Today is the first day of Standard Time, when we return from Daylight Saving Time by setting our clocks back an hour to find an earlier sunrise and sunset. Most of us don’t appreciate how BIG the impacts of changing daylight has on us—don’t appreciate how completely intertwined we are with our environment—and so will fall victim to depression, regretful eating-behaviors, and other consequences through the winter. To give an idea of this integration, let me begin with an excerpt from my free eBook, “Sleep and the Circadian Rhythm. Unimaginable complexity yielding mindless simplicity—in all of nature, only we possess enough intelligence to appreciate complexity, but enough arrogance to believe we are removed from its implications. So many moving pieces just to produce a simple phasic cycle: asleep-awake, asleep-awake, asleep-awake; sun up-sun down-sun up-sun down; Spring-Summer-Fall-Winter. More unimaginable still, because each cycle…all cycles, are the same cycle. The Earth rotates about its crooked and wobbly axis at a steady speed, while circling the sun in an uneven ellipse, which varies the angle and intensity of the Suns energy, predictable as a function of time measured in milliseconds or millennia. When the Earth leans and turns just right and gets just close enough to the Sun, solar energy strikes the leaf that synthesizes the nutrition that is eaten by the animal that is only awake because the same solar energy struck the eye that awakened the brain that fired the nerves that moved the body that was warmed by the same solar energy and so released the hormones that informed the brain that it was time to look for food... and when the Earth leans and turns just right again, the solar energy moves on like a wake over the rest of the Earth and the plant stops producing while the brain is no longer stimulated and the body cools and together we all rest—an environment forever true to the harmony of having grown out of unity. We are of this unity. We are coerced to harmony by the pain of deviation: to wake is to sleep, to starve is to hunt, to expend is to fatigue. We cannot escape this harmony of our environment for we are of our environment. Your Circadian Rhythm Have you ever wondered why you tend to wake-up, work more productively, get sleepy, and feel hungry at about the same times each day? This pattern is called the “Circadian Rhythm.” The “Circadian Rhythm” refers to the collection and summation of all biological events and processes which tend to occur and repeat in about a 24 hour cycle. Literally every bodily/cellular process is heavily influenced by your Circadian Rhythm—including things like eating-behavior, energy-expenditure, and metabolism. Of course, all of these events/processes are necessarily adjusted by several things. What use would such a rhythm serve if it had sole control over our bodies? If we fell asleep or had a bowel movement at the exact same time every day, regardless of circumstances? Instead, the Circadian Rhythm anticipates and prepares you for what is likely to occur, based on prior events. Things like eating, physical activity, stress, and exposure to light/dark directly and powerfully affect every cell in your body, thus synchronizing your Circadian Rhythm with your environment. The Sleep-Wake Cycle Your Circadian Rhythm can be divided into, that which occurs while you are awake, and that which occurs while you sleep. While awake, you’re motivated you to expend energy in order to attain the things which make life possible (food, love, money, etc.) by the stress inherent to being without. Once you attain those things, you are then compelled to rest/sleep so your body may repair and replenish what you expended in pursuit of those things with the nutrients from the food you ate...so that you are as fit or fitter to attain again tomorrow. Your brain controls all your wakeful activities with a system called the “Reticular Activating System (RAS).” Getting out of bed, drinking your coffee, checking Facebook, driving to work, etc. all require mental processes that rely on your RAS. The activation of your RAS largely depends on a single neurotransmitter called “orexin.” (Narcolepsy, a disorder of excessive daytime sleepiness, is caused by a defect of orexin.) The word “orexin” comes from the Greek root “orexia,” (opposite anorexia) for appetite. Unsurprisingly, orexin also triggers eating. The fact that a single neurotransmitter enables the wakeful-state AND triggers eating might suggest to you that expending energy in order to attain food is a primary function of your wakeful brain. Conversely, sleep becomes possible when orexin and the RAS shut-down. Several things can contribute to this, but the most pertinent here is the onset of dim light. A gland in your brain, called the “pineal gland” secretes a chemical called melatonin in response to dim light; melatonin inhibits orexin and the RAS while activating another part of your brain, called the “VentroLateral PreOptic nucleus (VLPO),” which also inhibits orexin and the RAS. In the natural environment, dim light onset occurs as the sun sets. Therefore, our entire Circadian Rhythm, and therefore eating-behavior and sleeping, is shaped by the Sun—gradually adjusted each day to align with the seasonal changes of daylight. Falling Victim to Shorter Days and Longer Nights You and I, we don’t fully live in the natural world. In the natural world, we’d get fatter during the summer cornucopia and leaner in the food-sparse winter as our bodies feasted on that stored body-fat. We’d stay up 16, 17, 18 hours in the longer warmer days, but sleep 12, 13, 14 hours as our section of the Earth was tilted away from the sun. Now, though, we can live in eternal sunshine; we’re bathed in the artificial light of our homes and offices, it’s injected straight into our eyeballs by computers, phones, tables, and televisions. Ancient organic bodies ill-fit for an evolving synthetic world. Rather than our behaviors being gently coaxed along by the sun, we’ve adopted technologies that smoothly hijack our brains—the consequences most severe and apparent in the winter. Just because the seasons change does NOT mean the demands of our lives do. Wake-up, work, eat, get home, go to sleep…do it again tomorrow. All the signals of the natural world—the cooler weather, the grey ambiance, the shorter light—are rivaled now…and our health caught in the cross-fire. We run our lives on a clock unaffected by change, but with bodies completely synched to an ever-changing, and synthetically incongruent, environment. It would bad enough if we’d only extended our summer daylight hours to all year long, but we’ve done so much worse. We cannot eliminate the effects of the sun on our Circadian Rhythm and eating-behaviors, those natural signals will forever urge us slumber—but the brightly lit worlds we’ve created incompletely thwart them. Whereas we’re naturally inclined to sleep, we are dually compelled to remain alert; we are fatigued but cannot sleep. In a word, we are stressed. Stress drives our desires for pleasure. For many of us, this pleasure is in the form of food—junk-food, the type of food that layers on our winter coat. It isn’t made any easier, nor is it likely a coincidence, that type of food is even more abundant this time of year—Halloween candy, Thanksgiving pies, Christmas cookies… Rather than shedding our summer supply of body-fat, we get fatter in the winter because we fail to heed the programming of our bodies. Taking Back Your Night The message seems clear: especially now, it’s important you understand the effects of winter hours on your brain, body, and behaviors. You probably can’t change many scheduled things in your life but most of can control the light in our houses, our use of electronic screen-devices, and when we go to bed. If you’re staying up late and looking at bright screens, you’re going to experience increasing sleep deprivation, fatigue, the blues, undesirable eating-behaviors, and the consequences thereof; conversely, by following the sun, you can emerge from your winter-den next spring happy, healthy, and even leaner. Thank you for reading. Be well, Nicklaus Millican
Posted on: Sun, 02 Nov 2014 21:42:14 +0000
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