Chronobiology

Seasonal Affective Disorder: How to Beat the Winter Blues

Many people suffer from seasonal affective disorder (SAD) and don’t even realizing it. You may have felt a touch of the winter blues but quickly recovered with a vacation to somewhere sunny. Others live all fall and winter with a mild case of the “winter blahs” without realizing that this can have an effect on their physical health. However, for many people, the winter blues are a pervasive health problem. They not only suffer from a serious case of the blahs but from persistent depression and other physical and mental health issues.

What Is Seasonal Affective Disorder?

Many people in North America and Northern Europe suffer from seasonal affective disorder, also known as SAD, without even knowing it. A lack of sunlight can affect our lives in a variety of ways. According to some researchers, many people feel the effects of low levels of light. While some feel the classic symptoms of depression, others experience seasonal affective disorder differently. You may feel more tired and fatigued, more anxious, or even be more prone to contagious illnesses.

Not getting enough sunlight in the fall and winter can impact your health in a variety of ways. Many people feel that they are more fatigued in the winter and get tired more easily. Others find that they have a larger appetite, leading to weight gain, or even that they are more likely to catch contagious illnesses such as colds and flus. Human health depends on having a balanced circadian rhythm, and having a balanced circadian rhythm depends on having healthy and appropriate levels of melatonin.

Sunlight and Human Health

Although we do not realize it, the sun affects our health in a variety of ways. Blind people who cannot experience sunlight are a good example of these effects. When our eyes perceive light, they send messages to the suprachiasmatic nucleus of the brain, which in turn sends messages to the pineal gland. These neurological messages determine whether we release sleep-enhancing hormones such as melatonin or biochemicals that encourage wakefulness such as cortisol. Without functioning retinas, the bodies and brains of blind people are left without a compass.

Many blind people suffer from seasonal affective disorder all year long. Their retinas do not sense light so they are left with no way to coordinate their circadian rhythms. This can lead to dysregulation of sleep and the according depression and fatigue, but also physical effects. Our bodies are created to be attuned to the light and dark cycles of our environments; without a way to perceive these cycles, we are left quite literally in the dark.

Combating SAD

Although seasonal affective disorder is common, it is not something people need to tolerate without treatment. There are many ways to beat the winter blues. Stock up on vitamin D supplements so you don’t lack this critical nutrient. Make an effort to get outside and enjoy the winter season, even if you find it hard to get moving. Get plenty of exposure to light, even if it isn’t the light of the sun.

In addition, there are natural therapies that have been found to decrease seasonal affective disorder. Exposing yourself to natural light during the day and taking melatonin at night can resolve many of the symptoms. In fact, taking melatonin at night in itself has been found to correct around a third of the symptoms associated with SAD.

When our eyes do not perceive the right wavelength of light, it is easy for melatonin production to also get off track. Taking melatonin before bed gives a clear signal, that now is the time for sleep. Light therapy during the day can also help, by sending a clear message that these hours are meant for wakefulness. In winter, light levels are low enough that it is easy for our brains to get confused about when to sleep and when to wake. Correcting these crossed signals with well-timed light and melatonin may alleviate many of the symptoms associated with seasonal affective disorder.

Many people suffer from seasonal affective disorder, or at least the winter blues, without even realizing it. However, there is no need to power through these symptoms: Many therapies, including light therapy and melatonin, have been found to alleviate them. Including light therapies, such as using a dawn-simulating alarm clock, and supplementing with melatonin are ways you can help keep your circadian rhythm on track. In many cases, depression is just the first obvious symptom that something is wrong with your whole body health.

Work and the Circadian Rhythm: How Your Ideal Work Schedule Changes as You Age

Sep 17 by Ewcopywriting Leave a Comment

What is your ideal work schedule? While the answer will vary from person to person, most people prefer a day shift that does not begin too early or end excessively late. Exactly what is too early or too late? New research suggests that the answer to this question largely depends on your age.

The Circadian Rhythm of Teens

By the time many adolescents apply for their first job, they have already settled into a circadian rhythm that roughly resembles that of adults. However, there are key differences that set teens apart. Mostly notably, teens fall asleep and wake later. They begin to release melatonin later in the day so their circadian rhythm is a little delayed compared to adults. These brain differences can linger well into the mid-20s, at which time your brain has officially grown up.

