A Great Understanding Of How Important Your Circadian Rhythm Is
How to reap the rewards and optimize your circadian rhythm?
Why is it that your circadian rhythm is so important?
If you were following me already a bit or if you’ve read some of my previous posts, you understand that i try to implement the topic or subject sleep in many of my posts.
Why?
“The self-development process”
Since sleep is a fundamental rule for great self-development, your circadian rhythm is the path primer, let’s say.
How your circadian rhythm is structured creates the path to achieve great sleep.
“Circadian rhythm > Sleep quality > Optimal self-development”
While you aren’t always consciously busy constantly tracking the things you do on a daily basis, chances are that you might reap great rewards from doing so!
Want to know how? Follow me throughout this post.
Chronobiology! The study of circadian rhythms. Having an unbalanced rhythm affects us in strange ways, often we are so busy that it gets neglected or we are even unaware of its effects.
Understand how it works and you will be equipped with the knowledge to self-create solutions to optimize your overall health.
Circadian rhythms are changes that follow a 24-hour + 11minutes cycle in a physical, mental, and behavioral way. Therefore it states circa (about a day cycle) Those natural processes respond primarily to light, darkness, and affect most living things, including animals, plants, and microbes. They all May affect the mammalian circadian clock as well.
In that sense the stimulus of a light source and temperature are of great importance!
- Light intensity, the influence from the spectrum of light
- Temperature(biology-clock) In numerous biological disciplines, a “clock” is defined as temperature-compensated
- Activity (Temperature)
- Food (Thermogenesis)
- Hormones (Melatonin, cortisol) (influenced by light, temperature, interaction, food,..)
- Breathing is also rhythmic (Oxygen)
While taking all aspects mentioned here into account, in the end they all seem to be largely tracked back towards light and temperature.
Your circadian rhythm also controls the nocturnal release of:
- Adrenocorticotropic hormone
- Prolactin
- Melatonin
- Norepinephrine
Understand that all of those mentioned above are essential hormones for normal body functioning.
But then there was,
Light
The emitting of light makes us see things better, but this is just an extra element. What’s more to get from light?
“Light is the most important stimulus that affects the circadian clock (Duffy et al. 1996).”
Absorption of vitamins , UV-light or Vit-D gets absorbed through our skin within the fat cells. Which has tremendous health effects by means of increasing testosterone levels and androgenic hormones especially in male gender, to increase the quality of sperm, and immune system which protect against lung diseases such as pneumonia for instance.
But here it gets more interesting,
The spectrum of light influences your SCN or Suprachiasmatic nucleus, Your personal master clock which synchronizes the other clocks within your body. The SCN is the cross section of when the external light passes the melanopsin on the back of your eye-bal.
Melanopsin or your light sensor exists basically out of two groups of neurons, greatly influenced by the spectrum of light whereas the blue light tends to increase stress hormones which wake you up while flowing toward the evening red spectrum of light, which tends to induce sleep and increase the hormone of darkness which is the well know Melatonin hormone.
“The best way to set your bio-clock is to get sunlight exposure as early as possible”
Note: Balance your rhythm, use bright daylight as a synchronization button for your rhythm from the moment you wake up. When deprived of REM-sleep we are less focussed and it affects us during the day in all kinds of forms.
By getting early exposure you are already priming for sleep later that day! That is the way you set your alarm clock in the morning, without actually using one ever again.
If you like to read, become aware of this. It enables your ability to read, write, comprehend and learn.
“Ever felt like having a dyslexia problem?”
How was your sleep the night before? or the whole week ? Was it great or were you a bit deprived ? maybe you didn’t finish your (90mins) sleeping-cycle ?
The amount of bright light (ideally sunlight) that you view in the morning & throughout the day & the absence of bright light viewing at night, together set the amplitude of your mental & physical health (directly & by impacting the quality & duration of your sleep).
-Andrew D Huberman-
In addition to what’s mentioned above you should try to avoid bright light of the complete light spectrum between the hours of 10pm and 4am.
Don’t get me wrong, when i told you about setting your clock, light isn’t the only way to get things done. When we wink back towards nature or biology the greatest reference which has clock-like allures is..
Temperature
Besides the influences light largely triggers, temperature has a great influence as well. Our bodies are largely influenced by both.
While the intensity of light increases together with the height of the sun, the temperature rises with it along the day. While this happens our skin temperature gets warmer and our core temperature will be slightly colder. This is part of the regulating system our body automatically does to find a state of homeostasis.
“Circadian Deathzone”
I don’t know if this is really the correct name, i got this one a while back from listening to a podcast of Andrew Huberman, i forgot which one exactly, he has numerous great podcasts so in that sense..
Why is the Circadian death zone is important? Because it’s a zone within your day where light isn’t able to affect your daily rhythm!
Fast forward >>> Everyone’s Circadian deathzone is slightly different because this needs to be tracked from the moment where you’ve reached your minimum body core temperature.
Why Take Your Circadian Rhythm Into Account?
We tend to overlook the negative effects of our circadian rhythm. Especially on our ability to stay focused when we are not well rested. Daylight has been indicated as the most important factor in the regulation of the human circadian rhythm.
