Lacking light perception, no group of people more so than the blind experience circadian rhythm disruption. So it’s interesting and possibly contradictory to this study that they also experience reduced cancer incidence across the board.
As others have commented, it's hard to draw conclusions from such a biased sample set. To truly determine causation we would need to run a double blind experiment.
Since when?
Last time I checked they're selling real meat from animals that lived in an absolute horror show for their short life, which came to a close in the slaughter house where they're drowned in CO2.
There are continuous audits wrt the meat to make sure exactly that doesn't happen.
Show me a single article which reports with proof that McDonald's accepted this kind of meat at scale.
You won't find it because they don't have to. They're paying cents per pound of meat because the meat industry has gotten extremely efficient at producing it.
Animals are artificially inseminated whenever they're not pregnant using sperm provided by a lab, fed soja and corn to maximize growth etc.
There are a lot of issues with the food, but the "meat quality" is likely higher then the stuff you buy at a supermarket.
You can literally go to court if what you claim is provable as they're making clear statements that its 100% beef. There are no asterisks on that, it is beef as defined by law.
McDonalds is the company that previously trademarked the term 'real beef' so they could mix filler in with it and still sell it as 'real beef (tm)' .. are they now that loophole has been plugged, do you think they're incapable of shaving the quality down in as many other ways as possible?
I hate this. I keep unusual and oftentimes random hours and I like it. I pull all-nighters maybe once or twice a month. Sometimes to party, sometimes to work, sometimes just because. But there is a lot of research arguing that my habits are a terrible idea. I consider myself healthier, more active and more resilient than a lot of people in their early 40's. But I'd hate to think I'm shooting myself in the foot by making my various internal systems go haywire because of my bizarre sleep patterns.
You will never have enough information or control to optimize for longevity, nor to know if you’d actually want to live in the world left for you at 100.
Just do your thing while you feel like doing your thing, and if there comes a time that something personally meaningful makes you want to do something else, do that thing.
Lifestyle research is great, but it’s glacially slow, prone to dramatic revision, and inherently impersonal. It’s not meant to be a textbook on how to live your life.
"Lifestyle research is great, but it’s glacially slow, prone to dramatic revision"
Would you say this about smoking and morbid obesity? Just because some things in lifestyle research are wishy washy and uncertain doesn't mean all of it is. Rotating shift work is one of the things to avoid.
I think it took 50+ years for public consensus to form around smoking (even if many people bought in sooner), and now vape culture has challenged that same consensus by formally changing the subject of research.
Meanwhile, challenges to the consensus around morbid obesity are skyrocketing to the top of thoughtful communities like HN as recently as last week.
I’m personally skeptical on both fronts, but also don’t find myself drawn to either, so my skepticism isn’t practically meaningful.
And especially since I’m not much effected, I can’t moralize over somebody else’s relationship to those beliefs or how they live in light of them. If they want to hope vaping is safe and obesity is misunderstood, or even if they’d just rather be a fat smoker and take statins, that’s kinda their thing to sort out. I can’t possibly expect myself to know their context better than they do.
>I consider myself healthier, more active and more resilient than a lot of people in their early 40's
then I suggest you keep doing what you're doing because life isn't lived in the aggregate, and if your behavior works for you there's nothing wrong with it. If your schedule is liberating to you throwing that away for a 0.1% chance of whatever complication probably isn't worth it, as long as you're aware of the trade-offs.
I don't agree with that. Would you say this to a smoker or someone morbidly obese? This isn't something harmless like treating yourself to drinking diet soda or eating ice crime on the odd occasion.
It's not hard to fix for most people either. Switching off devices and lights at night, and getting sunlight in the morning, is often what's needed to fix what presented as mild DPSD or N24 sleep disorder.
>I don't agree with that. Would you say this to a smoker or someone morbidly obese?
Yes. This neurotic obsession with health that categorizes every deviation from the norm as something that needs fixing rather than a choice that people make needs to stop. Smoking is bad, drinking is bad, unhealthy food is bad, staying up at night is bad. For everything that even remotely makes live fun you now have some health fixated busybody lecture you on it.