Many teens suffer from a disorder called “social jet lag,” in which they are required to awaken too early for school, work and other obligations and thus suffer health consequences. Pediatricians advocate for schools and other youth activities to begin at 9 a.m. or later and suggest that early start times may be a partial cause of health problems ranging from depression to obesity.

In adulthood, the ideal work schedule mainly depends on your unique circadian rhythm, which research has found is primarily a product of genetic factors. Experts recommend that people work a schedule that allows them to take advantage of their most energetic and wakeful times of the day while sleeping at the time of night that is best for them. However, for many people this ideal work schedule is not possible. Shift work is common and can have devastating health effects, some of which last up to five years after the worker has resumed a normal day shift.

Getting poor-quality sleep may set people up for a host of serious diseases later in life. The brain undergoes cleaning processes during sleep, which remove metabolic wastes that can later contribute to dementia. In addition, many cells in the human body perform essential repair processes when we sleep, which prevents aging and even can lower one’s risk of cancer. Getting a sufficient quality and quantity of sleep every night is an important way of reducing the long-term effects of age and keeping your body healthy.

Middle Age: When the Ideal Work Week Shortens

When most people hit their forties, they are working more hours than ever. Their children are older and education is complete, allowing a complete focus on career. However, powering through your last decades of work may be bad for your health. According to a recent study, the ideal work week for the health of middle-aged people is 25 hours, or just three days per week.

While it is important to stay active and continue being productive as we age, working too many hours, or at odd hours, can lead to stress and health problems. Many companies are shortening the length of the work week and finding this decision yields happier, healthier and more productive employees. Allowing ample time to rest, relax and engage in fulfilling activities allows people to more easily maintain a healthy circadian rhythm.

Working Through Retirement: Effects on Circadian Rhythm

We do not currently know the ideal work schedule for people over the age of 65 because working past this age is a relatively new phenomenon. Humans were once lucky to live to this age, but now around 27 percent of modern people plan to continue working into their golden years. Older people tend to go to sleep earlier, wake more often, arise at an early time and compensate later with napping or rests throughout the day. Working may make it difficult for these people to get the “catch up” sleep that they need to stay healthy and thrive. We have no idea how working well into old age may affect the human body as this is such a new shift. People in years gone by were almost always deceased or incapacitated by that age.

The world cannot always accommodate one’s ideal work schedule. We will always need night nurses, police officers and other nighttime workers. However, it is important to know what amount and timing of work is the healthiest. This will allow us to ensure that more people have a healthy circadian rhythm and that we can screen those who work odd shifts for the resulting health risks.

Complex Connections Between the Gut and Brain Influence Mood, Behavior and More

Sep 15 by Ewcopywriting Leave a Comment

Your digestive tract is an essential part of your body. We depend on our gut and intestinal flora to digest and absorb food as well as to get rid of waste products. However, there has been a great deal of research in the past few years regarding other, more surprising, roles that our gastrointestinal (GI) tract may play in our whole body health. Our GI tract affects every other system in the human body and is affected by them in return. New studies have found that even the brain has ways to communicate and receive communication from the gut.

The Circadian Rhythm of Your Digestive Tract

Our circadian rhythm tells our bodies when to perform a wide variety of tasks, including sleeping and eating. This central control is mainly governed by a clock in the hypothalamus of the brain, which is called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN). When our retinas sense light, they pass messages to the suprachiasmatic nucleus to halt melatonin production and ramp up production of cortisol to keep us alert and energetic. Without light, the opposite happens and our bodies prepare for sleep.

However, this central clock is not the only timekeeper in our bodies. Each organ system and even some small groups of cells maintain their own circadian rhythms. The circadian rhythms of various systems in the body communicate with each other to coordinate their activities. This becomes especially complicated in the gut because the cells that maintain the digestive system include not just human cells, but a wide variety of bacteria. Our gastrointestinal flora, the 40 trillion or so tiny microbes that help us to digest food and produce vital nutrients, also keep their own circadian rhythms. They undergo cell division and become more active in the presence of food. They are even affected by melatonin, ramping up activity as the rest of our bodies prepare for sleep. In addition, they send biochemical signals to the brain in a complex back-and-forth communication channel.

