The End of Night

by Paul Bogard

  In the mythology of countless cultures, the hero is called on a journey that must include an experience of a dark time or dark place. For the Greek hero Perseus that meant venturing to kill the Gorgon, Medusa, but many different stories have the same message about the value of experiencing darkness. Are we to imagine that these heroes—heroes we were to model ourselves after—felt no fear? I bet Perseus was scared, and that the same was true of other real heroes in other cultures. Because if he wasn’t, why would I believe his story? Why would I follow his lead? What would I learn about real life, my life, this life now—a life that has plenty of fear? With all our lights we push away our fear, and by pushing away our fear, we are a little less alive.

  “It must be a poor life,” wrote Leopold, “that achieves freedom from fear.”

  Electric light has given us remarkable freedom, allowing us to pursue our work and play long after the sun goes down. No one doubts it brings us a degree of safety and security we wouldn’t otherwise enjoy. But at what cost do we lock ourselves up behind our lights?

  “We live in our own little cells, our own little prisons that we create ourselves,” says Ken. Though he speaks a few feet away, I can’t see his face. “When you’re locked up you dream of freedom,” he says. And then—and I bet he’s thinking of the freedom he enjoys now, walking this wild canyon after dark—“I like the idea that it’s not real wilderness unless there’s something out there that can eat you.”

  On a dark night under a setting crescent moon I walk with fear out into that wilderness and stand still enough to just about hear my blood, ready for flight, thankful I have traveled to get here, with the stars, the lions, the darkness, a friend.

  6

  Body, Sleep, and Dreams

  Night shift is an entirely different way of life that few people who have not experienced it can understand. We live in a state of fatigue that most people never know, or would want to know.

  —MATTHEW LAWRENCE (2011)

  Far from the natural darkness of any desert canyon, more Americans than ever before face the dangers of our increasing dependence on artificial light. For Matthew Lawrence and some twenty million others—a total that grows every year—the pain of working at night is a daily reality. While not all work Lawrence’s 11:00 p.m.–7:00 a.m. shift, all work hours that normally find the rest of us home in bed, or at least home. It’s a situation that has scientists increasingly concerned as they unravel the litany of ailments affecting those who work at night—a situation that has the potential to radically alter our relationship to artificial lighting and darkness. But while the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) now lists night-shift work as a probable carcinogen, and researchers have linked working at night with ailments such as diabetes, obesity, and heart problems, the truth is that nearly anyone living in the developed world is subject to the potential effects of electric lighting at night.

  Having evolved over millions of years in light days and dark nights, it’s only suddenly, within the past century or so, that we have disrupted this ancient rhythm. Those who work at night often do so amid constant electric light. But just by going outside at night, we expose ourselves at every turn to streetlights, parking lots, flashlights, signs. In our homes we burn our lights—including television, computer, and tablet screens—right to the moment (and for many, even after) we close our eyes.

  The potential consequences of our exposure to all this light at night, scientists say, are enormous.

  Take sleep, for example, or rather our lack of it. As Steven Lockley of Harvard Medical School’s Division of Sleep Medicine tells me, “At the moment, we worry about diet and exercise and smoking and alcohol as risk factors for our health. As we learn more about the impact of poor sleep, it may outstrip them all.” Sleep disorders are now arguably “the most prevalent health concern in the industrialized world,” says the University of Arizona’s Rubin Naiman, with ramifications that reach throughout society. What does sleep have to do with artificial light and darkness? Close behind the increasing recognition that “every major disease is associated to some extent with short sleep,” says Lockley, is the fact that “short sleep also means long light.”

  Long light—electric light burning into and sometimes through our nights—is a fact of modern life, but we have only begun to make sense of its effects on human physical health. As recently as 1980, medical wisdom held that humans were immune to any effects from electric lighting. New research suggests that far from being immune to the effects of light at night (LAN), humans are highly sensitive, and that in fact when it comes to disrupting our sleep, confusing our circadian rhythms, and impeding our body’s production of the darkness hormone melatonin, LAN has the power to dramatically—negatively—affect our body’s ancient codes. We increasingly understand that “exposure to light at night is a completely unnatural and alien experience,” explains Lockley. “And our brain thinks it’s daytime, because our brain has not evolved, ever, to see substantial amounts of light at night.”

  Because we have changed our nights so rapidly, so recently, results from the enormous ongoing experiment we are conducting on ourselves—and most intensively on those who work the night shift—are just beginning to emerge.

  During the past two decades, as the service industry has exploded in the United States and around the world, more and more people have started to work at night. Most have no choice—their employers (from restaurants to convenience stores to factories) benefit from staying open after dark, or they work in a public safety field (police, hospitals) that society requires 24/7. In developed countries around the world nearly 20 percent of the working population now works at night. While some of these workers profess to be night owls, studies show that fewer than 12 percent of night-shift workers choose to work at night because of “personal preference.” Some (8 percent) choose these shifts because of “better arrangements for family or child care,” and 7 percent choose the night shift for the better pay that certain professions offer their night-shift employees. But the vast majority of night-shift workers take these shifts because they have to, and thus place themselves at greater risk for physical, emotional, and mental pain and illness. At times for our safety but more often for our convenience, millions of predominantly working-class Americans pay the price for our addiction to light.