> unhealthy food is bad ... everything that even remotely makes live fun
You've swept the dose of the poison under the rug in order to make your point that it's neuroticism and health fixation to suggest that people should avoid morbid obesity.
>that it's neuroticism and health fixation to suggest that people should avoid morbid obesity
that isn't what I said. I said that people should make their own decisions and listen to themselves. If they feel bad being obese, they should change it. If they don't, they shouldn't. What people ought to stop doing is being driven by others to make these decisions. And that is where the neuroticism from an entire self-help and lifestyle industry comes in.
the OP is apparently happy with his lifestyle and feels good and that's what they should care aobut, period. Smoking is a prime example of this. Other than in public places it's a purely private choice. If people enjoy smoking and they're aware of the risks other people should stop meddling with their decisions.
> If they don't [feel bad about being obese], they shouldn't.
Well let's agree to disagree on this. When these obese people age a further 20 years and get health complications caused by metabolic syndrome, they will wish they could go back in time and change things or they would wish that the people around them didn't placate their desire to destroy their own bodies. Someone's current feeling, which might just be because they're misinformed or addicted or on autopilot and not thinking about it, doesn't count for everything. It's also not just a private decision when my insurance health premiums and taxation pay for the consequences of their self-destruction.
> It's also not just a private decision when my insurance health premiums and taxation pay for the consequences of their self-destruction.
This is unsolvable and consequence of existing in a society. Unless you’ve disavowed all the “unhealthy sins” and actively avoid all risk factors, maybe then you can hold such a view. Doesn’t mean others should listen you though…
It is improveable. Metabolic syndrome is a late-20th and early-21st century phenomenon caused by the processed and junk foods industry. The worst of the effects can be improved with policy, whether that's public health messaging, taxes, bans or regulations. We saw this happen with smoking.
Members of a society have a responsibility to not impose unnecessarily burdensome costs on other members of society. If someone wants to develop metabolic syndrome on their own dime, that's none of my business. As it stands, it is my business, because the costs they're imposing on me are unacceptably high.
1. Most people, when regretting about decisions they could have made, are unlikely to even make those decisions at the time of that realization, if those decisions involve lifestyle changes, because change is hard and modern life is full of addictive superstimuli.
2. Trying to hard-sell people into making changes, whether by scare tactics, shaming, and so on, might cause them to actively avoid making those changes. Simply telling people what they're doing is unhealthy and they should stop it is often not enough. Public health education is an incredibly difficult and lacking area.
3. There's only so much that could be done to encourage or deter people. At some point these half-measures of nudge economics are useless, and if you really want to improve public health, you might as well start banning harmful products and practices, and mandating healthy ones. That would be more helpful than being a nag.
> 3. if you really want to improve public health, you might as well start banning harmful products and practices, and mandating healthy ones.
I would like to see that. More regulations or taxes or even bans and mandates (within reason -- we don't want a prohibition like situation that does more bad than good) applied to supermarkets and food chains (not individuals) are needed, for two reasons. The first being that they're taking my money for their healthcare, which gives me moral buy in into questions surrounding any self destructive habits that will take more money from me than necessary. The second being that the concept of free individual choice doesn't cleanly apply to any product that hacks our dopamine system, as with unhealthy food being sold to people who are addicted to unhealthy food, i.e. the morbidly obese.
I agree. There is probably a case to be made that industrialized, mass-produced, hyper-processed food has led to terrible nutritional consequences in the U.S. that regulators should reevaluate heavily.
Guaranteed 10 minute break whenever you want it. This is why I smoked in the military, I could always escape anything for a few mins while my non-smokers had to work. It was also a great time to just chat and socialize.
Only 9 out of 10 doctors. There's always that one in the bunch that spoils it.
Also, people get hurt at all hours of the day. For one, I'm quite happy that if I get hurt at stupid o'clock in the morning that there will also be medical staff awake at the same hour to help rather than making me wait for banker's hours before being treated.
