Dispatchers work odd hours, doing overtime, rotating shifts. Combined this with a lack of adequate sleep and inadequate nutrition and it makes it hard to combat the effects of stress.

People familiar with treating stress tell us to get adequate sleep, eat three balanced meals a day and exercise.

Yet if you have been dispatching for any length of time you know just how hard this can be. For instance if you are on the midnight shift, you know how hard it is to be up all night, and then try to get some errands accomplished during the day. Not to mention trying get some sleep before your next shift. Then there are the kids, the husband, the wife and other distractions and responsibilities.

What happens is you might not eat when you get off shift in the morning. You're tired so you hit the sack, then get up, maybe miss lunch, do your errands and then go back to bed. So that when you arrive on shift later that night you are famished. So what do you do then? Yep, you order a pizza and may just eat the whole thing. Then the cycle begins again the next day.

The problem with this is that you don’t get all the nutrition you need from just one kind of food or from just one meal. You need many different kinds of food to give your body the vitamins and nutrients it needs to fight sickness and disease and stress.

It is also important to understand that the human body runs on a twenty-four hour cycle. This cycle that the body operates on is known as the Circadian Rhythm. The following definition of Circadian Rhythm is from Webster's Encyclopedia.

Circadian rhythm

"This is the metabolic rhythm found in most organisms, which generally coincides with the 24 hour day. Its most obvious manifestation is the regular cycle of sleeping and waking, but body temperature and the concentration of hormones that influence mood and behavior also vary over the day. In humans, alteration of habits (such as rapid air travel round the world) may result in the circadian rhythm being out of phase with actual activity patterns, causing malaise until it has had time to adjust."

This rhythm for your particular body was set as early as childhood. For instance when you were a child you ate at a particular time, slept at a particular time, and woke up at a particular time. This went on unabated for many years before you became a dispatcher.

The point is that your body has not forgotten this pattern. So that even while you may be “up” working at midnight, your body may be struggling for its recognized state of rest. Foremost is your body’s metabolism that slows on average between 5pm and 8pm each day, as the body prepares for rest.

Yet if you are just getting to bed, the body thinks its going to sleep through the night (as it was trained to do), and then is shocked when you get up just before midnight to begin work again. Top this off with the usual midnight meal of a large pepperoni pizza with extra cheese and now you asking the digestive tract to digest hundreds of calories contained in fat and grease all while it is still in a rest mode.

Think about how you felt after that last midnight binge? How did the rest of the night go on the shift? Oh the gas! Not to mention the stress of the night shift if it happens to get busy. So while you can’t change the job, you can change the way you eat. The following chart shows foods to eat and foods to avoid indigestion.

The point is to give your digestion a break. It is hard enough to keep your attention on the job at hand than to complicate it with a sour stomach.

By eating the wrong foods in conjunction with the aforementioned long hours and shift work, you can create more stress on your body. Also certain foods affect how you feel. That is, they deposit certain chemicals and other things that have been known to cause problems in some people.

For instance food allergies don’t just make you sneeze. They can cause other problems as well. Even affecting the way you feel. So if you eat a meal that doesn't agree with you, you may just become disagreeable with others.

I mentioned water because many people don't drink enough water to survive. They live in a continual state of dehydration. In fact if animals on average drank the same amount of daily water humans did they would die.

Why is water so important? First because it keeps the body hydrated. The body operates on the principle of a battery. So just as your car battery needs water to generate electricity, so does your body. When you don't drink enough water your body begins to dehydrate and this causes stress on it. Also your brain which runs on electricity begins to loose its charge. You feel tired, foggy and loose concentration.

The dispatcher's staple, coffee, is a caffeinated drink. As is coke and other soft drinks containing caffeine. These are NOT replacements for water. They dehydrate instead of hydrate you. Water is the best substance for hydration and it's cheaper too!

A good idea is to bring a bottle of water with you to use during your shift. Most communication centers have a water cooler making it easy to refill. Three to four of these bottles a shift should be sufficient to keep you hydrated, and as a plus, water will also keep you from snacking on the junk food because it will keep your stomach full.

Remember, the more stress you place on your body the more you will have to compensate. You're only human, take care of yourself!