Morning Meditation After a Night Shift

The security badge around my neck hangs from a lanyard worn thin where it rubs the back of my collar. Every morning at handover I take it off, roll up the cord and push it into my shirt pocket. That is the last task of a working day. The only thing is, when I do it, the clock says six in the morning.

I am forty-one, and I have worked nights as a security guard at an office building in Bình Thạnh for nearly four years. My shift runs from ten at night to six in the morning. When I walk out of the gate the whole street is starting up: the noodle shop rolling up its shutter, parents on motorbikes honking their way to school, the smell of toasting bread from the cart at the mouth of the alley. Everyone is opening their day. I am looking for a way to close mine.

This is about learning to sit still for five minutes at exactly that hour. Not everyone who works nights needs it, and my way is not the only way. But if you also come home while everyone else is heading out, some of this might sound familiar.

To be clear from the start: these five minutes are not about sleeping better during the day. I do not know whether they do that for anyone, and I am not promising it. Nor are they the kind of morning meditation people describe for greeting the new day. When you finish a night shift, morning is the end of the day. These five minutes are there to give it an ending.

Six in the morning: the city starts and I stop

The first time I tried meditating was because a younger colleague sent me a guided morning meditation on Zalo. He said, "Give it a listen, I find it really nice." That morning after my shift, I sat on my motorbike in the basement car park, put my earphones in and pressed play.

The woman's voice was very soft. The first line invited me to breathe in and welcome the new day that was arriving.

I switched it off.

The guiding voice had the wrong time

At the time I assumed it was simply because I was tired. Eight hours at the duty desk, two rounds of every floor, one trip up to the roof to check a strange noise that turned out to be a cat. Tired people cannot sit still. That was my explanation, and I was ready to drop the whole thing.

A few days later I thought again. Tired, yes. But I was not short on the ability to sit still. Sitting still all night is my job. The discomfort was not in the sitting. It was in that line about a new day arriving. For me, no day was arriving. There was a day that had just ended and that nobody had acknowledged as over.

What was missing was not energy

People who work days have an ending built in that they never notice: it gets dark. The streetlights come on, the family gets home, dinner goes on the table, the evening news starts. A dozen things at once tell a person that the day is done. I do not get any of that. I get home as the sun is climbing, the road is filling up, the neighbours are saying good morning. Everything around me says go. And I am already finished.

I think that is why for years I would lie down and still be scrolling my phone at eight, nine o'clock. Not because there was anything I wanted to see. Just that nothing had yet told me the night shift was closed.

The first week I nearly gave up entirely

The first week I moved it home. My wife and I rent a room with a corrugated metal roof, and by eight the sun is already beating down through it. I sat cross-legged on the bed, back to the window, timer set for fifteen minutes because I had read somewhere that people sit for fifteen.

At minute three the house next door put on their exercise music. At minute five my head dropped so hard I nearly pitched forward.

My wife was hanging washing on the porch and looked in:

"What are you doing sitting there, just lie down and sleep."

"I'm trying to meditate for a bit."

"You're dead on your feet and you're practising. Go to sleep."

I could not argue with a word of it, because she was right. I lay down, and for three days after that I did not sit again.

I was copying someone else's morning

Looking back, the mistake of that first week is obvious. I had taken a morning meditation built for someone who just woke up and laid it over someone who had just been awake all night. Fifteen minutes is easy for a person fresh out of bed. For someone eight hours into being awake, fifteen minutes sitting still in a hot room is the quickest route to collapsing.

It was tempting because I thought meditation had to look the same for everyone: sitting on the bed, eyes closed, the full time. Every guide describes it that way. And I have a habit of thinking that if I do something differently from other people, I am doing it wrong. Really, it was only my hours that were different.

One time was worse. I sat on my bike in the car park with my eyes closed, and woke up because the day guard was knocking on my helmet. I had been asleep on the seat for nearly twenty minutes. Riding home that day, I knew I was not alert enough to ride. Since then I have kept one rule for myself: no closing my eyes while sitting on the bike, and never sitting to meditate right before riding if my eyes are already drooping.

In the second week I changed the place and the task

The second week I turned everything around. Not at home, but right outside the building. Not fifteen minutes, but five. Not eyes closed, but eyes open, looking out at the street. And not to open a day, but to close a shift.

In front of the building there is a stone bench under an almond tree, next to where a woman sets up her sticky rice stall. At ten past six I buy a glass of iced tea from her and sit down there. She asks:

"Done with your shift, Lực?"

"All done."

Saying that answer out loud turned out to be part of the five minutes.

Hearing other people's start without starting with them

The three sounds are my favourite step, and the one that feels most different from the morning meditation my colleague sent. That one invited me into the new day. This step lets me sit at the edge of other people's new day, hear it run past, and not run with it. The horn of a parent on the school run belongs to someone else. So does the noodle shop's shutter. I only listen.

The long out-breath I picked up from a piece about breathing out longer than you breathe in. I do not do it exactly as described there; I took just the one idea of lengthening the exhale. Three times is enough. Any more and I start getting drowsy.

What the first time felt like, and what changed after a week

The first time it felt a bit odd. A security guard on a stone bench staring at the road, iced tea in hand, doing nothing. People walking past probably thought I was waiting for someone. My head was still replaying the shift: the flickering camera on the fifth floor, the handover log missing a line. I let it run. Five minutes went by and I felt no lighter at all.

After about a week I noticed one small thing. Riding home, I no longer flinched at every crackle that sounded like a walkie-talkie. Before, any noise like that and my ears would prick up at once. Now I heard it and that was that. I do not know what to call it. Only that the night shift stayed behind me, instead of riding home on the back of the bike.

And some days I still get home, lie down, and scroll until nine. Five minutes does not fix everything. It does one thing, which is give the night shift an ending.

On busy days, when I have to pick up my kid or do the market run for my wife, I cut it to a single step: as I take the badge off, I breathe out long three times. About fifteen seconds. Some days that short version is all I manage, but to me it still works like a small nod to myself.

If you work nights too and it is not working

The first common reason is being too sleepy. Some shifts are so heavy that the moment you sit down your eyes start closing. On those days, do not force the sitting. Just go home and rest. And if you are sleepy enough that you are not sure you can ride safely, do not ride yourself: lie down in the duty room for a while, or call a ride home. No exercise is worth nodding off on the road.

The second reason is having nowhere to sit. Not every building has a stone bench. You can do the same steps while standing and waiting for the lift down to the basement, or while sitting to pull off your work boots in the changing room. What matters is the ending, not the place. If your head keeps replaying the shift and will not stop, the piece on when the mind refuses to settle goes into that more, and says the one thing I found true as well: the replaying is normal.

Some people work rotating shifts, a week of days and a week of nights, and these five minutes may not suit them, because there is no fixed hour to put them in. That is fine too. And if for weeks on end you cannot sleep during the day, you feel worn out all the time, and it is affecting work or home, that is something to tell a doctor about, not something for a five-minute exercise to carry.

This morning when I got up from the bench, the sticky rice woman was packing away her basins. The sun had climbed to the top of the almond tree. The road was busier than before. I dropped the iced tea glass in the bin, wheeled my bike out, and went home to sleep.

Everyone else's day had just begun. Mine was over, and this time I knew it was.

This article was created with AI assistance.