Night shifts per se do not imply the current insane sleep cycles for doctors and nurses at all. Understaffing, greed, political neglect and short-term-only planning do.
I always wonder about these types of studies too. I have diagnosed delayed sleep phase disorder, secondary to adhd. I sleep odd hours compared to the norm - approximately 3am to 10am. However, my schedule (while odd) is completely stable. I go to bed when I feel tired and I wake up feeling refreshed.
Does the fact that my natural sleep habits are so off-the-bell-curve put me in the "disrupted circadian rhythm" group or not? I never feel sleep deprived. And I've been told by specialists that trying to force myself to sleep a normal schedule could put me at a significantly increased risk of dementia, alzheimers, stroke, heart attack, and more.
So the thought that I might still be doing myself harm sucks.
From what I've read, the damage comes from jet lag and shifting schedules. If you have a stable sleep schedule and are exposed to light and noise and so on in the same way that regular people are, then your body won't (can't) know the difference.
Your body has a lot of processes that run on a 24-24.5 hour clock, such as metabolism, melatonin and temperature, which are mostly synchronized and coordinated by bright light exposure. You're designed to sleep during part of that 24 hour cycle, and be awake during another part.
Large disruptions are worse than small ones. Waking up 1 hour earlier than normal occasionally is not a large disruption. Jet lag because you woke up 5 hours earlier would be a big disruption.
What does a big disruption look like in terms of measurements? All of the many processes than normally oscillate together in phase go out of phase.
I'm no expert in this stuff, but if you want to read about it, search for "chronobiology".
> Is it anything that deviates from going to sleep when the sun sinks and sleeping through till you naturally wake up when the sun rises?
And how does it affect people living close to the poles, where the sun basically doesn't set for 3 months in the summer and doesn't rise for 3 months in the winter. (Scandinavia, Canada, etc)
Free-running sleep disorder in the extreme case of no sun and no concerted effort to entrain to sufficiently bright artificial light.
"Probably the best study to illustrate the effects of an unstructured life during the Antarctic winter is that of four Greenpeace volunteers over-wintering at Cape Evans Base 77°38′S in 1990 (Kennaway & Van Dorp, 1991). For the entire period of sundown (sun below the horizon for 126 d), all four (three men and one woman) showed free-running rhythms of all the variables studied: sleep, aMT6s, electrolytes, and cortisol. Each person free-ran with their own period initially, although two (a man and a woman) subsequently free-ran with the same period. With the return of the sun, all four resynchronized to the 24-h day."
Think of a heatmap of your hours awake over the past 6 months. How many of these things like waking up to pee actually make a difference? There's your answer.
> Chronobiology is a field of biology that examines timing processes, including periodic (cyclic) phenomena in living organisms, such as their adaptation to solar- and lunar-related rhythms.[1]
So, I constantly struggled with this because of ever shifting circadian clock. I recently found a strong appreciation for sleeping pills. You have no idea how happy I am because of them. No more hours of being awake trying to sleep followed by days of wanting to sleep but couldn't.
I suggest going for the pill for anyone who struggles.
Thanks. I figured there will always be a side effect from pills so I avoided them. I use them a lot now but I am hoping to only use them when I need to force myself to sleep early.
Life is too complex for us humans to understand, we are just scratching the surface. There are too many confounding variables. Smoking has been proven to kill but has not smoking been shown to improve quality of life and longevity for the SAME individuals who died of smoking? There are multiple variables at play: smoking kills animals in a lab but what about depression and stress which otherwise be reduced by smoking? Some people are not prone to such problems or have other ways of dealing with them so smoking would just kill such people. But for others it could improve their quality of life or even longevity.
Same goes with the idea in this article: travel less to stay healthy? Many would argue that life’s purpose is to travel and make memories, life would be meaningless for these people.
Don’t take night shifts to live longer? Easier said than done if not taking night shifts means you and your family go to sleep hungry or you have to take a dangerous day job.
It’s great that we are learning more about this terrible disease but extrapolating the findings to universal lifestyle choices is nonsense.