The Gut-Brain Axis: Complex Connections Between the Gut and Brain

The communication between the gut and the brain, along with the effects of this communication, have been dubbed the gut-brain axis. This two-way signaling system allows our brains and our guts to coordinate important activities. These activities are related to much more than mere digestion and hunger. Gut flora can activate a stress response by stimulating the vagus nerve, which directly connects our brains and our intestines. In addition, gut bacteria produce so much melatonin that there is actually more of this hormone in our gastrointestinal tracts than in the pineal gland, where it is made and stored in the brain. Gut bacteria influence our brain, our hormonal balance, and thus our health in a variety of ways, many of which we are just beginning to understand.

While more study is needed in this area, throwing off the bacterial balance may have effects such as memory loss, anxiety and depression. The simple act of taking a probiotic can be helpful in conjunction with the treatment of complex psychiatric problems such as OCD. Our brains are dependent on cues from the gut, so an imbalance in microbes can have far-reaching negative effects.

Could Your Gut Flora Be Affecting Your Sleep?

The role of your gut flora in maintaining a healthy circadian rhythm and sleep is one of the most surprising connections to have sprung from modern chronobiology studies We already knew that these bacteria are important players in health, synthesizing nutrients and helping to break food particles in our diets. However, new research is finding that your mental health, autoimmune activity, and, yes, even sleep may depend in part on having a health gastrointestinal tract.

If you are having trouble sleeping, an imbalance in your gastrointestinal flora may be leading to a decrease in melatonin and thereby insomnia. Conversely, it is also possible that low melatonin production in your brain may be affecting your digestion in a variety of ways. In either case, taking either melatonin or a probiotic may be an answer.

Our bodies are not a bunch of unconnected parts, but rather a whole that functions in a synchronized way thanks to complex communication and interrelationships. Not only does our circadian rhythm affect every cell in our body, but it appears to also be affected by these cells in turn. Getting enough sleep and good nutrition, two simple and common recommendations may be more important to our whole body health than we previously could have imagined.

Infections and the Circadian Rhythm: Why You’re More Likely to Get Sick in the Evening

Sep 09 by Ewcopywriting Leave a Comment

We are exposed to germs almost constantly throughout the day. However, most of us rarely get sick despite this constant barrage of pathogens. The reason for this is the action of our immune systems. Our immune systems are constantly on guard against disease-causing microbes and are usually very effective at protecting us. Yet, new research suggests that there is a connection between infections and the circadian rhythm. Like every other system in our bodies, our immune system has an internal clock that causes it to be more effective at certain times of the day.

How Viruses Infect Cells

There are thousands of types of viruses that cause illnesses ranging from the common cold to Ebola. However, they all infect our bodies in similar ways. A virus first enters through a break in the skin, our mouths, or another portal into the body. From there, they attach to cells and inject the contents of their genome. They then use cell machinery to manufacture more viruses. The infected cell bursts open and new viruses are spilled into the bloodstream.

Our bodies have a variety of complex ways to deal with a potential viral infection. Our immune systems produce macrophages that engulf and deactivate viral particles when they are found in our bloodstream, preventing them from infecting cells. In addition, T lymphocytes can recognize cells infected with viruses and kill them before more viruses can be made. Interestingly, these processes appear to be less effective in the morning, according to recent studies.

Infections and the Circadian Rhythm

Researchers studied groups of mice who were exposed to viruses at different parts of the day. Those who were exposed just before their resting phase (equivalent to evening for humans) had faster viral replication and more symptoms of illness than mice infected at the beginning of their waking phase (equivalent to morning for humans). This difference was not a small one; mice infected in their evening exhibited 10 times as much viral replication as those infected at another point in the day.

