Circadian Rhythm and Sleeping

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

Trouble Sleeping or Poor Sleep

I write about this today because I am a person who has trouble sleeping. I just came across this article in AOL news about poor sleep and found it very interesting.

Basically it states that a lack of sleep can contribute to a host of negative health effects, and through research they have found out why.

There study with mice showed a gene called SIRT1 which regulates circadian rhythm and sleep, which is also linked to aging this study was published on the 20th of June in the journal called Cell.

The findings may explain why the risk for diseases such as cancer and diabetes increase, all because of your circadian rhythm being disrupted. Circadian; being, having, characterized by or occurring in approximately 24-hour intervals.

What that means is a 24-hour cycle of light and darkness, disruption is common among shift workers, and has been linked to a number of diseases such as diabetes, cancer and obesity.

Sean Hagberg, PhD, assistant clinical professor of neuroscience at the University of New Mexico and head of scientific community relationsat the CellHealth Institute, said your circadian rhythm keeps your body in line, and helps ensure that your body processes occur when they are supposed to.

“The circadian rhythm organizes all of the timing of all the activity in your body like your personal calendar,” he said. “Imagine what it would be like if you didn’t keep a calendar?  Nothing would happen on time and even less would get done.”

Circadian Rhythm and The Gene SIRT1

Evidently we all have this SIRT1 gene, however for research purposes they engineered mice with different levels of the SIRT1 gene and found that the mice with lower levels of the gene had a more difficult time adjusting their circadian clock as the day wore on.

SIRT1 levels decrease as we age so the disruptions to your internal clock cause more damage. Adjusting the levels could fix the disruptions and help to ward off the diseases associated with your circadian rhythm.

Dr. Leonard Guarente a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology states that ”Just about everything that takes place physiologically is really staged along the circadian cycle,” also ”What’s now emerging is the idea that maintaining the circadian cycle is quite important in health maintenance, and if it gets broken, there’s a penalty to be paid in health and perhaps in aging.”

Dr. Guarente has also stated this, ”If we could keep SIRT1 as active as possible as we get older,then we’d be able to retard aging in the central clock in the brain, and health benefits would radiate from that.”

But a therapy to increase SIRT1 wouldn’t help unless people took steps to help their circadian rhythm on their own, Dr. Hagberg said.

“The basic problem for humans is that we have organized our lives to prevent ourselves from having good circadian rhythms,” he said. “The key component is sunlight during the day and darkness at night, but most of us spend the day indoors and with artificial light at night.”

So instead of waiting around for a gene therapy to help fix your circadian rhythm, Hagberg said to just take a walk outside.

“The simplest thing you can do to improve your circadian rhythms and improve cell function is to get out in the daylight,” he said.

I was interested in this article because I am getting older and I also have diabetes. My circadian rhythm is not in a very good place I must say.

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