How to Get In Sync with Your Body's Clocks
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The Next Big Idea Daily newsletter (SUBSCRIBE) is written by me, Michael Kovnat , and gathers insights from today’s leading non-fiction authors. It’s a companion to our Next Big Idea Daily podcast, available on Apple or Spotify .
You're probably sick of hearing the advice by now.
"Don't look at screens for at least an hour before bedtime." "Don't sleep with a phone in the bedroom."
I can barely hear these harangues anymore, and have a hard time following them. Maybe you do too. If so, you and I both may be missing the larger picture. These are not just annoying guidelines for sleep hygiene from Luddite nags. They're part of an effort to get us to face up to biological reality, to admit that our bodies and minds are adapted to life on this planet, tuned to its sunrise and sunset, and that we ignore those markers at our peril. As tempting as it is to imagine ourselves citizens of an untethered technological sensorium, we are embodied creatures, and we can't pretend otherwise without consequence.
The fact is, as Lynne Peeples explains in her new book the The Inner Clock: Living in Sync with Our Circadian Rhythms, your body contains trillions of tiny timekeepers. Like pretty much all life on this planet, we evolved in an environment with daily, lunar, seasonal, and annual cycles. In order to survive, creatures like us needed to track these changes in order to exploit opportunities for mating, eating and other critical activities. And while we humans have recently developed things like artificial light, intercontinental jet travel, daylight savings and other time-shifting innovations, those clock-like mechanisms deep in our cells are still ticking away, trying to sync up the old-fashioned way.
Lynne is a science journalist and former staff reporter at The Huffington Post and her writing has appeared in The Guardian, Scientific American, Nature and other publications. on the Next Big Idea Daily podcast, she explained how ignoring our body clocks impacts our health, our mental and physical performance, and more.
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Hear Lynne explain how to tune into your inner clocks:
We also heard a lot of other big ideas on the podcast last week, like:
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Have a listen to these ideas and then go outside for some sunshine or get to bed! Your body's clocks will thank you.
By the way, if you're interested in having these and thousands of other big ideas right in your pocket, download the Next Big Idea app .
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1 个月Thank you, Michael Kovnat, now this is advice I actually wanted to hear! ??