Mastering Your Internal Symphony

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You say our bodies are a symphony of clocks. Now, what happens if the conductor goes missing? Are most of us living out of rhythm without even realizing it?

Most of us are definitely living out of rhythm. So we wake up tired, we're going to bed late, we're eating at off times, we're stressed. I mean, basically you would look at our culture and say, gosh, nobody is really living in rhythm. And the biggest thing that is throwing our conductor off rhythm is artificial light at night. So having that electric around us when it should be dark is really disrupting our eyes, which is sending the wrong signal to the conductor, which actually lives in the brain. So within the brain, we have this cluster of 10,000 to 20,000 neurons. And when the light comes into the eyes, then signals what you're calling the conductor in the brain, then we get the release ultimately of melatonin from the pineal gland, which then goes to all of the different cells in the body and synchronizes all of our clocks. So every night we are essentially being pulled back into that natural rhythm. But like you said, the conductor can go missing or it can be disrupted in some way.

Or he has to go to a party.

Things happen. Yes, there's social jet lag, all kinds of things.

Yeah.

I would also assume that natural light is very different than artificial light.

Yes.

Or is your brain going to interpret them differently or what happens there? You know, how would you hack this? Like, I was just in Ecuador for, 11, 12 days with the Amazon indigenous tribes. I kid you not.

That's amazing.

And as we're going through this, I'm realizing that was actually a really interesting experiment about circadian rhythm. Because they, it's Ecuador, it's right at the equator, their days don't change. And so it becomes light every morning at 6, it gets dark every night at 6. Because of that, they go to bed at 6 o'clock at night and they get up around 2 in the morning.

Right.

Which is wild to me. The women get up around 2. Because they do all this work for the men. That was also wild for me. I was like, "This is interesting." And the men kind of start around 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning. Everything is dictated by natural light, you know? So what happens when things get disrupted with this light is, can we do it if we, let's say, are living in Iceland and it's winter?

We can. I think the bottom line is we just have to follow nature's rhythms. So when you were in the Amazon and it gets dark at 6:00 PM, that's the proper signal to go to bed. And then you just need 7 to 9 hours of sleep. So waking up at 2 to 3:00 AM makes sense. Mm-hmm. So there is what is called the, a different phase of that circadian rhythm. And we do that all the time. We do it seasonally. So even now it's winter. You live in Florida, I live in the Pacific Northwest. We have different phases and circadian rhythm just by nature of the different amounts of light and darkness that we have. So if we just follow that, whether we're in the Amazon, in Iceland, wherever we are at different times of year, that will bring us back into rhythm.

But then I look at places like Iceland. Well, what happens during the summer, or Alaska? You know, these places where they have daylight most of the time. Are you just getting a whole lot less sleep? What's going on? Is that following the natural circadian rhythm of living in a place like that?

Well, there are ways to, essentially move into a better rhythm if that isn't suiting the individual. But if you are living there, not just visiting there, but actually living there, I would think that, you know, after some time the body acclimates. It's the same in the north part of like Scandinavia, like Sweden. I have Swedish relatives. I went to go visit them up in the north. They don't even have curtains because they move with the sun. So they wake up with the sun, they go to bed when it's dark. So I think that we are missing out on something that traditional cultures have long adhered to, which is You go to bed when it's dark and you wake when it's light. Now, if we are forcing a different type of environment where we are artificially creating the light at night, mm-hmm, I think that's where it becomes disruptive. And the reason why is because when we are in Alaska at certain times of the year, our hormones are tethered to that rhythm. Then the hormones are actually connected to the metabolism, right? So we may need a little bit more in the way of certain hormones. Certain metabolic changes to get us through those periods of excessive light. Everything is tethered. The way I think about it is in 3 parts. Time is first and foremost. There's an access to think about. So time, hormones, and metabolism in that order. So when we are just thinking about hormones and we don't think about time, it's an incomplete flow because time will set the stage for the entire clock. So there are certain times to do certain things and certain times that certain hormones are released. So if we adhere to the time, then we have the proper secretion of hormones, which will then move us through certain metabolic pathways in the order that they need to be unpacked in the body.

