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The cigarette break did not start as a habit. It started as a solution. Somewhere around hour four of a quiet overnight shift, when the fluorescent lights are too bright and the tasks are too repetitive and the coffee stopped working an hour ago, a cigarette offered something nothing else on the floor could provide:

Most night shift workers notice it within the first year. A cold that takes two weeks to clear when everyone else shook theirs in five days. The flu that lands harder and stays longer. The chest infection in February that the day shift colleagues seemed to avoid entirely. You wash your hands. You take your

Most night shift workers know the schedule is hard on the body. They feel it after every run of overnights: the bone-tiredness that coffee cannot touch, the fogginess that lingers into days off, the vague sense that something is running below capacity. What they cannot always tell is whether what they are experiencing is the