A HARD DAY'S NIGHT
KU students brave threats on their health and social life when they work the night shift.
BY Anilino Astorne
"Do you smell that?"
"I feel like such a dog sniffing the air."
"I don't smell it."
"I smelled it at seven this morning outside someone's door. Can you believe that?"
"I don't smell weed. Let's keep going."
For the next 45 minutes, Zach Straus prowls Ellsworth's hallways, checking the handles on fire extinguisher cases, sniffing the air for signs of misbehavior and peeking in common rooms along with three other resident assistants. This ritual always begins the Topeka senior's shift as an overnight security monitor.
While most students are sleeping soundly by 3 a.m., a select few are using this time to work. The night shift has no specific length, so long as it occurs between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. And it's not just for strippers
and gas station attendants. College students working to pay off tuition or rent comprise some of the 5 million alternate shift workers between ages 16 and 24, according to a 2004 U.S. Labor Department study. In total, nearly 15 million work the night shift, which makes up 14.8 percent of all full-time wage and salary workers.
College students are notorious for staying up all hours of the night.Fifty-five percent of adults ages 18 to 20 go to bed past midnight, according to a study conducted by ACNielson, a marketing information company. So who can blame these scrappy getters who want to earn cash while they're already burning the midnight oil?
A firsthand look at a few KU students who work night shifts reveals that not just any Zack, Kelly or Slater can handle the rigors of the nightly grind while attending school.
Just because you can stay up all night drinking doesn't mean you can stay up all night working.
That's one of the misconceptions students have when they apply to work the 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. or the 4 a.m. to 9 a.m. shift, says Elizabeth George, supervisor for recruitment at UPS. The adjustment for working these times requires getting much less sleep than normal, which is hard for most to get used to, she says. After five years of hiring workers for these shifts, she has witnessed the revolving door of students who start the job and then burn out quickly.
New hires often get sick or have difficulty concentrating on their tasks. George says.
tasks, or forget them.
"Some students figure I've survived on three hours of sleep before so why not try it while working?" she says. "They're good for the first two days, but after three or four they can't handle it anymore."
Zach Straus, Topeka senior, moves silently along the hallway in search of misbehavior. Straus works as a security monitor for Ellsworth Hall.
George is referring to what happens to those who adjust to changes in their sleep cycle.The sleep cycle is regulated by two biological systems: sleep/wake homeostasis and the circadian rhythm,says Marci Cleary,spokesperson for the National Sleep Foundation.
After staying awake for a long period of time, sleep/wake homeostasis tells us we need to sleep. The circadian rhythm, on the other hand, regulates the timing of periods of sleepiness and wakefulness throughout the day. The rhythm is controlled by a group of neurons in the hypothalamus portion of the brain. The neurons respond to light and dark signals. When your eye perceives light, your brain thinks it's time to be awake — vice versa for darkness. When the body is exposed to light for a long time, like working at night in a brightly lit building, cues on the brain occur forcing the body to alter its normal sleep pattern to adjust. That's why those new to the late shift experience something similar to jet lag.
Tuesdays and Thursdays were the worst. She had to watch the safety monitors with fixed concentration.She
couldn't even work on her homework.
All night long she stared at the oftem-
empty screens, waiting for the shift to
end at 6 a.m. After she got off work,
it was only two more hours until her 8
a.m. class. Mondays, Wednesdays and
Fridays were a little better. On those
days, class didn't start until 10 a.m.
Tracy Blunt, Thornton, Colo,
freshman, began working nights
for the KU Public Safety office when she first arrived on campus this year. Throughout high school she held an after-school job. She wanted to do the same when she came to college and ended up working as a security monitor. Blunt knew from the start she wasn't a nocturnal person and that she would have to make some adjustments. At first she tried napping more often to make up for lost sleep, but that wasn't enough.
As the semester
wore on, her
schedule started
SLEEP IS FOR THE
LESSER KNOWN
if you have a penchant for burning the midnight oil you're in good company. These famous night owls were known for working well into the night with the occasional cat nap during the day, of course.
→Michelangelo
→Leonardo DaVinci
→Winston Churchill
→Florence Nightingale
→Thomas Edison
→Martha Stewart
→Bill Clinton
→Jay Leno
→Madonna
http://answers.google.
to take its toll. She was a straight A student in high school. In college she began to occasionally miss class because she was so tired after work. For long periods of time she would only get four hours of sleep a night. She didn't even have time for a set eating schedule.
"It was hard both physically and mentally," Blunt says. "Especially when it came to studying and my school work."
Blunt cites a number of factors, such as making the transition to college and not getting enough sleep, that prevented her from reaching her goal of a 3.5 GPA. She says it wasn't her employer's fault, but an inability to schedule classes before agreeing to work at night. Blunt says this semester she makes sure to adhere to a sleep schedule
that includes lots of naps and sleeping at set times. This has made all the difference, she says.
You have to take your sleep seriously when working at night, says Kenneth Wright, director of the Sleep & Chronobiology Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder. Wright has been studying the biological rhythms
that regulate sleep. He recommends a structured routine that workers start as soon as they are scheduled to work at night, which involves setting aside an adequate amount of time for sleep every day and a cool, dark, quiet place in which to sleep. If not, they risk encountering the inherent hazards associated with fatigue.
If people get four to six hours of sleep a night for a week, their performance will be just as bad as someone who has been awake for 24 straight hours, Wright says. Getting less than seven to nine
hours of sleep a night results in a worsening of performance every day, he says. If sleep is cut short, the body doesn't have time to complete all of the phases that help with muscle repair, memory consolidation and the release of hormones regulating appetite. This can result in side effects such as poor concentration, absenteeism, insomnia, weight gain and depression.
Getting enough sleep isn't the panacea for shift workers either, Wright says. Our bodies were not built to work during the night, he says. There are natural limits to our performance — our biological clock says so.
"Humans were meant to work during the solar day. In this 24-hour society, we expect people to be awake at all times, but there are consequences."Wright says.
10> JAYPLAY 03.02.2006
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