How many, I mean, looking at our metabolic health right now and, you know, the latest stats, which I don't even think are the latest stats of the 7% of us, less than 7% of us are metabolically healthy. Saying that very provocative statement, of time first, then hormones, then metabolism. How much of our poor metabolic health do you think is because we're living out of sync?

I think it's probably the majority. I mean, of course it's ultra-processed food, it's being sedentary, but a huge portion of that is also sleep disturbance. So in fact, when we think of circadian syndrome, where we have issues with lipids and body weight and blood pressure, there is the circadian syndrome now, which has an overlay of sleep disturbance. And also mood disorders. So even if we think of the pandemic where people were off their sleeping rhythm or they were eating at different times, because when we think of that conductor, the conductor, its first signal is truly light and darkness. The second round of conductors through would be eating, activity, and even social activity. All of that makes up kind of like a second tier. So when you throw one of those signals off, it throws the entire circadian rhythm off. And then we start to see which would be called in the literature chronobiological diseases. So things like sleep apnea can be connected to this whole array, this whole metabolic dysfunction, right? In fact, so many different diseases I could probably trace back to circadian dysmetabolism.

And so, you know, we've always thought that things like obesity cause sleep disturbance, but it could be that the sleep disturbance is causing the obesity.

And we got it all wrong and you're really looking at light as this really powerful drug.

In fact, if you put it first, I would argue that maybe it's the most powerful drug. What about sunlight? How could— I mean, seems that sunlight, you know, when we think about getting up in the morning and waking up, that sunlight could be the most powerful drug out there. And then on the flip side of that, we would also need darkness, but yet we don't get darkness. I mean, when I was in the Amazon, we did, right? Because we were finally in a place we were sleeping under thatched roofs outside with a lot of mosquito netting and DEET. But I know, I was like, they're like, "Use natural." I go, "Do you know where I am?" Right, right.

Well, at least you had certain other things that were more in balance than living in the United States. You know, when I think about light as a powerful signal, it is. And I think most people recognize that. Most people think in their minds, "Oh, sunlight, good, connects to my mood, connects to vitamin D." But, We don't actually honor it. We still spend a lot of time indoors. And in fact, I think that one of the most important things is to actually biohack your light and darkness. If you don't measure your light, you don't actually know what you're getting. So I use an app called Light Meter Lux.

I didn't know there was such a thing.

There is. It is so simple. You open it up on your phone, you put it at eye level, and it measures luminosity. So 1 lux is equal to a candle flame 3 feet away. So ideally what you want at night is 0 lux in your sleeping room. So no luminosity. But you know, if you have a little, you know, smoke alarm, I mean, that's not going to have an impact. But something like this room with a lot of lights, I mean, we would be probably a couple thousand. So that starts to change things. But during the day, that's a healthy signal. So if we were to go outside at noontime and it's a sunny day, we would probably get 15,000 to 25,000 lux. So thousands, right? But as we move through the day, we are going to see a reduction in the lux or the luminosity. And also the colors of the light are changing. So we're waking with that full spectrum blue light and a little bit of red, and then it gets more blue, blue, blue. And then we start to move back into that reddish orangish light. So it's not just the luminosity, it's the colors of the light. And so I do think light is, is huge and it's important for the skin. It's important for the eyes. There is so much changing even with eye health. Here we are with our glasses.

I know.

I mean, but essentially with people on so much tech and devices, what is happening as we get older is that the lens of the eye starts to get a little bit more cloudy. So we are better able to filter out blue light as we get older, just naturally through our eyes. But because it's more cloudy and the lens of the eye is something that it's very difficult to reverse its aging. As we get older, we need more light, more luminosity in the morning. So we really need to set that morning signal even more. So if we just walk through the circadian clock of the day, maybe everybody can kind of see like what to do when ultimately. But that's really important because eye health is really declining. People are having issues with their retina and that's where a lot of that signal back to the conductor of the brain to set the circadian rhythm is. So when you tend to your eyes, you're actually tending to that conductor that sets your rhythm. So getting your eyes examined, making sure that you have enough lutein, zeaxanthin— these are plant compounds in the diet— to protect the macula from the blue light. And again, the body just has this intelligence where lutein travels— once you've eaten it in plant foods, it'll go into the back of the eye and protect the macula from that blue light. And will also protect the eyes from things like age-related macular degeneration.

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