Falling Back: The Time Change & Your Body

Is there any American who won’t be saying, “Hallelujah! I get an extra hour of sleep!” when they turn in this coming Saturday night?

Let’s face it: Most folks see the end of Daylight Saving Time as a very good thing – and it’s onset, a very bad thing. As if losing that hour of sleep weren’t enough to make you a little bit cranky, each spring, there are countless media stories about how DST may be “bad for your health.”

But you hardly hear anything about how the change back to Standard Time affects us – and affect us, it does. Any change does. Just as you constantly making steering adjustments so your car maintains a steady path on the road, so your body is constantly makes adjustments on its path through life, as well.

The biggest change, of course, is the disruption of your body’s internal clock, or circadian rhythm. According to one study in Sleep Medicine Review,

The autumn transition is often popularised as a gain of 1 h of sleep but there is little evidence of extra sleep on that night. The cumulative effect of five consecutive days of earlier rise times following the autumn change again suggests a net loss of sleep across the week.

This cumulative sleep loss, in turn, can stress out mind and body in a big way. Research on circadian rhythms has shown that “clock genes are active in almost every cell type in the body…. In effect, tiny clocks are ticking inside almost every cell type in our body, anticipating our daily needs.” When those clocks get out of sync, we really feel it. When they’re out of whack, we’re out of whack.

Another oft-noted concern is the onset of seasonal affective disorder as our days become shorter and darker. This was the focus of a study published earlier this year in Epidemiology, which analyzed data from more than 185,000 individuals who contacted hospitals in Denmark for help with episodes of depression.

The researchers found an 11% rise in depression cases during the transition back to Standard Time, with episodes dissipating over roughly 10 weeks. There was no similar change during the shift from to DST – only during the shift back to Standard Time.

This study shows that the transition from summer time to standard time was associated with an increase in the incidence rate of unipolar depressive episodes. Distress associated with the sudden advancement of sunset, marking the coming of a long period of short days, may explain this finding.

If continuing depression is an issue, work with a good counselor can be a blessing. An integrative physician may also be able to recommend non-pharmaceutical therapies that can be a support through this time.

But where sleep loss is the main issue, there are things you can do to make the transition easier, starting with simple acceptance of the fact that your body’s internal rhythms are going to be shaken up a bit, at least temporarily. For most of us, it takes some time to adjust.

One thing that can help is keeping to a regular sleep schedule as much as possible – going to bed and waking up at roughly the same times each day. Regular exercise – again, at a set time – can also be extremely helpful for getting your internal clocks in sync again.

Keep your mealtimes regular, as well, with no eating after 8pm. At that time, your body is starting to move toward the sleep side of the cycle. Eating late makes new demands on it when it should be moving toward rest.

Also helpful is to keep light-emitting devices like TVs, smartphones, and tablets out of your bedroom – or, at the very least, using blue light filters to reduce their effects. (Blue wavelengths tend to make you alert – the last thing you need as you’re trying to wind down.)

Utlimately, though, your best friend? It’s routine.

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When It Comes to Your Health, Small Changes Can Yield Big Results

Conventional medicine is set up in a way that keeps patients mostly passive. Doctors do the fixing. Patients are fixed. Doctors say, “This is what we’ll do.” Patients acquiesce – “Doctor knows best,” and all that.

Sure, plenty of folks consult “Dr. Google” first and come in with their own ideas, but whatever they opt for, they still ultimately put themselves in the position of being treated, not taking an active role in their own health and well-being.

In his excellent book Confessions of a Medical Heretic, Dr. Robert Mendelsohn suggests this happens when people become alienated from, even fearful of their bodies.

When you fear something, you avoid it. You ignore it. You shy away from it. You pretend it doesn’t exist. You let someone else worry about it. This is how the doctor takes over. We let him. We say: I don’t want to have anything to do with this, my body and its problems, doc. You take care of it, doc. Do what you have to do.

No doubt, when you’re used to that kind of dynamic, taking charge of your health can be a daunting prospect. It can be hard to make the changes you need to minimize your risk of developing chronic illness. You get to thinking you need to do it all in one fell swoop: get active, throw out the junk and replace it with healthful whole foods, change your schedule so you get enough and better sleep, develop strategies for managing stress…

While there is some research that suggests making lots of health changes at once may be effective, who says you have to do it all at once?

Let’s consider just the matter of diet. According to a study published earlier this year in the New England Journal of Medicine, even small, incremental changes can have big impacts.

Researchers analyzed data from nearly 48,000 women and over 25,000 men to assess the quality of their diets.

Researchers found that a 20-percentile increase in people’s diet-quality scores was linked with an 8 to 17 percent reduction in a person’s risk of death from any cause over a 12-year period….

In practical terms, a 20-percentile increase in diet-quality score can be achieved by swapping out just one serving of meat, which is 4 ounces of red meat or 1.5 ounces of processed meat, for one daily serving of nuts (about a handful) or legumes (about one tablespoon of peanut butter), said Mercedes Sotos-Prieto, the lead author of the study and an assistant professor of food and nutrition science at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio.