This is not the first time researchers have found a link between the severity of infections and the circadian rhythm; previous studies have found that people who have a disrupted or absent circadian rhythm are more likely to get sick, more likely to miss work on a regular basis and even more likely to develop serious and life-threatening diseases such as type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

The Circadian Rhythm of Your Immune System

There are many theories about how your circadian rhythm may affect your immune system. Memory T cells, which are important in recognizing viruses we have encountered before, appear to replicate rapidly in slow wave sleep. This means that we will be able to mount a quicker response to viruses immediately following sleep, which is consistent with the results of this study. In addition, our bodies undergo vital cell repair processes while we sleep, which can improve our immune systems and also help us to recover more quickly from illnesses. Regardless of the exact reason for the link between infections and the circadian rhythm, the evidence is clear: Getting exposed to a virus in the hours before we go to bed is more likely to lead to illness and even cause a more severe illness than if we had been exposed earlier in the day.

Getting Sick Too Much? Sleep May Help

Obviously getting sleep can help give our immune system a needed boost, which is more important than ever as we approach flu season. However, for many people this is easier said than done. Chronobiology experts suggest lowering lights before bed, keeping roughly the same bedtimes every night and taking a melatonin supplement if necessary. On the other hand, even these behavioral changes may not be enough for shift workers and other people whose lives don’t allow healthy sleep patterns. Researchers involved in these recent studies linking infection and circadian rhythm suggest that people who work evenings or nights make sure they get their flu vaccination to ensure they have all the immunity that they can get.

Chronotherapy and Disease: Harnessing the Circadian Rhythm for More Effective Treatment

Sep 02 by Ewcopywriting Leave a Comment

Around 60 percent of American adults take a prescription drug and even more take over-the-counter medications as well. Could recognizing the link between the time of day we take our medications and their efficacy in treating disease, a groundbreaking practice called chronotherapy, make our meds more effective?

Your prescription bottle lists the name of your medication, dosage and whether the medication is to be taken with food or not. However, many medications work best when taken at certain times during the sleep-wake cycle. In fact, new studies indicate that timing of administration may be one of the most important factors in determining how well many medications work and how often we suffer from side effects. In the future, your prescription bottle may soon tell you when to take your meds for the best effects.

What Is Chronotherapy?

In simple terms, chronotherapy is the science of timing medications so they are present at the times of day when they are likely to be the most effective and/or cause the fewest negative effects. Our bodies run by internal clocks that control not just when we sleep and wake but also when we make lipids, when our cells divide and more. Timing medications when they are present during crucial parts of our metabolism can mean more therapeutic effects at lower doses.

How does this work in real life? Consider, for example, the common example of medications for hypertension, also known as high blood pressure. Blood pressure has its own circadian rhythm, typically peaking in the morning, when cortisol is at its highest. But in many people with high blood pressure, their blood pressure also fails to decrease at night. Because of this, many people may benefit from taking their hypertension medications at bedtime for best effects. In fact, a study of hypertension medications found that taking at least one anti-hypertensive medication at bedtime can improve control of hypertension and reduce the risk of a future cardiovascular event. Hypertension medications are not the only ones that may have a greater effect when taken at certain times; treatments for osteoarthritis, heartburn and other medications have been found to work best when taken at certain times of the day.

When Does Timing Matter?

The time of day affects much more than whether we are awake or sleeping. Every cell in the human body runs on a circadian, or 24-hour, clock. When our eyes stop perceiving light, our bodies make melatonin that helps us to sleep and also tells the body that it is time for critical repair of our cells and DNA. In the early light of dawn, our bodies begin to make cortisol, a hormone associated with stress but also involved in wakefulness and mental function.

What does this mean for our medications? Medications that are meant to target rapidly multiplying cells, such as immune cells and cancer cells, may work best when taken when these cells are dividing most rapidly. In addition, as seen in the example of hypertension medications, taking meds at the point in our daily hormonal cycle that we need them most may allow patients to get the same effects with a lower dosage and with fewer side effects. We have only just begun to discover how timing may affect the efficacy of medications, leading many researchers and physicians to request further study in this area.

