Click to listen to the audio…
“It is time to co-ordinate your diary with your body’s schedule”
Modern living is CLOCK LIVING, but just like you, Mother Nature is time sensitive. You need to co-ordinate your diary with your body’s schedule.
You have a TIGHT schedule. Every moment of your day is planned and your activities are directed by the clock.
At 6 am the alarm clock demands you get out of bed and start……….RUNNING. It is a scramble to get yourself and the rest of the family ready. The school run MUST start by 7.22. A minute or two later and the traffic situation will make EVERYONE late.
You MUST clock into work by 8.30 !
Modern living is CLOCK LIVING.
Clocks set the pace
Not just in your outer world, but also in your inner world.
Mother Nature is time sensitive. Pretty much everything that happens in your body, fluctuates in a regular pattern during the course of the day. The phenomenon is referred to as the circadian rhythm. A series of clocks, distributed throughout the body, help keeps things ticking.
In effect, each organ in the body has a set schedule, ensuring all the necessary activities take place. Body clocks run on a 24 hour clock. But the individual organ clocks must be synchronized with brain time , to avoid metabolic chaos.
The suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) region of the brain, is responsible for establishing TIME inside the body. This master time piece, cannot pick up the phone and dial TIME, so it relies on both external and internal cues, to keep the your body from timing out.
Jet lag is a rather unpleasant example, of what happens when your brain gets the timing of things wrong. Yawn, yawn….
Synchronizing the watches
Scientists have known that the organ clocks keep ticking with the help of CLOCK genes. And that unsynchronized clocks, contribute to health problems.
But the details of how the individual clocks synchronize with the brain’s master clock, the SCN have been a little sketchy. Recently researchers from the University of Geneva, found one of the tools used to keep the body’s clocks in synch is temperature.
Cold winds blowing
In high school biology, you probably were told that as a warm blooded mammal, your body temperature was stable and as a human, your set point is 37°C. In contrast, cold blooded creatures find their body temperature’s rising and falling, depending on the environment – this is one of the reasons lizards make a habit of sun tanning and frogs, avoid the sun as much as they can.
Stable doesn’t mean fixed. Your body temperature hovers around 37°C over a 24 hour cycle. And the metabolically troubled, may have a broken temperature dial.
It is this dip, that helps to synch all the organ clocks.
Throwing snowballs
Frosty temperatures create winter wonderlands, with lots of snow…. which means snowmen.
When body temperature dips, this brings out your body’s snowmen, the CIRP protein is one such snowman.
The Swiss team discovered, the CIRP protein loves to play, it lobs snowballs, particularly targeting RNA molecules floating about in the cytoplasm.
Snow “fights” can be lots of fun, but end up being a little distracting. It is this distraction that helps synch individual clocks. When things warm up again and the snowman melts, all the clocks starts ticking from “TIME ZERO”.
The clocks are ticking in synch.
Stick to your body’s schedule
The system ticks over like clockwork. Just like you, your body is running on a schedule.
For your body to run like clockwork, you need to co-ordinate your schedule with your body’s schedule.
So,
- make sure to get your beauty sleep at night
- sun tan in the morning
- load up on fuel supplies during the day only, avoid midnight snacks and if you’re going to pig out, do it at breakfast and
- take your meds, supplements and milk, at the “right” time
TIMING REALLY MATTERS
Further reading
When you fail to obey YOUR CLOCK – trillions are impacted
Stuck in the warm dark gut, your gut microflora depend on you to tell time. If you get it wrong, they get confused. And this is T-R-O-U-B-L-E.
Not sleeping in the dark, might be making you FAT
You’re a regular Jo, most nights, you climb into bed and ……………you’re off to dreamland. Sleep issues don’t explain your weight problems. Not so fast…….
Why midnight feasts cause bigger hips
If you eat, when you should be asleep, the enzymes contracted to work the night shift clock in for work, but they don’t do the work, so fat burning ceases.
Want to know more about your body’s clock ?
Join our mailing list to receive weekly science based tips & strategies that will help you optimize your health and the health of your family.
NOTE : Privacy & spam policy. Spoonful of Science will not rent, trade or sell the e-mail list to anyone. You can unsubscribe at any time by following the unsubscribe link.