Every time we have daylight savings time, many people have problems adjusting their internal sleep/wake cycles. The recent time change seems to have sent many people to their supplement stores to buy up all the sleep supplements available. This condition is similar to jet lag.
Our bodies have cycles known as circadian rhythms. We need food at specific intervals. We sleep during the night and are awake during the day. Cell regeneration and hormone production are also carried out based on these cycles. When these cycles are disrupted, we can run into health problems.
The circadian rhythm is defined as the natural cycle of physical, mental, and behavior changes that the body goes through in a 24-hour cycle. Circadian rhythms are mostly affected by light and darkness and are controlled by a small area in the middle of the brain. They can affect sleep, body temperature, hormones, appetite, and other body functions. Abnormal circadian rhythms may be linked to obesity, diabetes, depression, bipolar disorder, seasonal affective disorder and sleep disorders such as insomnia. Circadian rhythm is sometimes called the “body’s clock.”
Our biological clocks are organisms’ natural time devices, regulating the cycle of circadian rhythms. Nearly every tissue and organ contains biological clocks. Researchers have identified similar genes in people, fruit flies, mice, plants, fungi, and several other organisms that make the clocks’ molecular components.
Disruption of the circadian rhythm also plays a key role in tumorigenesis and facilitates the establishment of certain cancer development among diseases other then those mentioned above.
Circadian rhythms can be affected by lifestyle, heredity, and seasonal factors. Two first factors have physically direct effects on circadian rhythms and health, while other factors influence on them mentally. After all, all of them lead to cancer, cardiovascular disease and metabolic obesity, seasonal affective disorder.
In 2017, researchers Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young won the prestigious Nobel Prize for their circadian rhythms research. By studying fruit flies, which have a very similar genetic makeup to humans, they isolated a gene that helps control the body’s clock. The scientists showed that the gene produces a protein that builds up in cells overnight, then breaks down during the day. This process can affect when you sleep, how sharply your brain functions, and more.
Although environmental factors are universal events which are unrelated to human control but affect human’s body and circadian rhythm. Other factors are manageable by human to prevent disturbance of circadian rhythm making physical disorders.
Shift work is associated with both circadian disruption and sleep loss. Common estimates of under 20% have been reported for shift work in the industrial world.
Changes in our body and environmental factors can cause our circadian rhythms and the natural light-dark cycles to be out of sync. For example:
Mutations or changes in certain genes can affect our biological clocks.
Jet lag or shift work causes changes in the light-dark cycle.
Light from electronic devices at night can confuse our biological clocks.
In the case of melatonin, a hormone secreted by the Pineal Gland, is one of the major signaling molecules used by the master circadian oscillator to entrain downstream circadian rhythms. Its secretion is affected by factors such as age, light environmental and physiological factors. Also, genetic disorders of the melatonin receptor is related to biochemical disturbance in glucose metabolism pathway which ends to increase the risk of developing type 2 diabetes. Moreover, declining melatonin secretion speeds up aging and tumorogenesis, visceral adiposity and cardiovascular function.
When you pass through different time zones, your biological clock will be different from the local time. For example, if you fly east from California to New York, you “lose” 3 hours. When you wake up at 7:00 a.m. on the East Coast, your biological clock is still running on West Coast time, so you feel the way you might at 4:00 a.m. your biological clock will reset, but it will do so at a different rate. It often takes a few days for your biological clock to align with a new time zone. Adjusting after “gaining” time may be slightly easier than after “losing” time because the brain adjusts differently in the two situations.
