AT AROUND 6 a.m., while most of Davao is waking up, tens of thousands of people are finishing work. They log off after eight or nine hours of calls from customers in America or Australia, ride home through the morning traffic, and try to sleep while the city gets louder.
They are not a small group. In a privilege speech on October 21, 2025, Councilor Pamela Librado-Morata said that Davao City’s workforce of about one million includes some 85,000 BPO employees. The industry is one of the city’s success stories. It is also one of its hidden strains.
A hard year on the night shift
The councilor’s speech came after the doublet earthquakes of October 10, 2025, which shook Davao from offshore Manay. She said many BPO employees in high-rise buildings were left without clear instructions; some firms asked staff to report while inspections were still underway, and many workers reported exhaustion as they tried to recover from the quake while keeping up their night shifts. Several, she noted, were boarders in rented rooms with no proper place to work from home.
The fear did not end when the shaking stopped. Davao Today spoke to Dabawenyos weeks later who still panicked at the slightest vibration. One BPO worker described the helplessness of being at work while her child was at school.
Even in an ordinary month, night work is hard on the mind. Sleep is shorter and lighter. Friends and family are awake when you are not. Agents spend hours absorbing other people’s anger politely and then go home alone. In October 2025, a 27-year-old call center agent told Davao Today how she had struggled with depression largely on her own, alone in a boarding house, across three companies.
Putting the shift down on paper
Employers and the city have real work to do on pay, hours, safety, and clear disaster policies. Councilor Librado-Morata’s proposed resolution on worker protection is a start. But there is also one small thing workers can do for themselves, and companies can encourage: write at the end of the shift.
It sounds trivial. The research suggests otherwise. In a 2018 sleep laboratory study, people who spent five minutes before bed writing a to-do list for the coming days fell asleep faster than people who wrote about tasks they had already done. Getting the worries out of your head and onto paper seems to let the mind rest. For a night worker trying to sleep at 8 a.m., that matters.
Writing about feelings helps in a different way. Psychologists have studied expressive writing for about four decades, and a 2006 analysis of 146 studies found modest but real benefits. After a shift full of other people’s problems, a few lines about your own—the call that stung or the colleague who helped—can stop the day from following you into sleep.
A simple end-of-shift routine
Five minutes before sleep. Write down what is unfinished and what you will do about it. Then close the notebook.
Name the hardest call. One or two sentences on what upset you and why. Naming it shrinks it.
Write something good. A kind customer, a joke with a teammate, and a meal. Night shifts can blur into one long grey stretch, and this breaks it up.
Share with your team, if you want to. Some teams keep a private group or a small blog where agents write about the realities of the job. For more than a decade, I have written about blog psychology, and being read by people who understand and who reply is one of the clearest ways writing reduces isolation. Keep it private, though. Never post customer details, account information, or anything that breaks your company’s confidentiality rules.
What employers can do
BPO firms already run wellness programs. Adding a quiet room, a notebook in every welcome kit, or a short writing break at the end of a hard campaign would cost almost nothing. More important is the message it sends: what you feel at work is worth paying attention to.
The limits
Writing cannot fix unsafe buildings, unpaid overtime, or a shift pattern that wrecks sleep for years. Those need employers, the city, and the law. Nor is a notebook a substitute for care. Anyone whose low mood lasts for weeks or who has thoughts of self-harm should seek help. The SPMC Institute of Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine runs a crisis hotline at (082) 227-1531, and the National Center for Mental Health crisis hotline is 1553.
Davao depends on the people who keep the lights on overnight. The least we can do is help them set the night down before they sleep.
Dennis Relojo-Howell is a British-Filipino writer based in the UK. He is the founder and managing director of Psychreg, a psychology and mental health publication. He holds an MSc in Research Methods in Psychology from the University of Hertfordshire and an MPhil from the University of Edinburgh.
