Like any shift work, the main thing is to avoid the 12-hour switchover as much as possible. That's the killer.
It takes approx a week to get acclimatized to a new schedule - anybody who hasn't done shift work, maybe they can remember how long jet lag lasted when on vacation or business travel. Or, how long it took to recover from a couple of 'all-nighter' study sessions at school.
If you go from a string of days to nights right away, or vice versa, you might just get up to peak efficiency by the time a new shift string ends. On a drilling rig, going 'short change' to nights cuts your attentiveness and efficiency by a third even for a young guy. But if there's lots of activity happening like tripping out or fixing a big problem you don't notice it much.
I could only image how brutal that might be though, trying to stay awake sitting in front of an HMI console at 3 am on your first tour of nights back-to-back after days. But, if you could go for a month of nights, have a month of long change, then work for a month of days, that would be a lot better. Even better still would be two sets of 7 days-on, 7 off, then two sets of 7 nights-on, 7 off. So, you only get hit with one change-over a month.
Personally, I'd even take extra night shifts if somebody didn't want them, just to 'bridge' over or avoid an extra changeover to days. Especially in urban areas, because things are so much quieter and easy to drive to after rush hour is finished. Depending on the time of year though, in order to avoid deer strikes out in the country, you might need a whole bunch of HID lights installed on your vehicle
The drive home on Sunday morning after a night shift is amazingly peaceful, and quick. Being the first guy into the supermarket when it opens in the morning means you get the best vegetables and stuff before it gets picked over. Lots of advantages to night shift.