What I Have Learnt From Living Like A Night Owl..
Since 2017, I have been doing night shifts. It is a weird world to join and initially it sort of felt weird adapting to a whole another world. Working when most of the country is asleep is so intense but also unique.
Hello, my name is Holly and I am a Video Editor and Motion Graphics Designer, in my spare time I love taking photos of unique landscapes.
Let’s just say from the start - night shifts are tiring. When you first start doing them it can take ages for your body to adapt and if I am honest, I don’t think it ever fully does. You find your own ways to cope with it and you adjust for what is right for you.
Even though it is the night time, it does not mean all is quiet - a lot of the time the newsroom environment is vibrant because there is so much content to create for the show. Sometimes you can work up to three in a row and that can be really weird because the second one you are exhausted but the third one you are in this weird wide awake mode that when you get home you have one big crash afterwards.
Throughout my years of working night shifts there are some key things that I have learnt that have really helped me make it through the night.
Be Prepared
Live news means that anything can change at any minute and you have to be prepared to edit or work on something at the last minute. Even when you are working a night shift and you are starting to feel exhausted, as soon as news breaks such as a terrorist attack or a celebrity death, the adrenaline kicks in and you are on the ball ready to deliver anything that is thrown at you.
Food Weirdness
I only truly started to like Marmite thanks to night shifts. I think it is the salt in it, I had it one morning at 4am for breakfast and it tasted completely different to any other time I had eaten it. It is just amazing and I still have no idea why. Also, it is important to drink a lot on a night shift as you can feel more dehydrated. However, night shifts have done something weird to me - if I drink water I start to feel sick - so I tend to drink tea or squash. You learn very early on that you shouldn’t drink any sort of caffeine as it will make you crash - hard.
Fighting Tiredness
One thing that can be really hard on a night shift, especially if you work more than one in a row, is that they are exhausting. When I used to do two or three in a row, I learnt that I couldn’t just wake up and go into work - I would feel ten times more tired. So I used to wake up earlier, go to a mini gig, improv rehearsal or even a show to make my adrenaline kick in. It is weird but it worked.
Yungblud - one of the mini concerts I have been to before a night shift.
Night shifts are a funny thing and with my adventure in them ending by the end of the year, I will sadly miss them. I have some really great memories of them and they have been a big part of my life for the last eight years.
There is nothing else like them.