How to get accustomed to a 7pm to 7am position

for those of you that work 7p to 7a, how did you initially work your body into staying up all night? ive never worked a night position. my worst fear is that it is going to screw my life up to where i sleep all day and i'm up all night to where i have no sense of normalcy

Pineapple, I'm going to offer my two cents as someone who has worked the night shift in the past. If you know that you are not a late night/early morning person, then night shift is not for you. I literally could not function on the night shift because my sleep habits were already not that good, and I suffered even more working the night shift. I craved sleep all the time. Therefore, I did not get a chance to enjoy time off. If you have to work night shift, see to it that you develop some sort of routine that will not cause you to crave sleep on your days off. Try not to eat heavy late into the shift because you don't want to be prone to developing health problems. Really, you want your nutrition to be as sound as possible working on this shift and you want to drink adequate fluids. Try to get some exercise in as well and that in combo with good nutrition and fluid intake will keep you balanced. Best wishes!

workin nights is terrible!!i hate it! the first two or three shifts might be difficult because youll most likely get sleepy...

what i do is stay up on my off duty before im scheduled for nights till around 4 or 5 am then i sleep in till around 12pm sometimes i can sleep 12 hours so i get up at 3/4pm- for some reason i sleep longer hours when i sleep during the day..

then you start getting used to it. you still need that cup of coffee at 2am esp if the unit is quite! but it just sucks the social life right out cuz you get home at 8am after ur shift and you just want to get to bed and you dont wake up till 5/or 6pm because you have yet another shift and then on your off days the routine kicks in and its hard for you to get to sleep earlier then 4 in the morning because you got used to it! so there goes that day off!

dont worry too much about it... good luck!