During her recent Q&A with Mammoth Dr Nicola Barclay, Sleep Scientist and Psychologist, explains what Circadian Rhythms are and why we should know about them to protect our health and wellbeing…
“So Circadian Rhythms, so Circadian means ‘about a day’ and so refers to rhythms on around about a 24-hour cycle. And so the Circadian Rhythm is one of two drivers of sleep. So we have a Sleep Homeostasis, a Homeostatic sleep drive, and we also have a Circadian sleep drive. And so what the Circadian Rhythm does is it regulates all of our physiological functions throughout all of our bodies. Hormonal, respiratory, cardiovascular, you name it. All of our kind of bodily functions, function to a time which is dictated by our Circadian Rhythm.
Now, that Circadian Rhythm is provided input from the suprachiasmatic nucleus, which is a part of the brain, which we call the SCM, it’s in the hypothalamus and the deep centres of the brain, and that’s our biological clock. And so the biological clock receives input from the environment through our eyes. And the light stimulus from our environment stimulates the cells of the supercheaithmatic nucleus, tells it what time it is, whether it’s time to be awake or time to start initiating the process of getting to sleep and sends all those signals to every cell in our body. So we have clocks ticking in every cell in our body telling us what time it is.
And so why that’s important and why it’s important to know about our Circadian Rhythm is because we need to match our environment, we need to match our behaviour to the timing of our biological clock. And if our biological clock is out of sync with their environmental time, then we might experience something called social jet lag. And with social jet lag, we experience all the symptoms that we do with normal jet lag when we’re travelling across time zones. So we kind of feel gastro symptoms, you start to feel a bit sicky, we feel like we’re going down with a cold, we have irregular temperature regulation, we kind of feel a bit weird. And we feel like that if we are out of sync with our biological time and our environmental time.
And so understanding what our own kind of Circadian Rhythm is and what our Chronotype is. So, Chronotype refers to whether you’re a morning type person or an evening type person. And to some extent, we want to match our behaviour to our Chronotype. So morning types fit really nicely to the nine to five working day and going to bed relatively early, say around 10:00 p.m. Whereas evening types find it difficult to get up in the morning and probably will be matched to working later in the evening.
So to some extent, if we can work our daily lives in accordance with our Circadian Rhythm, we’re going to reduce the possibility of experiencing social jet lag. We’re going to set ourselves up for good health and good work productivity.”
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