On the night shift
It takes dedication and sacrifice to work nights
It’s 2:30 a.m., but it’s hard to tell on the casino floor in Hot Springs. Inside Oaklawn’s Racing & Gaming complex, the lights still flash, the slots still sing and cards still turn.
If you know where to look, you can see covid-19 precautions at work — the masks, the spacing, the constant wiping down of surfaces. But even with that, the action is surprisingly brisk here, given the hour. It seems night time is still the right time to court Lady Luck.
“On night shift, the casino takes a more nightclub persona,” says Ray Lunsford, director of casino operations, who has been in the gambling business for almost three decades. This is usually the busier shift, especially on weekends — “which translates to more energy and excitement,” he adds. “I personally like the adventure side of casino operations.”
Lunsford is one of millions of Americans whose workday starts when the sun goes down. Across Arkansas and around the country, the 24/7 economy is gaining its second wind in the era of covid-19. With it, the demand for workers in retail, food service and entertainment is growing. In other areas, such as health care and law enforcement, the need never went away for people working shifts that turn on when the rest of us turn out the lights.
Oaklawn doesn’t run 24 hours (unlike the new kids on the gambling block, Saracen Casino in Pine Bluff and, on Friday and Saturday, Southland Casino in West Memphis) but holding a shift that closes the place down at 5 a.m. comes close enough. For Lunsford, working nights is a means to an end, so he takes the sacrifices it calls for in stride.
‘A BLESSED LIFE’
“Somewhere along the way, I realized [that] to find the success I was striving for, it was necessary to position myself where I created the most value,” he says. He admits that he’s not been able to have a normal family life, especially when it came to weekends and holidays. But his family — including his two children, born during his casino career — have made do and “enjoyed a very blessed life.”
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 16% of wage and salary workers
in 2017-2018 worked a nondaytime schedule, broadly defined by shifts that fall outside the 7 a.m.-to-6 p.m. window. Some 6% of those employees worked evenings, 4% worked nights and the rest worked a rotating, split or other schedule that included non-daytime hours. People in leisure and hospitality sector jobs made up 37% of people working after dark.
Among workers holding these shifts, men outnumbered women, 18% to 15%. Nearly 4 in 10 workers kept these hours because it was dictated by the position, while 19% did it due to personal preference and 12% were working around school or another job.
In 2018, the Global Wellness Institute reported that working nights was a growing trend among European employees as well, with nearly 20% of European Union workers clocking in at night — up 10% over the previous decade. In the United Kingdom alone, the number of late-shift employees had grown by more than 250,000 workers in just the past five years, according to the organization.
GONNA BE A LONG NIGHT
The rationale — even preference — for working nights, as well as conditioning oneself to do so, varies widely from person to person. Trevor Arnett, a social worker with Arkansas Children’s Hospital, has regularly worked nights during his career, including having been on overnights at the Little Rock hospital for five years.
“Back in 2000, I had my first little dose of working overnights. I had a part-time job on the weekends where I worked for a behavioral health facility,” he says. “When I applied to Children’s, there were day openings, and that’s where my head was mostly at when I applied. Then, they told me about the other opportunities while I was interviewing and I wound up going the night route.”
Arnett notes there are benefits to working at nighttime … including and especially financial benefits at different locations.
“More important than that,” he adds, “I’ve always had some sort of issue with insomnia. By working in this role, it was the best cure. Really, I just sort of took to it like a duck to water. I don’t know if it’s in my DNA or what, but I’ve always been kind of a night person.”
Arnett’s average shift is 10 p.m. to 8:30 a.m. and for most of that time, he’s the lone social worker on site. He describes his primary job responsibilities as threefold: dealing with trauma cases that occur overnight, handling abuse cases and managing behavioral health presentations, such as a suspected suicide attempt. His hats can change from patient advocate to mandatory reporter to on-the-spot counselor in the span of a single shift.
LITTLE DIFFERENCE
Having worked days and nights, Arnett finds little difference in the kinds of cases that come in. But he does admit that night-shift work tends to create its own distinct culture, one that looks for signs as to what’s to come that evening.
“There’s a lot of superstition,” he says. “Some people will say Tuesday nights are more tense, for some reason. I bet if you asked a majority of the people here about phases of the moon, they’d say it does feel like the phases of the moon have a certain impact [on traffic], although there’s no connection there. They’ve even got me questioning it sometimes and I’m more of a science kind of guy.
“I do have sort of a formula that I’ve created when I walk in where I compare the number of cars in the parking lot versus the number of cars of the employees. There’s no science to it; any night could be completely busy and slammed and then, we’d have another night where it’s quiet.”
Arnett’s job takes a physical and emotional toll under any circumstances; add in night hours and for many people it’s a one-way ticket to burnout. Recognizing this, he takes special note of his health and mood to ensure he stays balanced.
“There are still a few stragglers that have been in the nighttime with me since the very beginning, but most eventually gravitate towards a day schedule later on,” he says. “With preventing burnout, I think the biggest thing would be just being aware of what your limits are and knowing how much you can take and then having a team you can reach out to and talk to openly and honestly about where your head is.”