That’s hardly a monumental change. And one of the things about success is that it tends to lead to more success. As you eat better, you start to feel better, and that becomes motivation to keep going in that direction, improving your diet even more. It also makes it easier to make additional changes, such as adding exercise to your routine or finding new ways of managing stress. (You’ll find more tips for reaching your goals here.)

As you continue to embrace the keys to Radiant Health, you may want to take things even further – say, regular detox or immune boosting through IV therapies, regular acupuncture to keep your body in energetic balance, and more.

So maybe you start with just cutting back on processed grains. Or maybe you start by cutting out all added sugars. Later, you might start including a wider variety of vegetables or opt for more fish.

Start small and build on your victories. As they say, a journey starts with just one step – however small.

Image by Lord of Pixels, via Flickr

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The Hazards of Binge-Watching, Sleep Edition

Just as your body needs oxygen, food, and water to go about all its daily business effectively and efficiently, it also needs sleep. Quality sleep. Sufficient sleep. It is, after all, one of the 8 keys to Radiant Health.

One thing that can get in the way of that? Binge-watching.

Recently, a research team, led by Liese Exelmans of the Leuven School for Mass Communication Research, surveyed just over 400 young adults, asking about fatigue, insomnia, and binge-watching habits.

Most of the sample (81 percent) reported that they had binge-watched. Of that group, nearly 40 percent did it once during the month preceding the study, while 28 percent said they did it a few times. About 7 percent had binge-viewed almost every day during the preceding month. Men binge-watched less frequently than women, but the viewing session nearly doubled that of women.

Respondents indicated they slept, on average, seven hours and 37 minutes. Those who binge-viewed reported more fatigue and sleep quality compared to those who didn’t binge-watch.

How come? “Increased cognitive arousal prior to sleep,” said the authors.

“Bingeable TV shows have plots that keep the viewer tied to the screen,” Exelmans said. “We think they become intensely involved with the content, and may keep thinking about it when they want to go to sleep.”

A racing heart, or one that beats irregularly, and being mentally alert can create arousal (or pre-sleep arousal) when a person tries to fall asleep. This can lead to poor sleep quality after binge-viewing.

“This prolongs sleep onset or, in other words, requires a longer period to ‘cool down’ before going to sleep, thus affecting sleep overall,” Exelmans said.

This means less deep sleep, too, and that’s a problem. Another recent study suggests that it’s the loss of REM-sleep – the phase when we dream – that may be the main cause of the health problems associated with sleep loss. “We are at least as dream-deprived as we are sleep-deprived,” said its author.

And it’s not just our mental and emotional involvement with shows like Game of Thrones and Stranger Things and Orange Is the New Black that’s the trouble. There’s all that blue light emitted by the tablets, monitors, and other electronic devices we watch them on.

Blue wavelengths boost attention, reaction times, and mood. This is great during the daytime, but not so much at night when it comes time to wind down and rest. While any kind of light can interfere with your body’s internal clock – its circadian rhythms – blue light does so much more powerfully.

Harvard researchers and their colleagues conducted an experiment comparing the effects of 6.5 hours of exposure to blue light to exposure to green light of comparable brightness. The blue light suppressed melatonin for about twice as long as the green light and shifted circadian rhythms by twice as much (3 hours vs. 1.5 hours).

In another study of blue light, researchers at the University of Toronto compared the melatonin levels of people exposed to bright indoor light who were wearing blue-light–blocking goggles to people exposed to regular dim light without wearing goggles. The fact that the levels of the hormone were about the same in the two groups strengthens the hypothesis that blue light is a potent suppressor of melatonin.

While we experience sleep loss through things like daytime tiredness, crankiness, and muddy thinking, as we’ve noted before, skimping on sleep can ultimately drag down your overall health. A recent item in The Australian offers a pointed summary of what happens when you get even one hour less sleep than you need.

With less sleep your heart rate goes up, your blood pressure rises, your stress hormones surge, your growth hormones fade, your hunger hormones increase, you eat more calories (and especially more sugar and fat) and your arteries fur up. Your brain makes extra little parcels of endocannabinoids, the same chemicals that give dope smokers the munchies.

We’re not even halfway yet. Your cells start to ignore insulin (a precondition for type 2 diabetes), your testosterone levels sink to those of a person 15 years older, your testicles shrink and your sperm die (if you’re a man), your egg release hormone dives (if you’re a woman), your emotions run riot, your DNA gets scrambled like a pack of cards in a wind tunnel, and your immune system tanks. One British study suggests that sleep deprivation produces changes in the blood similar to your body preparing to be stabbed. And to top it all off, you look shiftier and less attractive to the opposite sex.

Keeping that stuff from happening should be plenty good motivation for spreading your viewing out over time – or at least making the binge just a sometimes thing.

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