Imagine you’re on a swing on a playground with a friend standing behind you. This friend is not a jerk, so they’re going to push you when a normal person would push you on a swing—right when you’re at the end of your backwards motion and ready to start moving forward again. They, like a …
So you want to help shift workers feel better—sleep better, be safer, have fewer of the long term chronic health problems that go hand in hand with shift work. How do you do it? Where do you start? As some of the most circadian-wrecked people around, shift workers have been the topic of no small …
NOOOOOO!!!! Noooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!! (To hear our actual stance on permanent DST, check out this blog post. Short version: we love getting rid of the seasonal time change, as long as we end up on permanent standard time, not permanent DST.)
The Circadian Code by Satchin Panda In keeping with the theme of new beginnings, this January we introduced a book of the month. Join us as we work our way through books that highlight the importance of circadian and sleep health 😴 Up first: The Circadian Code by Satchin Panda of the Salk Institute for …
As today is the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere (and the longest in the Southern Hemisphere), it seems appropriate to talk about how the seasons change our bodies’ rhythms. Many things change with the seasons, but the main seasonal variation that I will consider here is the variation in day length. …
Tis the Season: Seasonal Effects and Circadian Rhythms Read More »
Here’s a fun fact: You probably get way less light exposure during a normal work day than you would if you were out camping. “Sure,” you say. “That’s no surprise. At home, I have walls around me to block the sun. If I’m camping, I presumably have fewer walls.” “You don’t understand,” I say, leaning …
Rods, cones, and…ipRGCs? For almost a century and a half, it was thought that the mammalian retina had just two types of photoreceptors: rods and cones. That assumption was not proven to be false until studies in the late 1990s proved the existence of a third kind of mammalian photoreceptor that differed greatly from rods …
inTRO to ipRGCs ( Intrinsically Photosensitive Retinal Ganglion Cells) Read More »
I recently got some blackout curtains for my bedroom. This was pretty long overdue: about thirty feet from my bedroom window is a cheerfully bright, energy-efficient street lamp, which—while great when I’m taking the dog out for a nighttime stroll—is the photic equivalent of somebody standing in my azaleas and playing “Seventy-Six Trombones” while I’m …
Lately, I’ve been watching clips from the Olympics… …getting misty-eyed when the athletes hug at the end, and then stalking the winners on social media: a normal Saturday night in 2021. I have a shirt that looks like that, I think as I scroll through photos of them lifting approximately three times my body weight. …
I recently went on a trip to California. Coming from the East Coast, this was a three-hour shift west. To adjust to California time, I needed to delay my circadian clock. One catch, though: my flight out was extremely early in the morning. That meant, like it or not, I was going to advance myself …