Handling the affairs of daily life also takes adjustment and planning, from scheduling appointments to grocery shopping. Personal relationships are equally hard to maintain as Arnett’s night-owl system never fully switches over.
“It’s important for me to have, at least, a few days off together where I can briefly re-acclimate myself with a normal life,” he says. “But I will always find myself up late at night and just a little bit off from the average person. It impacts you in that way, you know? It’s not always a great thing.”
PAYING THE CONSEQUENCES
To be blunt, there is ample evidence that those who work off-hours are working themselves to death. Study after study shows that working when you are supposed to be sleeping carries significant potential health hazards.
In 2018, Statnews.com reported research that strongly suggests night workers are at higher risk for diabetes and cancer. Three years earlier, Time magazine reported the results of a study that followed 75,000 nurses for decades. The study found that those who worked rotating night shifts for more than five years were up to 11% more likely to have died early compared to those who never worked these shifts. The morbidity was even higher for those who worked more than 15 years on such shifts.
Diet figures in too, reported HealthDay.com in 2019. Eating “lunch” at 1 a.m. can throw off proper digestion and lead to obesity. And night workers may also turn to drugs to either get them up for work or to sleep afterward, further exacerbating health problems.
At the heart of this lies something called a circadian rhythm, a pattern into which our bodies and brains have evolved over millions of years, per the American Psychological Association. Circadian rhythms are among the hardest-wired of our natural body systems and therefore do not bend easily to unusual scheduling.
As Michael Price wrote in the APA Monitor in 2011, “Our bodies and brains evolved to relax and cool down after dark and to spring back into action come morning. People who work the night shift must combat their bodies’ natural rest period while trying to remain alert and high functioning.”
WHAT’S LOST AT NIGHT
What’s more, compensatory daytime sleep does not adequately make up for what’s lost at night, because the circadian clock still runs on its own schedule for triggering various glands to release hormones and control mood, alertness, body temperature and other aspects of the body’s daily cycle.
“All the sleep in the world won’t make up for circadian misalignment,” Price wrote.
To help combat this, some employers are switching to rotating night-shift schedules instead of permanent assignments. This helps reduce risk to the worker as well as the individuals they may be tasked to engage … such as with law enforcement, where fatigue can impair judgment and affect quick decision-making.
“When I first got hired on, we were working 10-hour shifts and we would rotate in between days, evenings and nights,” says Lt. Ryan Britton, an 18-year veteran of the Conway Police Department. “Then, we did six-months rotations where we went to 12-hour shifts.
“Then, a little while back, they changed it to every four months. That way, you changed three times a year. Last year, I spent two rotations on night shift and one rotation on day shift. This year, it’ll be the opposite.”
A MORE NOTICEABLE TOLL
During his turn on nights, Britton’s 12-hour shift starts at 5:30 p.m. and could run as long at 8 a.m. the following morning, depending on the situation. He says that while he never particularly liked working late nights or early mornings, he’s noticed, as he’s grown older, that such shifts take a more noticeable toll than when he was a rookie.
“It used to be fairly easy; being able to stay up wasn’t really a problem for me. I was 21 and able to pretty much do whatever,” he says. “The older you get, the harder it gets on your body.”
Night duty has also been shown to be typically more dangerous than days, especially during certain periods of the year, lending further mental and physical stress to officers.
“You deal with different things at night than you do during the daytime, usually,” Britton says. “There’s a lot more drugs going on at that time; a lot of people who have used are coming off their high. There’s a lot more potential for dangerous situations. You have a lot more shots-fired calls, shooting calls and stuff like that. At nighttime, there are a lot more domestic calls than there are during the day.”
Then, throw in warm weather.
“Summertime, it usually picks up quite a bit because everyone’s outside doing things; they want to get out,” Britton says. “It would probably blow your mind how busy it gets sometimes. During the cold months, I don’t think criminals like being outside as much at night … And yes, there are wilder calls when the moon is full. People have a little too much fun and they get a little crazy with it, and that’s where it ends up coming to us.”
JUGGLING ACT
Night shifts lend additional strain to relationships already under stress from the normal demands on police officers. A father of two, Britton doesn’t get to do all the things other dads get to do with their children. So he toughs it out in order to make time for family.
“It does take quite a toll,” he says. “There’s a lot of times where you’re not going to be able to be there for things, and it’s tough. It is doable, but it’s very tough — and you’ve just got to try to do your best to be there when you can.
“Once we had kids, it was no more of the sleeping-allday-type thing. When we go to night shift, I usually stay up until noon or 1 p.m. my first night back. I’ll take a nap and then go in. It makes it difficult when you have a family and you’re trying to keep a family life together. So on my days off, I keep a day-shift schedule — even though the days I work, I keep a night-shift schedule. I’m constantly swapping back and forth.”
Asked if he had any regrets over his career choice, Britton quickly says no. Even in the darkest of nights, he relishes being a beacon for those in need.
“I think this is a calling. It’s not so much a job choice,” he explains. “It takes a special type of person to be in this position and see the things that we see — the things that I’ve seen — and still be able to do the job and keep yourself together. At the same time, there’s a little bit of joy in some of the stuff that we do, too.”