Don’t Lose Sleep Over Daylight Savings Time

Did you have trouble getting up this morning?  Did Sunday’s ‘spring forward’ fail to put a spring in your step? You are not alone.  Daylight saving time wreaks havoc on the millions of people because it affects our circadian rhythms, Losing that precious hour doesn’t just cause pain the next day, but temporarily causes or internal body clocks to become out of sync with the day-night cycle.

Approximately 70 million people in the United States are affected by a sleep problem. Sleep disorders cause more than just sleepiness. The lack of quality sleep can have a negative impact on your energy, emotional balance, and health.  Sleeping well is essential to your physical health and emotional well-being. Unfortunately, even minimal sleep loss can take a toll on your mood, energy, efficiency, and ability to handle stress. Ignoring sleep problems and disorders can lead to poor health, accidents, impaired job performance, and relationship stress. If you want to feel your best, stay healthy, and perform up to your potential, sleep is a necessity, not a luxury

Dr. Aparajitha Verma, a neurologist with the Sleep Disorders Center at the Methodist Hospital, Houston, Texas;  recommends that people make sure they are well rested going in to the time change.

“One way to do that is to start changing your hours before the time change. Get up an hour earlier. Retire an hour earlier.”

Great advice but how many of us take it…and of course it’s too little, too late for this year.

To whether, like me, you’re one of the 70 million with a sleep disorder or whether you’re just having trouble adjusting to the time change, here’s some tips for a good night’s sleep:

• Keep a regular sleep schedule, going to sleep and getting up at the same time each day, including the weekends.
• Set aside enough time for sleep. Most people need at least seven to eight hours each night in order to feel good and be productive.
• Sleep in a quiet and dark environment and set the thermostat at a slightly cooler temperature
• Don’t allow pets in the bed
• Turn off your TV, smartphone, iPad, and computer a few hours before your bedtime. The type of light these screens emit can stimulate your brain, suppress the production of melatonin, and interfere with your body’s internal clock.
• No reading, eating or watching TV in bed
• Don’t watch the clock
• Set a “wind down” time prior to going to bed
• Try drinking warms teas or milk to increase your body temperature, which helps induce and sustain sleep
• Exercise is good for sleep, but not within two hours of going to sleep

And remember, while some sleep disorders may require a visit to the doctor, you can improve many sleeping problems on your own. The first step to overcoming a sleep problem is identifying and carefully tracking your symptoms and sleep patterns using a sleep diary.

This can be a useful tool for identifying sleep disorders and sleeping problems and pinpointing both day and nighttime habits that may be contributing to your difficulties.  Your sleep diary should include:

• what time you went to bed and woke up
• total sleep hours and perceived quality of your sleep
• a record of time you spent awake and what you did (“stayed in bed with eyes closed,” for example, or “got up, had a glass of milk, and meditated”)
• types and amount of food, liquids, caffeine, or alcohol you consumed before bed, and times of consumption
• your feelings and moods before bed ­(e.g. happiness, sadness, stress, anxiety)
• any drugs or medications taken, including dose and time of consumption

And if none of that works, just remember we’ll all get that hour back on November 3^rd.

Tick-Tock, Tick-Tock. Understanding your food clock!

If the excesses of holiday eating have sent your system into butter-slathered, alcohol-soaked overload, you are not alone. People with jet-lag, those who work graveyard and 24 hour shifts and even late-night snackers know just how you feel.

Turns out that all these activities upset the body’s “food clock”  – a collection of interacting genes and molecules which keep the human body on a metabolically even keel. Look behind the face of a mechanical clock and you will see a dizzying array of cogs, flywheels, counterbalances and other moving parts.

Biological clocks are equally complex, composed of multiple interacting genes that turn on or off in an orchestrated way to keep time during the day. In most organisms, biological clockworks are governed by a master clock, referred to as the ‘circadian oscillator,’ which keeps track of time and coordinates our biological processes with the rhythm of a 24-hour cycle of day and night.

Scientists also know that in addition to the master clock, our bodies have other clocks operating in parallel throughout the day. One of these is the food clock, which is not tied to one specific spot in the brain but rather multiple sites throughout the body. The food clock is there to help our bodies make the most of our nutritional intake. It controls genes that help in everything from the absorption of nutrients to their dispersal through the bloodstream. It’s also designed to anticipate our eating patterns. Even before a meal, our bodies begin to turn on some of these genes and turn off others, preparing for the burst of sustenance – which is why we feel the pangs of hunger just before our lunch hour.

And while scientists have known that the food clock can be reset over time if a person changes their eating patterns, very little was known about how the food clock works on a genetic level.

Until now!  A new study by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is helping to reveal how this clock works on a molecular level. The study showed that normal laboratory mice given food only during their regular sleeping hours will adjust their food clock over time and begin to wake up from their slumber, and run around in anticipation of their new mealtime. But mice lacking a certain gene (PKCγ) are not able to respond to changes in their meal time and instead sleep right through it.

The work has implications for understanding diabetes, obesity and other metabolic syndromes because a desynchronized food clock may serve as part of the pathology underlying these disorders.

“It may also help explain why night owls are more likely to be obese than morning larks,” says Louis Ptacek, MD, Distinguished Professor of Neurology at UCSF. “Understanding the molecular mechanism of how eating at the “wrong” time of the day desynchronizes the clocks in our body can facilitate the development of better treatments for disorders associated with night-eating syndrome, shift work and jet lag.”

All of which is potentially good news for this sleep-deprived, word-traveler, up-all-night-on-the-ambulance, always-on-a-diet blogger!

The Peak Time for Everything

Not enough hours in your day?  So much to do…so little time?  If you’re anything like me, these will be familiar expressions.

