Dr. Sheri Johnson

People with bipolar disorder often struggle with something called circadian rhythms.

Really what that means is day-night rhythms.

Many times people with bipolar disorder can feel very sluggish by day, and then they're more awake than other people are at night.

So we think that circadian rhythms are part and parcel of what's going awry for many people with bipolar disorder, and that maybe if we can improve those circadian rhythms, we can make a difference in the disorder and the outcomes.

All of us have a clock in our brains.

We have something called the suprachiasmatic nucleus.

And it's a timekeeper in your brain that sends signals out across your body.

And the suprachiasmatic nucleus responds to specific cues of light at dawn and dusk when a person is outside.

So we've known that, and scientists have been using light exposure at critical periods of day, using the same frequency of light that you get at dawn and dusk to help people improve their circadian rhythms for a long time.

What we got excited about is research coming out of Sachin Panda's work at Salk Institute showing that just as powerful as light is,

was when you fed an animal.

If you feed an animal during their most active period, you can strengthen the animal's circadian rhythms.

And he was able to show that that was great for the animal's metabolic health.

Many other people around the world began to work on clinical trials with humans to say, hey, could the timing of eating help people's metabolic health and their sleep patterns?

Nobody had done that in bipolar disorder, and that's what we wanted to do, is to say, can we help people adjust the timing of their eating, follow the kind of most active period of their day, and see if that improves circadian rhythms for people with bipolar disorder.

There are a lot of versions of time-restricted eating, and it's kind of part of a broader family called intermittent fasting.

We're using a really specific version of this, though.

We want to make sure that people just basically eat during their 10 most active hours.

So wait an hour or so after you wake up to have your first calories.

And then a couple hours before you go to sleep, quit the eating.