Your body has an internal clock that dictates when you eat, sleep and might have a heart attack – all based on time of day | Healthly Virus

July 05, 2022

Your body has an internal clock that dictates when you eat, sleep and might have a heart attack – all based on time of day

Researchers refer to your biological clock, or circadian rhythm, as the "master pacemaker" that synchronises how your body reacts to the passage of one day to the next. Anyone who has experienced jet lag or struggled after moving the clock forward or back an hour for daylight saving time is well aware of this.

In the hypothalamus, the region of the brain close to the centre that regulates your body's unconscious processes like breathing and blood pressure, there are roughly 20,000 neurons that make up this "clock." Others than just humans have an internal clock system: All vertebrates, which include mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish, as well as plants, fungi, and bacteria, have biological clocks. Cats are most active at dawn and dusk, and flowers blossom at specific times of the day because of biological clocks.

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Circadian rhythms play a crucial role in maintaining health and happiness. They control how your body reacts to environmental stimuli like light and food throughout each 24-hour cycle, affecting your body's physical, emotional, and behavioural changes. They are to blame for the higher rate of heart attacks and strokes in the morning. They also contribute to the accelerated ageing and lower lifespans shown in animals lacking biological clocks, as well as the irregular sleep patterns observed in people with circadian clock gene mutations. Chronic circadian rhythm misalignment with environmental signals, as found in night shift workers, can result in a variety of medical and psychological illnesses, such as obesity, Type 2 diabetes, cancer, and cardiovascular diseases.

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In conclusion, there is plenty of data to support the importance of your biological clock to your health. And chronobiologists like me are researching how the day-night cycle impacts your body to learn more about how you may alter your actions to take advantage of your internal clock.

Your biological clock controls your sleep-wake cycles as well as changes in blood pressure and body temperature, all of which have an impact on your health. The main way it accomplishes this is by synchronising your endocrine system with the environmental light-dark cycles so that specific hormones are released in specific levels at specific times of the day.

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For instance, the pineal gland in your brain creates melatonin, a hormone that aids in controlling sleep in reaction to darkness. Because artificial blue light from electronic devices can interfere with the release of melatonin and the quality of sleep, doctors suggest limiting exposure to it before bed.

Your metabolism is also impacted by your circadian rhythm. Sleep assists you in regulating leptin, a hormone that affects appetite, among other things. Your circadian clock sets a rhythm for the daily variations in your leptin levels. Leptin production can be disrupted by insufficient or inconsistent sleep, which can increase hunger and cause weight gain.

Over the course of the day, your hormone levels change rhythmically. Cortisol, the stress hormone, often rises in the morning, whereas melatonin, the sleep hormone, typically peaks at night. iStock/Pikovit44 via Getty Images Plus

There are now even more ways that your circadian clock can impact your health, according to current research. For instance, current research points to the potential benefit of time-restricted meals in preventing obesity and metabolic disorders. It's possible that altered gene expression as a result of circadian control problems contributes to depression and other mood disorders.

When you take your medication might have an impact on both how effectively it works and how severe any potential side effects might be. The biological clock is also a potential target for anti-obesity drugs and cancer chemotherapies.

Finally, whether you are a "morning person" or a "night person" according to your internal clock may even influence your personality.

A possible solution to the question of what time of day is optimum to maximise the health benefits of exercise is offered by circadian clocks.

My colleagues and I performed this research by taking blood and tissue samples from the brains, hearts, muscles, livers, and fat of mice who exercised either before breakfast in the early morning or after dinner in the late evening. A mass spectrometer was the device we used to find the 600 to 900 molecules each organ produced. These metabolites provided instantaneous snapshots of the mice's reactions to exercise at particular periods of the day.

These images were pieced together to form what we dubbed a "atlas of exercise metabolism," which showed how exercise in the morning compared to exercise in the evening affected each of the mice's many organ systems.

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https://www.kxly.com/i/your-body-has-an-internal-clock-that-dictates-when-you-eat-sleep-and-might-have-a-heart-attack-all-based-on-time-of-day/

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aah4965

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