Jade Wu

Yes, it sounds jarring, it doesn't make sense. You're like, this is just noise, it's not music.

We might be really tired or have difficulty concentrating, can't remember stuff, can't react quickly. Also just be physically run down, tired, exhausted. unmotivated, lethargic.

And if you have other medical conditions already, like chronic pain or diabetes or high blood pressure, all those things are going to be more exacerbated or your symptoms are going to be worse when your circadian rhythm is misaligned from the outside world.

So humans, most of us have 24.1 to 24.3 hour circadian rhythms. So that means that left to our own devices, if we didn't have any work, school, lights, schedules, any cues for when we should be doing what, if we just lived in perpetual twilight in a dark cave, then we will naturally feel sleepy, go to sleep and wake up later every day. Wow. That's for most of us.

I stayed in exactly my house, but I had a baby, which means that my schedule got topsy-turvy, turned all the way around. And it felt like I had jet lag, even though I didn't go anywhere.

Some of us have 24.5 or even 25-hour rhythms.

Yeah, yeah. And these folks have a really hard time functioning in our 24-hour world because every day they're having to fight upstream basically to live in a 24-hour world when their body wants to live in a 25-hour world. And then occasionally someone's clock might be 23.8, for example. They're getting sleepy at 7 p.m. They're waking up at 3, you know, ready to go.

So it's not really helpful to be at either end of the spectrum of having too short of a circadian day or too long of a circadian day because our society runs on 24 hours.

Great question. So light is by far the strongest cue that we can have. Because if you think about it, your brain lives in a dark cave, right? It's inside your skull. It doesn't know what's going on in the outside world. Really the only way that it knows whether it's daytime or nighttime is is by how much light is coming in to your eyes.

So yeah, your eyes are not only the windows to your soul, but also the windows to your circadian rhythm. So ideally, you have lots of light coming into your eyes during the daytime, and that tells the brain, oh, hey, it's daytime. Let's send out signals to the rest of the body to get your metabolism running, get your body temperature up, and get everything up and running.

And then if there's not a lot of light coming into the eyes, then that's where the brain says, oh, okay, it's nighttime, so it's time to send out some melatonin, which is the messenger that will tell the rest of the body to close down the factory, to shut down the machines, and to start resting for the night.

Yes. So melatonin is a hormone that our bodies naturally produce, and it's really a time-keeping hormone. Sometimes people have called it the vampire hormone, the nighttime hormone, because it comes out at night. It starts to ramp up in the evenings as it starts to get dark, stays high through the night, and then goes away in the early morning hours.

And it's basically sending the message to the rest of the body. Hey, it's nighttime. It's time to shut down. Or, hey, I'm going away now that time. That means it's about to be morning. So start to ramp up those systems.

I would say melatonin is the most misunderstood supplement in all the world. And that's because people tend to think that melatonin that you can buy over the counter is a sleep aid. And it's not, it's really just synthetic melatonin that tries to mimic what your body naturally produces. But the way that we often take it is not really helpful.

So often people are taking it at bedtime or close to bedtime. to help them sleep, so to speak. But by that time, your own melatonin is already high. So taking melatonin is either going to be just a drop in the bucket and not make a difference. Or if you take too high of a dose of melatonin, then it stays in your system and lingers into the morning when your melatonin should be going away.

So it's still going to be sluggish, lethargic. You know, it's not really going to get the machines running. And if you had to guess, What is the dosage of melatonin that people ought to be taking? What would you say?

Well, when we do use melatonin to help people with jet lag, with shift work, to try to shift the timing of their own natural melatonin release, we usually do it with a 0.3 to 0.5 milligrams.

Several hours before bedtime. So that's 10 times less than what's usually sold in the bottles. Three to five milligrams is usually what you see being sold on the shelves. And there's been a couple of really big studies showing that you know, just off the shelf melatonin is wildly inconsistent in their dosage.

So it might be up to five or even higher number of times as much melatonin as what's advertised on the bottle.

Correct. It's considered a dietary supplement. It's not regulated the same way that a prescription medication would be. So you don't know if you're getting any melatonin or too much melatonin. You might be getting serotonin or CBD or other stuff that is not, you know, labeled. Wow.

Absolutely. Yes. We need sleep like we need water and food. It's just foundational to our ability to exist and function.

If we try to ignore our lack of sleep or even the timing of our sleep, if it's wildly inconsistent or if it's just really misaligned with what our bodies naturally want to do, then we end up not only not functioning at our best, but we also end up putting ourselves on the back leg in terms of our health in the long run.

Jet-lag is when your body very quickly changes time zones so that your internal body clock becomes mismatched with the outside environment.

So we can have higher blood pressure, for example, and have more risk that's added or more risk that's accumulating towards heart disease. So, for example, we know that people who don't sleep enough and people whose sleep timing is very inconsistent,

If we look at them 10 years later, 15 years later, they're more likely to have heart disease, more likely to have cancer, more likely to have had some sort of fatal health event, or just to have passed away. So these cumulative types of health risks can add up really over the years.

And even things about our day-to-day quality of life, like if you have an injury or if you have chronic pain, not getting good sleep and not being on a good schedule will exacerbate that pain and exacerbate our emotion dysregulation too. So we have a harder time coping with pain, coping with stress, coping with anxiety, You know, things that happen that are out of our control.

So, yeah, emotionally, physically, mentally, we're going to be affected.

What you can do is start to shift your circadian rhythm towards empowerment. your destination circadian rhythm. So for example, since you'll be traveling east, you can go to bed and get up a little bit earlier every day. Or if you have the freedom to do so, you could also go the other direction. You can go to bed later until you go halfway around the clock and you land on Australia time.

If you don't have the luxury of being able to shift your rhythm leading up to a trip, then the best thing you can do is just to try to protect your sleep as much as possible leading up to the trip. Maybe even sleep a little bit more than you usually do. don't force yourself. If sleep doesn't come, it doesn't come, but give yourself the best opportunity to bank some sleep.

And then when you do get to your destination, use your best friend's light and naps to adjust to your new environment. So use light whenever you need to be awake, especially in the morning of work, whatever day you need to be awake. So that means going outside. That means using a light box and use naps to catch up on the sleep that you lost through the process of shifting your rhythm.

But don't nap too close to the time when you should be going to bed at your new nighttime. And then after a few days, hopefully you will have shifted over to your new schedule.

The circadian system should work like a symphony that plays in sync together and on time. If all our clocks run as they should and together in sync, then our circadian rhythms are doing great.

And so that's why when we get jet lagged or, you know, have a baby and your whole schedule goes topsy turvy, what happens is that your internal circadian rhythms, your internal clocks start to not play in sync with each other or start to shift. and they no longer match the day-night cycle that's actually in your environment.