  When I first spoke to Matthew Lawrence, he explained that, like many schools, Wake Forest has recently moved to a new cleaning system that asks each custodian to do one task repeatedly (as in, again and again and again) rather than be responsible for every cleaning task in a certain building. For example, an employee becomes “the vacuum specialist” or “the bathroom specialist.” Lawrence says management is doing what it can to make the new roles “a profession, rather than drudgery. We’re trying to make it into a real profession with real skills and documented achievements and a way to progress, to advance yourself.” But he admits that custodial work is “the forgotten career, the forgotten industry.” And when I ask if doing the same thing all night gets boring, he jokes, “Yeah, that’s why I’m a manager.” But then he pauses. “Not just boring but I would almost say soul-destroying, because you go in and put your life’s effort into making an area neat and tidy, and you come back and the kids have trashed it again. And the next night they’re going to trash it again. Every single day.”

  I’m thinking about this as I drive to campus just before 11:00 p.m. on a Thursday to meet Lawrence. Simply going to campus at this hour feels odd. Shouldn’t I be going to bed right about now? On campus, that’s exactly where I imagine everyone I see is headed. That is, except for Lawrence and the dozen custodians gathering in the break room. They look weary already—each shuffles into the room as though he or she has just awoken—and their shifts are just beginning. In fact, they almost certainly have just awoken after perhaps a few hours of sleep. And while Lawrence expresses satisfaction and even pleasure with working all night (“I feel like I own this campus!”), what captures my atten
tion is his description of the physical ordeal that is night-shift work.

  “I spent five years with a permanent headache,” he explains. “You can be so fatigued, and you really have to learn how to manage it, even down to how to breathe. People on the day shift, they breathe all the time, and they don’t even think about it. But when you’ve got to slug it out and keep moving all night long, you even begin to manage how you breathe and move your arms and legs. And sometimes you get so fatigued… I would lie down on my bed and immediately hit REM sleep and dream psychedelic fantasies and wake up an hour later sweating and my heart pounding like I had been for a run. That can’t be good for you, right?” About his employees he says, “It’s beating them up. One or two say it’s the best thing, but for a lot of our people it’s just very tough.”

  I tell Lawrence how this makes me think about my love for night, and how the night I love is a voluntary night—I get to choose when to stay up and when to sleep. But…”

  He interrupts me with a chuckle. “To be bound to it with chains? It’s a different story.”

  I hear a number of those stories as I follow Lawrence on his rounds. The first is from Joe, a veteran of third shift for the past thirteen years. When I ask how he likes it, he sighs. “Like it? It’s okay. It’s where the job is. I am trained in music, Christian education, and that never paid well enough. It’s a mind-set, pretty much. You either fight it or you say this is what it is and you go with it. See, I work a part-time job also, in the mornings. So I go to bed around two and get up around nine. A lot of time when everyone else is enjoying a beautiful afternoon, you can’t. I wake up a lot of nights before coming here and think, Oh, you gotta be kidding me.”

  A heavyset woman in her fifties, Sherry has done custodial work at the university for eighteen years, but has only worked the night shift for the past two. “It’s been a real challenge,” she admits. “It’s sucked.” But then she says—and I will hear this phrase often tonight, said with varying degrees of resignation—“You get used to it.” When I ask what’s the hardest part of the job, she doesn’t hesitate. “Sleeping in the daytime is the hardest part. My sleep is broke up. Like I go home and try to sleep two or three hours, then I get up, and then I try to lay back down in the afternoon, and that’s the hard part. Sundays are really hard because your whole family’s together and all of sudden you have to go to bed. I look forward to Friday and Saturday night so I can get my sleep. I look forward to going to bed. It’s my best sleep. A lot of people can’t sleep on their nights off, but I can really wreck out.”

  The toughest hours of the night shift, she says, are from 2:00 a.m. to 4:00 a.m. (“Yeah, that’s true,” adds Lawrence. “Because even if you were partying at night, that’s when the party would be over.”)

  “How do you get through?” I ask.

  Sherry says, “Oh, you got so much work that you just can’t think about it.”

  That may be true, but, as Charles Czeisler, professor of sleep medicine at Harvard Medical School, explains, “You can’t just order people not to be exhausted when they’re working at night.” Unfortunately, in our 24/7 society, where airline, automobile, and train traffic continues through the night, that’s exactly what’s happening. Authorities increasingly cite exhaustion from working the night shift as causing—or nearly causing—catastrophic accidents.

