PSY 1010 Module 3 Consciousness and Health Written Assignment Example

Twelve-Hour Nights, Short Days and a Midterm: Sleep, Stress and Coping in the Life of a Dispatcher Who Is Also a Student

Student Name

Bachelor of Arts in Psychology, Thomas Edison State University

PSY-1010: Introduction to Psychology

Mentor Name

Month Day, Year

Twelve-Hour Nights, Short Days and a Midterm: Sleep, Stress and Coping in the Life of a Dispatcher Who Is Also a Student

Module 3 covers two topics that shape my daily life more than any others: consciousness, especially sleep, and health psychology, especially stress and coping. I work rotating twelve-hour shifts as a 911 dispatcher, alternating two weeks of days with two weeks of nights, and I study in whatever hours are left. The answers below apply the textbook (Feldman, 2021) and research to my own situation and end with a plan for protecting my health and my grades.

Question 1: Sleep and Circadian Rhythms on Rotating Shifts

Consciousness is our awareness of sensations, thoughts and feelings, and sleep is the most familiar change in that awareness (Feldman, 2021). A night's sleep moves through cycles of non-REM stages, from light sleep to deep slow-wave sleep, and REM sleep, when most vivid dreaming occurs and the body's major muscles are relaxed. Cycles last about ninety minutes, deep sleep comes mostly early in the night, and REM periods lengthen toward morning.

These cycles are governed partly by circadian rhythms, the body's roughly twenty-four-hour cycles of alertness, body temperature and hormone release, which are set by light. Night work puts me awake when my rhythm says sleep and asleep when daylight says wake. In the week after I switch to nights I fall asleep easily but wake after four or five hours, and around 4 a.m. at work I struggle to stay sharp. Åkerstedt (2003) reviewed research on shift work and found that disturbed sleep is its most common health effect, with difficulty falling asleep, shortened sleep and sleepiness at work that continues into days off. That matches my experience, and the shortened sleep cuts mainly into the later cycles, when REM is most concentrated.

The result is a sleep debt that builds across a run of nights. The textbook notes that sleep deprivation impairs attention, mood and memory, all of which my job and my coursework depend on.

Question 2: Altered States and Drugs

Two everyday ways I alter my consciousness are caffeine and meditation. Caffeine is a stimulant, a drug that increases activity in the central nervous system, and it works partly by blocking a chemical that builds up during waking and promotes sleepiness. It helps me on nights, but if I drink coffee after about 2 a.m., I cannot sleep when I get home, so the drug that rescues one shift damages the next. I now stop caffeine six hours before my planned sleep.

Meditation is a learned technique for refocusing attention that changes the state of consciousness (Feldman, 2021). Our department offered a short guided-breathing session, and I tried ten minutes after night shifts for two weeks. I fell asleep faster on most mornings, although that is a single person's observation rather than evidence, since I had no comparison and expected it to work.

Question 3: Stress, Coping and Social Support

Health psychology studies how psychological factors affect physical health and illness. The textbook describes stress as the response to events that threaten or challenge us, and it notes that how we appraise an event matters as much as the event. When I see a quiz and a double shift in the same week, my primary appraisal is that the week is a threat; my secondary appraisal, whether I have the resources to cope, determines how stressed I feel.

Selye's general adaptation syndrome describes the body's response to stress in three stages: alarm and mobilization, resistance, and exhaustion. Weeks of nights without recovery put me close to the third stage: I catch every cold going around, which fits the textbook's point that prolonged stress weakens the immune system.

Coping can be problem-focused, changing the situation, or emotion-focused, changing how we feel about it (Feldman, 2021). Problem-focused coping works for my schedule: I ask my sergeant to avoid placing me on nights during exam weeks. Emotion-focused coping works for what I cannot change, such as a call that went badly; talking with a coworker afterward helps me put it in perspective. Social support is one of the strongest buffers. Cohen and Wills (1985) reviewed studies and found evidence that support protects people from the harmful effects of stress, particularly when it matches the kind of help they need. My dispatch team provides support no one outside the job can, and my study group provides a different kind.

Culture and setting also shape stress. In my workplace, admitting distress after a bad call used to be seen as weakness; a new peer-support program is changing that norm, which shows how social context affects whether people use the coping resources they have.

A Plan for Health and Success as a Student

From this module I built a weekly plan. During night runs I sleep at the same time each day in a dark, cool room, use the ten-minute breathing routine after shifts and stop caffeine six hours before sleep. I schedule study for my first two days off, when I am most rested, rather than after nights, and I tell my sergeant about exam dates in advance. When stress builds, I use problem-focused coping for what I can change and talk to a coworker or study partner about the rest.

Conclusion

Shift work disrupts the circadian rhythms and sleep cycles the textbook describes, and the resulting sleep debt and stress affect my health, my work and my studying. Understanding the stages of sleep, the effects of drugs like caffeine, the role of appraisal and the value of coping and social support has given me practical ways to manage all three.

References

Åkerstedt, T. (2003). Shift work and disturbed sleep/wakefulness. Occupational Medicine, 53(2), 89-94. https://doi.org/10.1093/occmed/kqg046

Cohen, S., & Wills, T. A. (1985). Stress, social support, and the buffering hypothesis. Psychological Bulletin, 98(2), 310-357. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.98.2.310

Feldman, R. S. (2021). Essentials of understanding psychology (14th ed.). McGraw Hill.