“Get into a healthy rhythm it will increase your life quality”
However, if one changes the light schedule then regardless of change in activity or any other stimulus, the human circadian pacemaker will often follow the light stimulus and not be affected by the presence or absence of the other “zeitgebers” (time-givers).
The pathway from external light to the pacemaker in the brain has received much recent attention from researchers. Originally, it was thought that only rods and cones in the retina could send light signals to the circadian clock in the brain. However, mice that lack rods or cones can still be entrained to light and dark signals.
Even some “blind” people can entrain to such signals. These observations led to some other means of phototransduction.
Pay Attention To Your Circadian Rhythm
Analyse your rhythm daily, and adjust accordingly
At first i became aware of this when discovering the physiological benefits of sleep after performing HIIT training, and a full day of physical labor. Being deprived of sleep in general will increase the risk of injury as well. Matthew Walker explains this in his book “Why we sleep?”
At that time i saw the brain more as a computer as it often gets referred to on the internet or by people from our surroundings, because of it’s massive storage accessability. And while this is partly true, considering the storage and cache memory cleaning allures,
It was only when i started to pay more attention towards my brain as a muscle that these effects became more obvious.
“Your brain has computer-like capabilities but it needs rest and nutrition like a muscle.”
“A disrupted clock is the mother of all maladies and conversely in most chronic diseases”
- Dr. Satchin Panda -
But how bad does it actually get when your rhythm is off?
Disturbed rhythms can become a problem from the moment they are disturbed as little as a day or two. Certain diseases which can be triggered by irregular rhythms are:
- Insomnia
- Various types of infections
- ADHD
- Migraine
- Diabetes
- Obesity
- Cardiovascular disease
- Dementia
Rumors go that there are chances, that this even could induce certain cancers,
Your clocks can’t send out the correct message to these genes and your body and mind will not function as well as needed.
“A healthy mind is a healthy body”
When you restore your circadian rhythms, you can even reverse some of the other diseases or accelerate cures, returning us to better health.
Lack of sleep doesn’t give our brain enough time to consolidate memories and therefore staying up late reduces brain function and productivity that same night!
When we sleep less we are exposed to additional light, and when staying up late we are also in a position to start eating more. In the end, all if it disrupts your circadian health cycle.
Sleep
Your circadian rhythm has the power to affect your sleep pattern significantly, it can affect it in sneaky ways. In ways which you ought not to be influencing at all. Still it happens and irregular daily rhythms affect your sleeping time, your ability to sleep in, how deep you get into sleep, your sleep duration and the time you wake up.
Nothing there?
Multiple studies have proven in the last two decades that a lack of sleep has devastating effects. It Significantly brings down our immune system,
“Sleep and the circadian system are strong regulators of immunological processes”
Prolonged sleep curtailment and the accompanying stress response invoke a persistent unspecific production of pro-inflammatory cytokines, best described as chronic low-grade inflammation, and also produce immunodeficiency, which both have detrimental effects on health.
- As many as 67% of adults report sleep disturbances at least once every night (Philips Global Sleep Survey, 2019)
- Roughly 30% of all medical diseases are tracked back toward sleep problems. Sleep deprivation have shown to impair how the body protects itself because immune system cells traveling to affected sites in the body can be diminished
- Sleep loss is associated with decreased immune response through our T cells, which are active participants in immune responses
- A lack of sleep increases levels of stress hormones, which reduce levels of integrin, a molecule that helps T cells stick to virus-infected cells
- Less sleep may mean less integrin and, as a result, less-effective T cells
But here is a way to counter the effect of a sleepy brain and a tired body as well.
1. Control your light exposure
2. Fight the temptation to eat at night
A sleepy brain may work better without adding food to the mix for hours at a time. It strengthens the connections or synapses between brain cells. A stronger connection between neurons means the brain can think better and remember better, regardless of how rested we are.
When you are awake for a long time, the variation in your performance based on the circadian clock will increase.
Just after waking, a person typically is still very tired and cannot perform well. Once the person is awake, they recover exponentially from sleep inertia. It was found that when the homeostatic drive increases, the circadian component of subjectiveness and cognitive throughout also increases.
This is why after an all-nighter, one gets a second wind during the morning of the next day, but is really exhausted by the evening of that day.
Furthermore,
Sleep deficiency also affects immune response to vaccines
including the flu shot: Patients who are sleep deprived with less than 7 hours of sleep per night have a reduced immune system response and are considerably more likely to remain unprotected despite vaccination.
What’s important to understand here,
Those with sleep disorders may wonder how a vaccine may impact their ongoing treatments, or whether it could exacerbate their symptoms. There is a clear need for medical professionals to ensure that their patients are made aware of common contributors to sleep disruption such as jet lag or shift work. However, more patient attitudes about the adverse effects of inadequate sleep for health need to be addressed. This is also the reason to blend in a post like this, in the hope more people become aware of how important the hidden job of your sleep actually is!
Thanks for reading this, i truly respect you by doing so, since this isn’t all that easy to absorb.
I encountered a serious sleep problem for most of my life, roughly 20 + years, and this is exactly the reason why i found it so important. After fixing my own sleep problem by attaining deeper knowledge I truly feel enlightened and have found myself to become a better person, a better husband and a good father as an example for my kids. And hopefully this reflects into greater insight and knowledge for you as well.
