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| LIVING
BY THE BODYCLOCK
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By Anil Bhatnagar  Are
you a "morning person" or do you function best after dark? Learning
about your special timings will help enhance the quality of your life
and get you in sync with the universal biorythmEveryone's catchall advice about how to cope with life today follows the same lines: "Be Regular, Understand how your Bodyclocks and Trust your Instincts." Okay, you say, but everything in the whole wide world is conspiring against our trusting our instincts, trusting our bodyclocks, trusting anything at all in this universe. The "universe" (as Dr Wayne Dyer puts it in his book You Will See it When You Believe it) means one song (unit is one, "verse" is song). It is a song that is well orchestrated, and anything out of step with it is an anomaly that will eventually fall by the wayside in times inexorable forward journey. The problem is that the blast of cacophony in the celestial symphony—the anomaly—is us. As the years go by, we fall into human error and out of sync with the universe biorhythm. The problem is compounded by the fact that we can't stop the heartbeat of the universe. But we can try to get back into step with it. For, like it or not, you are on your own when it comes to fixing your bodyclock—you are either a morning butterfly or a night moth. Morning persons are beloved of parents as well as homemakers. "Early to bed and early to rise/Makes you healthy, wealthy and wise" is their anthem, perhaps boring to the extreme but certainly the best for health. Morning persons are introverts by nature. Their lives are said to be functional and conservative. You won't find adventures here. In many societies, a night person is considered dark and unfathomable. Dracula wore night like a cape around his shoulders, Mary Shelley allegedly wrote her novel Frankenstein by the light of a candle of whale tallow. Most Greco-Roman tragedies reached their crescendo at night. Almost all aesthetes—artists, thespians, the whole creative zoo, in fact confess that they work best after dark. Serial killers, sociopaths, politicians and vampires are creatures of the night. Most wars all down human history began after eight p.m. In contrast, most wars down human history were concluded at mid morning. Florence Nightingale did most of her rounds and saving lives by the light of the sun, not as legend would have us believe—by her trademark lantern. The one way you can discover which part of the day is your natural ambiance is by marking, on a scale of 1-10, your temperature every four hours and alertness levels every hour. Morning people, whose temperature begins to plummet before 8 pm, are anatomically inflexible, reaching a body temperature and alertness peak on the dot in the early afternoon. Night people are more adaptable and also to conquer the demands of the body. We tend to fall asleep when our body temperature is on the decline and wake up when it begins is mercurial escalation. What is good for us is that neither category is fanatical about its identity; the truth is that the difference between morning and night people is never more than two hours. But your body knows the subtle difference; which is why it is always safer to take second or even third opinions—at different times of the day when it comes to measuring your blood pressure. Here's another mystery demystified: Why are Monday mornings called 'blue Mondays", Simple: over weekends, many of us tend to splurge on pleasure—saying up late, falling out of step with our inner rhythms, leading to a disruption of our sleep-cycle. Waking up on Monday Mornings thus entails getting up in the middle of our sleep-cycle, an incompleteness that dogs us throughout the day, rendering us lethargic, irascible, physically challenged and generally mean minded. |
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Only senior military officers love what Monday mornings do to soldiers; they put them in a frame of mind where they are courageous, to the point of being foolhardy. The wily Napoleon, in fact, is said to have noted that even if he had a ragtag, unruly army and if every day were a blue Monday, he could win any war, anytime, anywhere. As for that biggest bogeyman and mass murderer of the second half of the 20th century, stress, the main culprit is the desynchronization—read "messing up"—of our daily life cycle. THE BODY METRONOME Five different rhythms govern our bodies: ultradian (less than 24 hours); circadian (about 24 hours); circaseptan (weekly); circatrigintan (monthly), circa-annual (yearly). Ultradian: Heartbeat (almost one per second), breathing (4-6 seconds) brainwaves (fractions of a second) and 90-minute cycles (hunger, attention span, urination rhythms, sleepiness). Each sleep-cycle consists of 5-6 ultradian cycles that last for 60-90 minutes each. The first cycle begins with REM (rapid eye movement, or dream sleep) of 5-15 minutes, then drifts through phase I to IV, where it stays for 10-15 minters and returns to the basic REM, which keeps getting longer as the night progresses. Good for us: Nature has guaranteed that if we don't dream adequately, we end up psychotic. Circaseptan: The common cold, heartbeat, blood pressure, body temperature and hormone levels are circaseptan rhythms. Even the probability of the rejection of a transplanted organ increase after every seven days. Circatrigintan: The menstrual cycle, including the so-called Dormitory Effect, a rhythm discovered by chronobiologists that is most evident in the fact that the physical bodies of women sharing the same room tend to adjust their menstrual cycles to each other till they start menstruating at the same time. The average menstrual cycle duration is 29.5 days, well in match with the lunar cycle. Circa-annual: Cases of mental depression peak during winter. In fact, people often suffer from the common cold, flu and viral fever at almost the same time each year. In terms of the "soma-climate" calendar: children grow faster in summer. Suicides peak in May and accidents around late summer. Cases of arteriosclerosis hit the highest around January. Circadian: The daily cycles are the commonest and the best known of all rhythms. We all become sleepy at about the same time every day. Unfelt by us, our body temperature, blood pressure, cell division, ability to perform different types of activities—all follow a repeated daily pattern. What is interesting is that our daily cycles are slightly longer than 24 hours and vary from 25.6 hours (an average for a person 20 years old) to 24.3 years (60 and above). Of all rhythms, the circadian is the one that demands immediate corrective measures, because it is what we live by minute. Correcting the circadian rhythm: Spend 15-20 minutes in the sun every day, because sunlight can reset and normalize your rhythm. |
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| For happier days, read on: |
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| And if you want to tuck into bed, take these steps: | ||
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Going by the clock does more than merely help you wake and sleep in a regular
manner, almost robot-like.
Serious time management can either make you or break you. Here's how: | ||
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| COMMON
ILLS Colds, influenza and viral attacks have their own cycles, which begin in mid-October. Chickenpox, mumps and the slew of measles mutants strike usually during the first six months of the year. The only way to avoid being laid low is by not touching exposed parts of the body—the face, eyes, nose—with unwashed hands or hands that frequently touch cups, tabletops, door handles and similar familiar objects that can act as cirrus hosts. Powerful, narrow spectrum drugs have to be administered when they can do little harm to healthy cells. In fact, chronomedication is a growing discipline in the West and has led to pharmaceutical companies evolving production processes and priorities geared to the seasons and the day night cycles. An experiment a few years ago established the fact that patients with tumors caused by chewing betel leaves doubled their recovery rate when subjected to radiation at the peak of the patient's temperature cycles. All this is aggravated by cycles out of control; irregularity and inappropriateness of food intake, stress, weak immune system, accumulated sleep. Allergies: Susceptibility to allergies is higher between 7 PM and 11 PM than during the day. Schedule your day so that activities that force you to ingest substances are restricted to daytime and not when the sun goes down. Asthma: Drugs such as acetylcholine that slacken the breathing tracts and make respiration easier are more effective when taken in the late afternoon or early evening, which is a short while before antigens that spark off asthma reach their peak. The threat of an asthmatic attack is least pronounced at 3 PM when the bronchial tubes are most relaxed. The threat becomes worse around 11 PM peaking at 6 am and then declining till its trough at 3 PM Cancer : 2010 Cisplatin, an anti cancer drug, can damage the kidneys, and should be administered during the late after noon when the kidneys are working hard and secreting potassium. Cisplatin is counterproductive if it is taken late at night.
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