Circadian Rhythms: Embracing Our Natural Cycles in Life

When I was at University, I was a surprisingly early-to-bed type person... compared to most of my peers who would be out partying all night. I just could never get myself to find the natural pattern of keeping "vampire hours!"

They thought I was a bit "weird" for going to sleep so early.

However, as the years rolled by, my tendency gradually became to stay up later and later, and to rise later and later. That is, if I was allowed to just do "my natural thing," independently of having to go to a job at a specific hour.

When I reached the point in my life where I was exploring the early parts of the internet, I found myself often being up till 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, and then going to bed, only just then getting sleepy... the exact opposite of my University days. Some of this had to do with being on messengers with a lot of people on the west coast while I was living in Texas, but some of it had to do was simply what "felt natural," at the time.

About a decade ago it seemed like my internal clock had rolled over and I was once again back to getting up very early in the morning. In fact, there was a time when getting up at 5:00 or 6:00 was quite natural to me.

And now, I am reaching a point where I am once again feeling more creative and energized late at night rather than in the morning.

What the Heck???

Being the curious sort of human being that I am, I decided to take a look at whether there was something actual and tangible and documented at work here, or if I was just plain weird as I often claimed to be.

As it turned out all human beings have something called "Circadian Rhythms." In general, that means that we are in tune with the planet which rotates once every 24 hours and our Circadian Rhythms are equally 24 hours long.

Within that, you're still going to have "morning people" and "night people," but they will remain consistently morning people and night people, unlike me who has moved between being a morning person and a night person and back again at least three times in the course of my life.

Except...

My research actually let me led me to the somewhat surprising realization that not everybody's circadian rhythms are exactly 24 hours long. Some of us are blessed (or cursed) with having an inner clock that is anywhere from 24 hours and a couple of seconds long to maybe 24 hours and 15 minutes long. Except for a handful of extreme outliers, poor souls.

Of course, when you set that against a day that is always 24 hours long you're going to experience a gradual shift in your sleep cycle, vs. the actual night/day cycle. And that seems to be what has been happening in my world.

My cycle is only a slight bit off from 24 hours in as much as it takes me on the order of 15 years to cycle through a full 24-hour period. That basically adds up to my "internal day" being about 24 hours and 20-something seconds long. 20 seconds may not sound like much but when you stretch it out over a period of years it adds up to something!

The slightly odd situation typically exists in the form of people's days being longer than 24 hours... and that's only in a very small percentage of the population, but in rare cases people also have shorter days and they move backwards through time, so to speak.

It doesn't really make me "special" or make my days weird, awkward or anything, but it is a "curiosity" that sometimes makes life a little bit challenging. That's especially true and I am in the part of my 15-year cycle where I am often wide awake at 4:00 in the morning. Of course I sleep through it because that's how the world works, although sometimes when I'm at that point in my life I will get up in the middle of the night and work on the computer for a couple of hours and then go back to bed. I'm going to reach that particular point in about 3-4 years.

I have no particular reason for sharing this story other than perhaps as an illustration of the fact that sometimes we think something is uniquely and weirdly wrong with us, when in fact it has a perfectly normal and scientific explanation.

Thanks for stopping by, and have a wonderful remainder of your weekend!

How about you? Have you ever heard of Circadian Rhythms? Have you always been consistently a "morning person" or a "night person?" Leave a comment if you feel so inclined — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — Not posted elsewhere!)

Created at 2024.04.14 00:27 PDT
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