Would be interesting to see this play out for families with many kids. Just the one toddler already killed my sleep for the last two years, with frequent waking up at night. Can't imagine what it'd be like with 5 kids waking up randomly and crying for milk, potty etc.
Some cancer treatment centers are starting to take circadian rythm into account to time the different chemotherapies as they noticed they don't work the same at different moment of the day. They are also working on making sure the patients have correct sleep cycles.
No, they mean the usual definition of the word, the biological mechanisms that regulate sleep/wake processes in the body, synchronized almost entirely by light, run by a small bit of your brain.
Lacking light perception, no group of people more so than the blind experience circadian rhythm disruption. So it’s interesting and possibly contradictory to this study that they also experience reduced cancer incidence across the board.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9730026/#:~:text=Totally%20b....
As others have commented, it's hard to draw conclusions from such a biased sample set. To truly determine causation we would need to run a double blind experiment.
> double blind
Ah!
I know nothing about being blind, but maybe there is some confounding lifestyle factor for blind people.
Well, the blind would not be as tempted by a McDonalds advertisement, for starters
That's an interesting point. A huge part of food is visual cues-- without those there are that many fewer triggers to eating processed and fast foods
Olfaction ? I can make your stomach gargle instantly. And blind people are said to have heightened senses.
I mean, who doesn't hear the "I'm lovin' it" jingle and not want a highly processed not real meat patty shaped something on a bun?
> not real meat patty
Since when? Last time I checked they're selling real meat from animals that lived in an absolute horror show for their short life, which came to a close in the slaughter house where they're drowned in CO2.
I mean, if you want to consider other animal parts used as filler as real meat, then sure. Personally, I don't.
There are continuous audits wrt the meat to make sure exactly that doesn't happen.
Show me a single article which reports with proof that McDonald's accepted this kind of meat at scale.
You won't find it because they don't have to. They're paying cents per pound of meat because the meat industry has gotten extremely efficient at producing it.
Animals are artificially inseminated whenever they're not pregnant using sperm provided by a lab, fed soja and corn to maximize growth etc.
There are a lot of issues with the food, but the "meat quality" is likely higher then the stuff you buy at a supermarket.
You can literally go to court if what you claim is provable as they're making clear statements that its 100% beef. There are no asterisks on that, it is beef as defined by law.
McDonalds is the company that previously trademarked the term 'real beef' so they could mix filler in with it and still sell it as 'real beef (tm)' .. are they now that loophole has been plugged, do you think they're incapable of shaving the quality down in as many other ways as possible?
That particular hypothesis could be tested reasonably well by comparing the BMI of the two groups.
Maybe some blind hackers could share their view in that
I hate this. I keep unusual and oftentimes random hours and I like it. I pull all-nighters maybe once or twice a month. Sometimes to party, sometimes to work, sometimes just because. But there is a lot of research arguing that my habits are a terrible idea. I consider myself healthier, more active and more resilient than a lot of people in their early 40's. But I'd hate to think I'm shooting myself in the foot by making my various internal systems go haywire because of my bizarre sleep patterns.
You will never have enough information or control to optimize for longevity, nor to know if you’d actually want to live in the world left for you at 100.
Just do your thing while you feel like doing your thing, and if there comes a time that something personally meaningful makes you want to do something else, do that thing.
Lifestyle research is great, but it’s glacially slow, prone to dramatic revision, and inherently impersonal. It’s not meant to be a textbook on how to live your life.
I think it took 50+ years for public consensus to form around smoking (even if many people bought in sooner), and now vape culture has challenged that same consensus by formally changing the subject of research.
Meanwhile, challenges to the consensus around morbid obesity are skyrocketing to the top of thoughtful communities like HN as recently as last week.
I’m personally skeptical on both fronts, but also don’t find myself drawn to either, so my skepticism isn’t practically meaningful.
And especially since I’m not much effected, I can’t moralize over somebody else’s relationship to those beliefs or how they live in light of them. If they want to hope vaping is safe and obesity is misunderstood, or even if they’d just rather be a fat smoker and take statins, that’s kinda their thing to sort out. I can’t possibly expect myself to know their context better than they do.