  Here are just a few examples. In 2010, an Air India flight carrying 166 passengers crashed upon landing, killing all but eight people onboard, and investigators suspect the pilot was suffering “sleep inertia” after having just awoken from a nap. In 2011, two planes heading toward Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., landed without air traffic controller assistance after the controller fell asleep while on duty. He’d been working his fourth consecutive night shift of 10:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. The same year, a tractor-trailer slammed into an Amtrak train in Nevada, killing eight passengers, and authorities suspect the truck driver had fallen asleep at the wheel. In 2009, investigators of a crash that killed ten people along I-4 in Florida found that the seventy-six-year-old driver of the tractor-trailer that slammed into several other vehicles never applied his breaks, and blamed a devastating blend of sleep loss, shift work, and sleep apnea. Estimates are that some two million Americans fall asleep while driving on the highway at night, and that 20 percent of automobile accidents occur as a result of sleepy drivers. Those “rumble strips” at the edges of the road? They really ought to be called “wake-up strips” in recognition of their primary purpose.

  Headlines like “Fatigue Likely Cause of Fatal Train Crash” are becoming common enough that after a 2011 crash of a coal train left both the engineer and conductor dead, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) issued a report urging the Federal Railroad Administration to take significant action to address the problem. “The human body is not designed to work irregular schedules,” said NTSB chairman Deborah Hersman, “especially during the circadian trough.” This “circadian trough” refers to the time between midnight and 6:00 a.m. when our bodies have the least energy and alertness—for most of us those hours from 2:00 a.m. to 4:00 a.m. that I’d heard about from the custodians at Wake Forest. Chuck, a thirty-five-year veteran locomotive engineer, explains that trains hauling hazardous material through sleeping communities are often being driven by exhausted men who haven’t slept in hours. “If you find a locomotive engineer who tells you he hasn’t fallen asleep on the job,” Chuck says, “you’ll be talking to a liar.”

  Exhaustion is one result of confusing our body’s circadian rhythms, which evolved to the natural rhythm of bright days and dark nights. Circadian (meaning “about a day”) rhythms reset approximately every twenty-four hours and control not only our sleep/wake cycle but many aspects of our physiology, behavior, and metabolism, including hormone secretion, body temperature, blood pressure, and other subtle internal rhythms. The brain synchronizes these rhythms based on signals sent by light hitting photoreceptors in the back of the eye, signals that for tens of millions of years could only mean the presence or absence of the sun, and what season it was. In short, light tells the human body to wake up, while also setting our internal clock to expect an eventual period of darkness that will signal a time to sleep. When we’re exposed to electric light at night this clock is confused, with exhaustion one of the many consequences.

  If you’ve ever pulled an all-nighter or suffered jet lag, disruption of this clock is what you’re feeling. The difference between those of us who occasionally struggle through this feeling and those who regularly work the night shift is that they subject their bodies to this experience again and again, never giving their internal clock the chance to regain its natural rhythm. As if the resulting exhaustion weren’t bad enough, scientists have found it only one in a long list of health problems suffered by those who work at night. “What we’re also doing is messing with our internal clock organization,” says Steven Lockley, who explains that each of our individual organs has its own clockwork and its own rhythm. “So that means there’s a master clock in the brain, the conductor of the orchestra, if you like, and all of the different organs of the body are trying to play the same tune. They’re being kept in time by the master clock, but they also keep their own rhythms to make sure the local function is correct. And so, disrupting these internal clocks is likely to be an unhealthy thing to do, because it’s going to mess with how the systems have evolved to work together efficiently. And when we start to mess around with these systems, there is more risk of them going wrong.”

  How might they go wrong? In addition to exhaustion and its resulting increase in sleepiness-related accidents and injuries (including the crashing of trains and smashing of semis, flipping of trucks and bashing of boats, and plenty of rolling of speeding automobiles), Harvard epidemiologist Eva Schernhammer reports that “increases in cardiovascular risk, peptic ulcer disease, a higher abortion and miscarriage rate as well as lower pregnancy rates, higher rates of substance abuse and depression… and higher body weight due to abnorm
al eating habits… have all been reported in shift workers.”

  The people most at risk seem to be those who work a “rotating” schedule—the night shift sometimes, the day shift other times—rather than those who maintain a regular night-shift schedule. It’s the switching back and forth between sleeping during the day and sleeping at night that prohibits the body from adapting and thus hinders the body’s circadian rhythms from adjusting to a new schedule. But consider that the vast majority of those who work a steady night shift revert to a normal day/night sleep schedule on their days off, further confusing their circadian rhythms. Says Harvard’s Lockley, “The clock can’t adapt quickly enough. It takes about a day to shift an hour, on average. So if you go from a day shift to a night shift, it’s a twelve-hour shift, and it will take you at least twelve days to fully adapt. Then when you go from a night shift back to a day shift, it takes you twelve days to go back. And of course very few people work twelve night shifts in a row. Usually they have days off, and on days off they tend to go back to what they did in the daytime.” As a result, says Lockley, “Essentially, no night-shift workers are ever adapted to their night schedule.”

  Consequently, night-shift workers are often awake during their biological night, a time when their physiology is sending them to sleep. It’s worth dwelling for a moment on what this means: This biological drive to sleep isn’t something about which we have a choice, and it’s not something we can overcome. We can try—guzzle gallons of coffee or energy drinks, muster a chipper attitude or brute sheer will—and it might work for a few hours. But, eventually, sleep is going to win.