Set Your Biological Clock
In the depths of your organs, tissues and cells, biological timers beat that control appetite, sleep, mood and many functions essential to your health.
Perhaps during the weeks of confinement due to the COVID-19 pandemic you suffered from insomnia or drowsiness, excess or lack of appetite, fatigue and discouragement. The cause was not the virus, but the mismatch in your body rhythms because your habits changed: perhaps you stopped going out early, changed your meal times, or stayed at home for so many hours that your body lost connection with what was happening. out of.
During confinement the situation is extreme, but our loss of contact with biological and cosmic rhythms has been occurring since the electric light bulb was invented until today, when messages reach us on the phone at any time of the night.
The basic rhythm: day and night
The functioning of our body is governed by a basic clock that marks 24 hours a day and night. It is the circadian rhythm that marks the hours of activity and sleep in harmony with the natural periods of light and dark.
This clock is the wonderful fruit of the evolution of life on Earth under the eternal return of the Sun. The cosmic rhythm has been incarnated in a group of 20,000 neurons in the suprachiasmatic nucleus.
Just as a wristwatch does not stop working because we put it in a drawer, this natural pacemaker has achieved a certain autonomy, but it maintains the ability to synchronize with the Sun: when the light hits the eye, the information reaches the brain and a series of events is triggered.
When the first ray of sunlight caresses your face in the morning, your brain stops producing melatonin, the sleep hormone, and increases cortisol, which gives you energy to get going. As night falls, the melatonin rises again.
Are you sabotaging your internal clock?
We can congratulate ourselves on the functioning of our body, which does all these things without our realizing it. But this unconsciousness also causes us to sabotage our watch, such as when we hide the sun from it in the morning because we don’t feel like going out for a walk, or when we trick it at night by subjecting it to the short-wave artificial blue light of LED screens. .
Light invades our eyes when it shouldn’t and not only is our sleep disturbed, hundreds of secondary clocks are also thrown out of adjustment in the cells of the heart, muscles, intestines, liver, pancreas, fatty tissue or skin.
Alteration of the biological clock affects the microbiota
It is no coincidence that 40% of people with irritable bowel syndrome also suffer from insomnia, according to a study led by Dr. Liping Duan of Peking University. It is being investigated whether circadian imbalance affects the gut microbiota and whether probiotic supplements could help people who work during the night, who are among those most affected by alterations in their biological clocks.
The blood pressure and heart rate are other variables that obey the biological clock. Their analysis is crucial for the treatment of hypertension and heart conditions: experts in a new science, chronopharmacology, have realized that taking the medication before bedtime instead of in the morning can prevent 67 % of heart attacks.
The treatments could be carried out taking into account, even, the setting of the clocks in each person, which can be determined using tools such as the BodyTime blood test, by Dr. Achim Kramer, or the Kronowise clock, developed by Kronohealth under the doctor’s direction. Juan Antonio Madrid.
Seek harmony. The science of chronobiology has only taken its first steps. Many discoveries await us, but we already know how to set our clocks and benefit from living in greater harmony with the Earth.
Your body minute by minute
- Sleep occurs by increasing melatonin when the retina stops perceiving blue light sufficiently and the pineal gland begins to secrete it. With the first light of the morning the production is cut off.
- Blood pressure drops as you sleep. Two hours later it has fallen by as much as 20%. 3 to 5 hours later it begins to increase. Some people have hypertension
- morning.
- Body heat reaches its maximum between 4 and 6 in the afternoon and its minimum around 4 in the morning. In women, this daily rhythm is combined with the monthly rhythm of menstruation (it increases after ovulation).
- Attention is at its minimum between 1 and 3 in the morning, hours when the risk of an accident due to distraction is greatest. In the morning the cortisol hormone increases and from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. we are at the maximum level.
- The defenses increase after midnight because the bone marrow produces more immune cells of the CD4 and CD8 types. This biological rhythm is associated with the nocturnal production of melatonin.
The sleep hormone fights viruses
The main gear of our biological clock is greased with melatonin, the sleep hormone that is continuously secreted by the pineal gland from dusk until dawn.
Melatonin has many functions and one of them is to modulate the immune response. Several studies have analyzed its usefulness in reducing the severity of COVID-19 coronavirus infection.
This nocturnal hormone could help control the cytokine storm that can lead to death in patients, according to an article published by Rüdiger Hardeland of the University of Göttingen. In addition, it acts on the contagiousness of the virus by reducing the number of entry gates into cells (ACE2 receptors).
Staying in the dark at night and getting enough sleep are natural ways to produce melatonin, but a supplement can also be taken for therapeutic purposes.
