This is your brain on nights

I know my last post was night duty related but seeing as I will be on night duty until Monday morning (when my last shift for the time being finishes) this is my life right now. I will say having done nights I can fully understand why sleep deprivation is used as a form of torture. I have done 5 nights so far (four more to go) but it feels like a lot more and it is fair to say that nights have kind of taken over my life (for now).

 The thing about nights is that while the whole staying awake at night part is tough. Especially when you have all the physical work done, everyone is asleep and I am too brain dead to do any paperwork in a coherent fashion. That's the bit where you feel as though you might actually die from tiredness and then surprise yourself time and time again by surviving. Then the morning gets going and the busyness keeps you awake until hometime. So you drive home and fall into bed only to find your mind buzzing and you wait for sleep to come. I once tried a trick of getting drowsy cough syrup before bed in the hopes of knocking myself out ( I had heard someone say that nurses who do regular nights do this but can't verify if its correct) but instead I ended up awake and a bit high from the full bottle of cough syrup. I would not recommend that.

 I don't seem to sleep enough when I am on nights and whatever sleep I get does not appear to regenerate me so I find that household chores pile up, I am unable to read (if you knew me then you would know how upsetting this is for me), I can only focus enough to watch very bad tv, I don't leave the house and I seem to be just cooking the same thing for dinner. Plus I become quite down from all the tired and I find it hard to keep in touch with people. Mostly because I struggle with sentences and following the thread of a conversation in the wake of nights. I also find my memory suffers and I just generally become a bit dim.

 I am working on some better coping strategies and I am hopeful I will do better by the time by next round of nights crops up. I am thankful however that my healthy eating has not gone off the deep end and I have been managing to train on a semi regular basis which makes this set of nights more successful than all those that have gone before. Right now though my focus is on surviving nights and coming out with some brain cells intact. If you do happen to meet me in the next few days then please do keep in mind that I am normally nicer, brighter and much sharper so this is not me you are meeting. This is my brain on nights. 

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