Timing Is Everything

In medications, as in comedy, timing may indeed be an important factor in how we respond to treatments that both make us more comfortable and extend our lifespans. Timing also is important when it comes to leading a healthy lifestyle. People who eat late at night, for example, reset the circadian clocks in their livers and pancreases. This can mess up their circadian rhythms for days to come.

Taking medications at the wrong time may have the same effect, although this matter definitely needs more study in order to get a definitive answer. Our circadian rhythm affects the cells of our body, but our cells also affect our circadian rhythm. The communications between different cells and systems are so well-regulated that even small changes can have huge systemic effects. Stifling the liver by eating at odd times of day can lead to increased lipids in the bloodstream and thus to higher cholesterol and triglycerides, which in turn can cause damage to the heart and blood vessels. The cells in our bodies function independently but also as parts of a whole. Understanding this back-and-forth play between different systems will be essential to figuring out how chronobiology may improve our lives in the future.

Most of us do not plan to be dependent on prescription medication, but most of us will be taking it at some point in our lives. New discoveries on how timing affects medication metabolism and effects may allow us to take lower doses and get more effects in the very near future. Chronotherapy just may be the future of pharmacology.

Promising New Connections Between Melatonin and Migraines

Aug 31 by Ewcopywriting Leave a Comment

Migraines are one of the most daunting problems facing modern medicine. There are medications that may help prevent migraines and others that can help with the headaches when they do occur. However, these are not always effective and can have various side effects. This leaves millions of people suffering from the pain, nausea, auras and other effects of this common condition, with no relief in sight. So what is a migraine sufferer supposed to do? According to new research, promoting healthy levels of the sleep hormone melatonin may be the answer for some.

What Is Melatonin?

Melatonin is a hormone produced in your pineal gland and released when your eyes do not sense light. Melatonin is responsible for regulating our sleep cycles and inducing sleep. However, it has a variety of other effects on our bodies as well. Melatonin has been implicated as playing a major role in GI health and may even help protect against certain types of cancer.

More important for migraine sufferers, it has been found to be effective at soothing minor pain and is beginning to be used to help in cases of cluster headaches. Melatonin appears to have a modulating effect on nerve pathways that carry pain signals, preventing overactivity in these circuits.

Links Between Melatonin and Migraine

Sleep plays an important role in migraines. Migraine sufferers who have disrupted sleep are more likely to get headaches more often and to suffer from worse pain when they have these migraines. There is significant evidence that people who get migraines often have sleep disorders linked to a lack of melatonin. People who have low levels of melatonin have a lower stimulation threshold in their trigeminal nerve, which is the nerve that is most commonly implicated in migraine pain. The link between melatonin and migraine is clear, but could promoting healthy levels of this natural substance really help?

Could Sleep and Melatonin Help Your Migraines?

There is significant research maintaining healthy levels of melatonin through supplementation and other means may be helpful for many migraine sufferers. Melatonin has been shown to be more effective than popular preventive medications, and it comes with a much lower risk of harmful side effects. In addition, taking melatonin at the onset of a migraine may help reduce some of the symptoms once they have begun. Melatonin slightly lowers the rate of nerve firing in the neural pathways that carry pain signals, especially those in the head, face and neck. This includes the trigeminal pathway, which has been repeatedly implicated as a major source of migraine pain.

These discoveries were made after scientists observed that people who suffer from migraines are less likely to get them at night and also have lower levels of pain during night migraines. If the melatonin made by our brains protects us partially from the symptoms of a migraine, it’s possible that a melatonin supplement could have the same effect. In addition, melatonin is safe and has no side effects for many people.

Stopping Migraines the Natural Way

If you suffer from migraines and are trying to find natural solutions that might be helpful, there are a few things that you can try. First, even low dose melatonin taken at night before sleep may have a positive effect, especially on your quality of rest. In addition, taking measures to improve your own melatonin production without supplements also can help. Reduce your light exposure at night and practice good sleep hygiene, including going to bed at the same time every night. These measures may help protect against a migraine, but also leave you feeling better rested in the morning. As with all lifestyle changes, it is important to discuss these changes with your doctor before making them.

Research suggests that supporting healthy melatonin production and getting a good night’s rest are both a potential solution for many people who have been suffering from this debilitating disorder.