>I consider myself healthier, more active and more resilient than a lot of people in their early 40's
then I suggest you keep doing what you're doing because life isn't lived in the aggregate, and if your behavior works for you there's nothing wrong with it. If your schedule is liberating to you throwing that away for a 0.1% chance of whatever complication probably isn't worth it, as long as you're aware of the trade-offs.
I don't agree with that. Would you say this to a smoker or someone morbidly obese? This isn't something harmless like treating yourself to drinking diet soda or eating ice crime on the odd occasion.
It's not hard to fix for most people either. Switching off devices and lights at night, and getting sunlight in the morning, is often what's needed to fix what presented as mild DPSD or N24 sleep disorder.
>I don't agree with that. Would you say this to a smoker or someone morbidly obese?
Yes. This neurotic obsession with health that categorizes every deviation from the norm as something that needs fixing rather than a choice that people make needs to stop. Smoking is bad, drinking is bad, unhealthy food is bad, staying up at night is bad. For everything that even remotely makes live fun you now have some health fixated busybody lecture you on it.
> unhealthy food is bad ... everything that even remotely makes live fun
You've swept the dose of the poison under the rug in order to make your point that it's neuroticism and health fixation to suggest that people should avoid morbid obesity.
>that it's neuroticism and health fixation to suggest that people should avoid morbid obesity
that isn't what I said. I said that people should make their own decisions and listen to themselves. If they feel bad being obese, they should change it. If they don't, they shouldn't. What people ought to stop doing is being driven by others to make these decisions. And that is where the neuroticism from an entire self-help and lifestyle industry comes in.
the OP is apparently happy with his lifestyle and feels good and that's what they should care aobut, period. Smoking is a prime example of this. Other than in public places it's a purely private choice. If people enjoy smoking and they're aware of the risks other people should stop meddling with their decisions.
> If they don't [feel bad about being obese], they shouldn't.
Well let's agree to disagree on this. When these obese people age a further 20 years and get health complications caused by metabolic syndrome, they will wish they could go back in time and change things or they would wish that the people around them didn't placate their desire to destroy their own bodies. Someone's current feeling, which might just be because they're misinformed or addicted or on autopilot and not thinking about it, doesn't count for everything. It's also not just a private decision when my insurance health premiums and taxation pay for the consequences of their self-destruction.
> It's also not just a private decision when my insurance health premiums and taxation pay for the consequences of their self-destruction.
This is unsolvable and consequence of existing in a society. Unless you’ve disavowed all the “unhealthy sins” and actively avoid all risk factors, maybe then you can hold such a view. Doesn’t mean others should listen you though…
It is improveable. Metabolic syndrome is a late-20th and early-21st century phenomenon caused by the processed and junk foods industry. The worst of the effects can be improved with policy, whether that's public health messaging, taxes, bans or regulations. We saw this happen with smoking.
Members of a society have a responsibility to not impose unnecessarily burdensome costs on other members of society. If someone wants to develop metabolic syndrome on their own dime, that's none of my business. As it stands, it is my business, because the costs they're imposing on me are unacceptably high.
1. Most people, when regretting about decisions they could have made, are unlikely to even make those decisions at the time of that realization, if those decisions involve lifestyle changes, because change is hard and modern life is full of addictive superstimuli.
2. Trying to hard-sell people into making changes, whether by scare tactics, shaming, and so on, might cause them to actively avoid making those changes. Simply telling people what they're doing is unhealthy and they should stop it is often not enough. Public health education is an incredibly difficult and lacking area.
3. There's only so much that could be done to encourage or deter people. At some point these half-measures of nudge economics are useless, and if you really want to improve public health, you might as well start banning harmful products and practices, and mandating healthy ones. That would be more helpful than being a nag.
> 3. if you really want to improve public health, you might as well start banning harmful products and practices, and mandating healthy ones.
