer or dispatcher who works a morning shift and then, only a few days later, is expected to work a graveyard shift. The employee can change the schedule on paper almost immediately. The body’s internal clock does not necessarily cooperate.
The same problem applies to the body’s stress system. Repeated disruption of sleep and wake cycles can affect the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal, or HPA, axis and alter the normal timing of stress hormones such as cortisol. For someone working nights, sleeping during the day, and repeatedly changing schedules, the normal relationship between sleep, alertness, stress, and recovery can become increasingly difficult to maintain.
That matters in public safety because employees are not simply trying to remain productive. They may be expected to make critical decisions while tired, emotionally taxed, and biologically out of sync.
And there is often very little opportunity to recover.
After finishing a high-intensity 12-hour night shift involving critical calls or a difficult field operation, an officer may have trouble winding down during daylight hours. The employee then has to try to sleep while the body is still operating on a different schedule. If that person is required to return to another demanding shift before adequate recovery has occurred, fatigue begins to accumulate.
That is more than simply being tired. It becomes a fatigue-management problem.
Sleep loss also affects the brain’s ability to regulate emotions, maintain attention, process information, and make sound decisions. The effects become increasingly concerning during extended operational deployments, forced overtime, or repeated schedule changes in which accumulated sleep debt leaves little opportunity for meaningful recovery.
Research has found that severe sleep deprivation can be associated with psychotic-like experiences, including paranoia, hallucinations, perceptual distortions, and disorganized thinking. Importantly, this does not mean that every exhausted police officer or dispatcher will develop psychosis, nor does it mean that shift work alone causes psychosis. The evidence is more appropriately understood as showing that severe sleep loss and disrupted sleep can increase the risk of unusual perceptual and psychological experiences, particularly when sleep deprivation becomes extreme.
That distinction is important.
When a person is severely sleep-deprived, negative emotions can intensify while memory, concentration, and the ability to accurately interpret information can deteriorate. Sleep disruption has also been associated with increased paranoia and other unusual perceptual experiences. Someone who is exhausted may become more irritable, suspicious, emotionally reactive, or prone to interpreting an ambiguous situation negatively.
The issue is not diagnosing the employee.
The issue is recognizing that severe fatigue can change human performance.
For police officers, that can have obvious consequences. Officers routinely make decisions in situations where seconds matter. A sleep-deprived officer conducting a nighttime traffic stop may have to interpret a sudden movement by a driver or passenger and determine whether it represents an immediate threat. Fatigue can reduce the ability to process information quickly and accurately.
Dispatchers face a different version of the same problem. They have to listen carefully, extract critical information, communicate with responders, maintain situational awareness, and make decisions while emergency calls continue coming in. A dispatcher who is exhausted may still be sitting at the console and technically capable of performing the job, but the quality and speed of cognitive processing may not be what it should be.
The problem becomes more complicated when severe fatigue begins affecting perception and judgment.
A severely sleep-deprived employee may become increasingly suspicious or begin jumping to conclusions. An ambiguous comment from a supervisor may suddenly seem threatening. A routine action by a coworker may be interpreted as intentional. In an extreme situation, an employee experiencing serious sleep deprivation could begin to believe that colleagues or management are conspiring against them when there is no objective basis for that belief.
The danger is not simply that the employee feels bad. The danger is that the employee’s perception of the situation may no longer accurately match reality.
Dispatchers are particularly vulnerable to another part of this problem: burnout. They deal with irregular schedules, constant cognitive demands, prolonged periods of intense concentration, and repeated exposure to traumatic events through emergency calls. Add chronic overtime and inadequate recovery time, and the result can be significant emotional exhaustion.
Staffing shortages can turn that into a vicious cycle.
When there are not enough people to cover the schedule, someone works an extra shift. Someone stays late. Someone changes days off. Someone moves from days to nights. Someone comes in on what was supposed to be a recovery day.
Eventually, the schedule becomes a puzzle that administrators solve one vacancy at a time.
Low staffing creates fatigue. Fatigue contributes to burnout. Burnout contributes to turnover. Turnover makes staffing worse. Worse staffing creates more fatigue.
That is not simply an employee-wellness problem. It is an organizational operations problem.
There is another issue that deserves attention: employees may be reluctant to admit how exhausted they are or to acknowledge that something more serious is happening.
Public safety organizations can develop cultures in which acknowledging mental health problems, fatigue, or psychological symptoms is perceived as a sign of weakness. Employees may worry about being removed from duty, damaging their careers, losing promotional opportunities, or jeopardizing their ability to perform their jobs.
As a result, someone experiencing serious symptoms may attempt to hide them and explain them away as ordinary job stress.
An officer experiencing hallucinations or severe persecutory beliefs, for example, may be afraid to report what is happening because of concerns about what it could mean for his or her career or ability to remain armed and in the field.
That is precisely where organizational culture and leadership become important. Employees need safe and appropriate avenues for acknowledging serious fatigue and seeking assistance before a problem becomes a crisis.
The scheduling issue itself deserves much more thoughtful attention than it often receives.
Agencies sometimes change schedules because someone wants a different rotation, because administrators believe a new schedule might work better, or because there is a legitimate operational reason to make a change. Those reasons are not necessarily equal.
