Switching to night shift is always difficult and the events of this week haven’t made it any easier. I’ve found that it takes a good 4-5 days for me to get my internal clock adjusted to working an off shift. I need copious amounts of caffeine to make this work because I can’t stay busy enough to keep myself awake. I’ve tried to keep myself busy but there have been times when I caught myself dozing while standing up. Summer has arrived in the state of Washington and in the land of no air conditioning our house tends to get a little toasty during the day even if all of the windows are open. If it’s dark I can usually sleep but when its warm like this I don’t sleep quite as well.
Jessica has had a rough week. Jeff, her brother in-law, was in the hospital because of kidney stone and a brand new diagnosis of diabetes (boo!), her uncle passed away earlier this week, and she has been running on empty all week long. She has been stressed (obviously) and taking everything in like this simply wears a person down. Stress feeds stress and I haven’t been my normal self all week.
My normal stress reliever is a trip to the gym. The heat and the lack of energy due to the time shift has prevented me from getting in a decent workout. I feel like a weakling right now. Its extremely difficult to time to calorie intake so that I have some energy come workout time. When I work on dayshift I normally workout 4-6 hours after my last meal and 1-2 hours after my last snack. When I am working nights I haven’t had anything to eat in at least 9 hours. I feel like I am trying to win a race with nothing in the gas tank. I have tried eating immediately after waking but I hardly have enough time to digest. My only options are to suck it up or wake up in the middle of the night (or day) and eating breakfast. Can you imagine waking up at 2AM to eat a meal? I can’t and I really enjoy my six hours of sleep a night.
Little things at work have been driving me crazy. Communication from my shift to the other shifts is a one way street. I try to send out as much information as possible and in return I receive nothing. Dayshift may do something and have some solid reasoning behind it but without communication I feel that they have lost their damned minds. Ten to fifteen times I night I ask myself what the hell were they thinking. Oh well – I’ve vowed to get in a good workout tomorrow and the weekend is fast approaching. Hopefully I can ignore the little things and relax – this isn’t the end of the world and I need to stop acting like it is. I really want to be able to work myself to exhaustion but finding enough work to stay busy is a difficult task. I’m writing this post instead of doing something because I want to be able to stretch out my one hour of scheduled work for this evening. Motivation is difficult when you are working by yourself. When you have no communication with other people it’s hard to gauge how much work you need to finish to be a contributing member. I’d much rather work with someone I despise than work alone – at least I’d have some competition.
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