I would like to see that. More regulations or taxes or even bans and mandates (within reason -- we don't want a prohibition like situation that does more bad than good) applied to supermarkets and food chains (not individuals) are needed, for two reasons. The first being that they're taking my money for their healthcare, which gives me moral buy in into questions surrounding any self destructive habits that will take more money from me than necessary. The second being that the concept of free individual choice doesn't cleanly apply to any product that hacks our dopamine system, as with unhealthy food being sold to people who are addicted to unhealthy food, i.e. the morbidly obese.
I agree. There is probably a case to be made that industrialized, mass-produced, hyper-processed food has led to terrible nutritional consequences in the U.S. that regulators should reevaluate heavily.
Its weird that we know this stuff, but doctors and nurses, the 'caretakers' of health, are put on insane sleep schedule cycles in their work.
I mean, doctors clearly know better, but they Continue to smoke at a higher rate than the regular population...
Guaranteed 10 minute break whenever you want it. This is why I smoked in the military, I could always escape anything for a few mins while my non-smokers had to work. It was also a great time to just chat and socialize.
Only 9 out of 10 doctors. There's always that one in the bunch that spoils it.
Also, people get hurt at all hours of the day. For one, I'm quite happy that if I get hurt at stupid o'clock in the morning that there will also be medical staff awake at the same hour to help rather than making me wait for banker's hours before being treated.
Night shifts per se do not imply the current insane sleep cycles for doctors and nurses at all. Understaffing, greed, political neglect and short-term-only planning do.
What does "disruption of circadian rhythm" really mean in layman's terms?
"influence our biological clock, including night shift work, extended light exposure, changes in sleep/wake cycles and altered feeding behavior,"
Is it anything that deviates from going to sleep when the sun sinks and sleeping through till you naturally wake up when the sun rises?
What about those:
Waking up at night because you have to pee?
Waking up early because you got something on your mind (like work related problems that need solving)
Going to bed late because you addictively browse HN?
Jet lag after travels?
Not taking an after lunch nap when I feel like it?
Needing to be wakened by an alarm?
Generally bad or not enough sleep?
I'll take a layman's crack...
>Waking up at night because you have to pee?
You may want to not drink large amounts of liquid before going to bed, altering your liquid consumption times/schedule could resolve this.
>Waking up early because you got something on your mind (like work related problems that need solving)
Stress is known to generally be bad for health and well-being, there are animals can outright die from too much stress.
>Going to bed late because you addictively browse HN?
Stick to a better schedule.
>Jet lag after travels?
Don't travel too much if you can help it.
>Not taking an after lunch nap when I feel like it?
This may have to do with an unhealthy diet
>Needing to be wakened by an alarm?
Personally I've noticed that after using an alarm for a month or so, I start to naturally wake up just before the alarm is set to go off.
>Generally bad or not enough sleep?
Definitely an issue, if you cannot find a solution on your own, you may want to see a specialist.
> You may want to not drink large amounts of liquid before going to bed, altering your liquid consumption times/schedule could resolve this.
Sleep apnea causes nocturia, so that might not be a solution.
I always wonder about these types of studies too. I have diagnosed delayed sleep phase disorder, secondary to adhd. I sleep odd hours compared to the norm - approximately 3am to 10am. However, my schedule (while odd) is completely stable. I go to bed when I feel tired and I wake up feeling refreshed.
Does the fact that my natural sleep habits are so off-the-bell-curve put me in the "disrupted circadian rhythm" group or not? I never feel sleep deprived. And I've been told by specialists that trying to force myself to sleep a normal schedule could put me at a significantly increased risk of dementia, alzheimers, stroke, heart attack, and more.
So the thought that I might still be doing myself harm sucks.
From what I've read, the damage comes from jet lag and shifting schedules. If you have a stable sleep schedule and are exposed to light and noise and so on in the same way that regular people are, then your body won't (can't) know the difference.
Your body has a lot of processes that run on a 24-24.5 hour clock, such as metabolism, melatonin and temperature, which are mostly synchronized and coordinated by bright light exposure. You're designed to sleep during part of that 24 hour cycle, and be awake during another part.
Large disruptions are worse than small ones. Waking up 1 hour earlier than normal occasionally is not a large disruption. Jet lag because you woke up 5 hours earlier would be a big disruption.