A shift schedule is an organizational system. Changing it affects sleep, family life, commuting, overtime, morale, staffing, performance, and recovery. It should not be changed simply because someone believes a different schedule would be interesting or preferable.
Any significant schedule change should be approached as an organizational change requiring careful planning. Leadership should consider how quickly employees will have to alter their sleep patterns, how much recovery time they will receive between shifts, how many consecutive night shifts they will work, how overtime will affect the schedule, and whether employees will have predictable opportunities to recover.
The impact on morale and retention also matters.
The objective should not be to create a schedule that looks good on a spreadsheet. The objective should be to create a schedule that allows people to perform safely and effectively.
Unfortunately, chronic staffing shortages often make that difficult.
When an agency does not have enough people to cover its required assignments, administrators begin moving people around to fill the holes. The resulting schedule may technically cover every shift, but the organization can pay for that coverage through exhausted employees, increased overtime, declining morale, burnout, and eventually turnover.
That raises a larger question that public safety leaders should be willing to ask:
What is the cost of solving a staffing problem by continually consuming the recovery time of the people already on the payroll?
The answer cannot simply be, “We need more people.”
Public agencies have an obligation to demonstrate to taxpayers why appropriate staffing matters. Well-staffed and properly rested organizations are better positioned to provide effective service, protect their personnel, maintain continuity, and respond to emergencies.
Staffing is not simply a personnel expense.
It is an operational investment.
The same principle applies to scheduling. A schedule is not merely a management tool for putting enough names into enough boxes. It is part of the operating system of the organization. If that system consistently leaves employees exhausted, then the organization has created an operational risk that eventually will show up somewhere—through mistakes, accidents, turnover, poor decisions, reduced morale, or diminished service.
Constant shift changes and insufficient sleep take a heavy toll on the brains and bodies of public safety workers. Sleep loss and circadian disruption should be treated as legitimate occupational and operational concerns, not simply as personal weaknesses.
Under severe conditions, sleep deprivation can contribute to hallucinations, paranoia, perceptual disturbances, and other psychotic-like symptoms. For public safety professionals, that possibility deserves serious attention because the consequences of impaired judgment or distorted perception can extend beyond the individual employee to coworkers and the public.
The answer is not necessarily to eliminate shift work. Public safety agencies cannot stop answering calls at night.
The answer is to manage the system intelligently.
That means thoughtful scheduling, adequate recovery time, attention to staffing levels, responsible overtime practices, and a culture in which employees can acknowledge fatigue and seek help without automatically being viewed as weak or incapable.
The best public safety organizations do not simply ask, “Can we cover the shift?”
They ask the more important question:
Will the people covering that shift be rested, prepared, and capable of performing at their best when the call comes?
Additional Reading
Andreadi, A., Andreadi, S., Todaro, F., Ippoliti, L., Bellia, A., Magrini, A., Chrousos, G. P., & Lauro, D. (2025). Modified cortisol circadian rhythm: The hidden toll of night-shift work. International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 26(5), 2090. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms26052090
Basner, M., Rao, H., Goel, N., & Dinges, D. F. (2013). Sleep deprivation and neurobehavioral performance. Neuroimaging Clinics of North America, 23(3), 509–524. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nic.2013.03.011
Flinn, R. B., & Spencer, R. M. C. (2023). Associations between sleep and circadian disruption in shift work and perpetration of interpersonal violence. Frontiers in Sleep, 2, 1220056. https://doi.org/10.3389/frsle.2023.1220056
Gassull, A. (2025). Transient psychotic symptoms induced by acute sleep deprivation in a factory worker: A case report. Cureus, 17(1), e79124.
Khan, S., Duan, P., Yao, L., & Hou, H. (2018). Shiftwork-mediated disruptions of circadian rhythms and sleep homeostasis cause serious health problems. International Journal of Genomics, 2018, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1155/2018/8576890
Meyer, N. (2024). The sleep–circadian interface: A window into mental disorders. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 121(9), e2214756121. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2214756121
Peterson, S. A., Wolkow, A. P., Lockley, S. W., O’Brien, C. S., Qadri, S., Sullivan, J. P., Czeisler, C. A., Rajaratnam, S. M. W., & Barger, L. K. (2019). Associations between shift work characteristics, shift work schedules, sleep and burnout in North American police officers: A cross-sectional study. BMJ Open, 9(12), e030302. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2019-030302
Reeve, S., Emsley, R., Sheaves, B., & Freeman, D. (2018). Disrupting sleep: The effects of sleep loss on psychotic experiences tested in an experimental study with mediation analysis. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 44(3), 662–671.
Garbarino, S., Guglielmi, O., Bruck, N., Campintosi, F., & Magnavita, N. (2021). Shift work and mental health in nurses: A systematic review. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18(21), 11295.
Neylan, T. C., Metzler, T. J., Best, S. R., Weiss, D. S., Fagan, J. A., Liberman, A., … & Marmar, C. R. (2011). Critical incident exposure and sleep quality in police officers. Psychosomatic Medicine, 73(8), 707–713.
Vgontzas, A. N., Liao, D., Pejovic, S., Calhoun, S., Karataraki, M., & Bixler, E. O. (2020). Adverse effects of shift work on public safety workers. Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 62(7), 543–550.
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