And in which case, you should be interested to learn that maybe, just maybe, you could pack more into each day if you did everything at the optimal time?

A growing body of research suggests that paying attention to your body clock, and its effects on energy and alertness, can help pinpoint the different times of day when it’s best to perform at specific tasks.

Most people organize their time around everything but the body’s natural rhythms.

But workday demands such as commuting, social events and kids’ schedules inevitably end up clashing with the body’s natural circadian rhythms of waking and sleeping.

And as difficult as it may be to align your schedule with your body clock, it may be worth a try, because there are significant potential health benefits.

Disruption of circadian rhythms has been linked to problems such as diabetes, depression, dementia and obesity.

When it comes to doing cognitive work, for example, most adults perform best in the late morning, says Dr. Steve Kay, a professor of molecular and computational biology at the University of Southern California.  As body temperature starts to rise just before awakening in the morning and continues to increase through midday, working memory, alertness and concentration gradually improve. Taking a warm morning shower can jump-start the process.

The ability to focus and concentrate typically starts to slide soon thereafter. Most people are more easily distracted from noon to 4 p.m.

Alertness tends to slump after eating a meal, and sleepiness tends to peak around 2 p.m.  But you may want to rethink taking a nap at your desk.  It turns out, somewhat surprisingly, that fatigue may boost creative powers.

For most adults, problems that require open-ended thinking are often best tackled in the evening when they are tired. According to a 2011 study when students were asked to solve a series of two types of problems, requiring either analytical or novel thinking, their performance on the second type was best when they were tired.

Mareike Wieth, an assistant professor of psychological sciences at Albion College in Michigan who led the study says, “Fatigue may allow the mind to wander more freely to explore alternative solutions.”

Of course, not everyone’s body clock is the same. Morning people tend to wake up and go to sleep earlier and to be most productive early in the day. Evening people tend to wake up later, start more slowly and peak in the evening.

Communicating with friends and colleagues online has its own optimal cycles, research shows. Sending emails early in the day helps beat the inbox rush.  6 a.m. messages are most likely to be read.

Reading Twitter at 8 a.m. or 9 a.m. can start your day on a cheery note. That’s when users are most likely to tweet upbeat, enthusiastic messages, and least likely to send downbeat tweets steeped in fear, distress, anger or guilt.

Other social networking is better done later in the day. If you want your tweets to be re-tweeted, post them between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m., when many people lack energy to share their own tweets and turn to relaying others’ instead. And posts to Facebook  at about 8 p.m. tend to get the most “likes,” after people get home from work or finish dinner.

When choosing a time of day to exercise, paying attention to your body clock can also improve results. Physical performance is usually best, and the risk of injury least, from about 3 p.m. to 6 p.m.

Muscle strength tends to peak between 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. as does lung function which is almost 18% more efficient at 5 p.m. than at midday.

Is there a best time to eat? Experts suggest limiting food consumption to hours of peak activity to keep from packing on pounds.  Perhaps we are not only what we eat, we are when we eat!

Springing Forward Safely

SRxA’s Word on Health reminds you to turns your clocks forward an hour before going to bed tomorrow night. But as your dream of that extra hour of daylight, remember all good things come with a price.  First, the switch to summer time means we all lose an hours’ sleep. More worryingly, the time change may be bad for your health.

According to experts at the University of Alabama in the days immediately following the time change your risk of having a heart attack goes up by about 10%.

Because the Sunday morning of the time change doesn’t require an abrupt schedule change for most people, the elevated risk doesn’t kick in until Monday when people rise earlier to go to work.

Interestingly, the opposite happens in the fall, when we turn the clocks back. Then, the risk of heart attacks drops by 10%.

“Exactly why this happens is not known but there are several theories,” says Associate Professor Martin Young, Ph.D. from the University of Alabama’s Division of Cardiovascular Disease.  “Sleep deprivation, the body’s circadian clock and immune responses all can come into play when considering reasons that changing the time by an hour can be detrimental to someone’s health.”

Young offers several possible explanations:

Individuals who are sleep-deprived weigh more and are at an increased risk of developing diabetes or heart disease. Sleep deprivation also can alter other body processes, including inflammatory response, which can contribute to a heart attack. Apparently, your reaction to sleep deprivation and the time change also depends on whether you are a morning person or night owl. Night owls have a much more difficult time with springing forward.

Circadian clock – every cell in the body has its own clock that allows it to anticipate when something is going to happen and prepare for it. When there is a shift, such as springing forward, it takes a while for the cells to readjust. It’s comparable to knowing that you have a meeting at 2 p.m. and having time to prepare your presentation instead of being told at the last minute and not being able to prepare.

Immune function – immune cells have a clock, and the immune response depends greatly on the time of day. In animal studies, when a mouse is given a sub-lethal dose of an endotoxin that elicits a strong immune response, survival depends upon the time of day they were given this endotoxin. Mice that were put through a phased advance much like Daylight Savings Time, and then had a challenge to their immune system, died, whereas the control animals that were not subjected to a phased advance survive when given the same dose of the toxin.

Fortunately, the body’s clock eventually synchs to the new time on its own.  In the meantime we offer you some tips to help you ease your body into the adjustment.

• Wake up 30 minutes earlier on Saturday and Sunday than you need to in preparation for the early start on Monday
• Eat a decent-sized breakfast
• Go outside in the sunlight in the early morning
• Exercise in the mornings over the weekend

These tricks will help reset both the master, clock in the brain that reacts to changes in light/dark cycles, and the peripheral clocks — the ones everywhere else including the one in the heart — that react to food intake and physical activity, thereby reducing the chance of a heart attack on Monday.

Assuming we all survive the annual time change shock to our system, we look forward to seeing you back here after the weekend.