What does a big disruption look like in terms of measurements? All of the many processes than normally oscillate together in phase go out of phase.
I'm no expert in this stuff, but if you want to read about it, search for "chronobiology".
> Is it anything that deviates from going to sleep when the sun sinks and sleeping through till you naturally wake up when the sun rises?
And how does it affect people living close to the poles, where the sun basically doesn't set for 3 months in the summer and doesn't rise for 3 months in the winter. (Scandinavia, Canada, etc)
Free-running sleep disorder in the extreme case of no sun and no concerted effort to entrain to sufficiently bright artificial light.
"Probably the best study to illustrate the effects of an unstructured life during the Antarctic winter is that of four Greenpeace volunteers over-wintering at Cape Evans Base 77°38′S in 1990 (Kennaway & Van Dorp, 1991). For the entire period of sundown (sun below the horizon for 126 d), all four (three men and one woman) showed free-running rhythms of all the variables studied: sleep, aMT6s, electrolytes, and cortisol. Each person free-ran with their own period initially, although two (a man and a woman) subsequently free-ran with the same period. With the return of the sun, all four resynchronized to the 24-h day."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3793275/
Think of a heatmap of your hours awake over the past 6 months. How many of these things like waking up to pee actually make a difference? There's your answer.
For those curious about the general field:
> Chronobiology is a field of biology that examines timing processes, including periodic (cyclic) phenomena in living organisms, such as their adaptation to solar- and lunar-related rhythms.[1]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronobiology
On a related topic, the book “Why Time Flies” by Alan Burdick is a great read, and touches on biology related aspects of time.
So, I constantly struggled with this because of ever shifting circadian clock. I recently found a strong appreciation for sleeping pills. You have no idea how happy I am because of them. No more hours of being awake trying to sleep followed by days of wanting to sleep but couldn't.
I suggest going for the pill for anyone who struggles.
Watch out, long term diphenhydramine use is linked to increased rates of dementia and alzheimers. I switched to natural herbal teas like valerian.
source: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/common-anticholinergic-d...
Thanks. I figured there will always be a side effect from pills so I avoided them. I use them a lot now but I am hoping to only use them when I need to force myself to sleep early.
Interesting to hear. I've been considering seeking out medication for sleeping. Do you use a benzo?
No, the cheapest diphenhydramine I could find.
Life is too complex for us humans to understand, we are just scratching the surface. There are too many confounding variables. Smoking has been proven to kill but has not smoking been shown to improve quality of life and longevity for the SAME individuals who died of smoking? There are multiple variables at play: smoking kills animals in a lab but what about depression and stress which otherwise be reduced by smoking? Some people are not prone to such problems or have other ways of dealing with them so smoking would just kill such people. But for others it could improve their quality of life or even longevity. Same goes with the idea in this article: travel less to stay healthy? Many would argue that life’s purpose is to travel and make memories, life would be meaningless for these people. Don’t take night shifts to live longer? Easier said than done if not taking night shifts means you and your family go to sleep hungry or you have to take a dangerous day job. It’s great that we are learning more about this terrible disease but extrapolating the findings to universal lifestyle choices is nonsense.
Would be interesting to see this play out for families with many kids. Just the one toddler already killed my sleep for the last two years, with frequent waking up at night. Can't imagine what it'd be like with 5 kids waking up randomly and crying for milk, potty etc.
Some cancer treatment centers are starting to take circadian rythm into account to time the different chemotherapies as they noticed they don't work the same at different moment of the day. They are also working on making sure the patients have correct sleep cycles.
When they say circadian rhythm do they specifically mean sleeping 8 hours or sleeping at the same time everyday?
No, they mean the usual definition of the word, the biological mechanisms that regulate sleep/wake processes in the body, synchronized almost entirely by light, run by a small bit of your brain.
Regulated by just sunlight or any light? Basically is it wavelength specific etc?
Mostly blue light: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7065627/
This is why blue-light-dimming night modes are being integrated into devices.
Both, and, doing it at night, not during the day.