Ologies with Alie Ward - Chronobiology (CIRCADIAN RHYTHMS) Encore + 2023 Updates with Katherine Hatcher

Episode Date: March 14, 2023

Ahh, Daylight Savings Time: does it mess up your brain? What time should you go to bed? Are you sleeping enough? Is shift work really that bad? How dark is dark enough? The wonderful and hilarious Dr. Katherine Hatcher got her PhD in hormones, sleep cycles and circadian rhythms, and helps Alie dissect her terrible sleep habits. We also chat about a tiny magical area in our brains that acts as your body's Big Ben. By the end of the episode, you'll be in footie pajamas eager to change your whole life.Follow Katherine Hatcher on TwitterA donation went to the Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science at https://www.sacnas.org/Saatva is the exclusive sponsor of this episode! Head to Saatva.com/ologiesMore episode sources & links at alieward.com/ologies/chronobiologyencoreWondercon: Friday March 24, 6pm panelOther episodes you may enjoy: Somnology (SLEEP), Oneirology (DREAMING), Molecular Neurobiology (BRAIN CHEMICALS), Sports & Performance Psychology (ANXIETY & CONFIDENCE), Fearology (FEAR), Thermophysiology (BODY HEAT), Biogerontology (AGING)Transcripts & bleeped episodesSupport Ologies on Patreon for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, masks, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media & Steven Ray MorrisTheme song by Nick Thorburn

A special shout out to our sole sponsor, Saatva Mattress. So this is coming to you without a bunch of ads, just sponsored by Saatva. Saatva sponsored our series on dreaming the honorology episodes, which were so good. And since this one is also about sleep and I sleep on a Saatva, I also read books on a Saatva and lay around

and look at my phone on a Saatva, but the sleeping part's the best. A Saatva is like getting a first class ticket to slumberland for the price of a middle seat and coach. They're that good and they're also that affordable. Since I have gotten a Saatva, several of my friends and my niece have one too. It's been the most comfortable, the easiest to purchase.

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Halliward, back with another episode of ologies. I'm alive, y'all. I slept so many hours over the last couple of weeks dealing with this flu. Who, when are you listening to this? Are you turning the coffee pot on and feeding the dog? Are you on the 7 a.m. train to work? Is it your lunch break and you have half a burrito

spinning slowly in a microwave? Maybe the sun is setting while you walk to your car. Are you nursing a human who has decided to snack on your boo-bij at 4 a.m.? At least once a day, it seems we look at a clock and we're cranky about it. Myself very much so all the time. So we are here to talk about why.

But first, we're gonna talk about you saying thank you so much for supporting via patreon.com slash ologies for sending in your questions that way, for wearing ologies shirts and hats from ologiesmerch.com. We have some great new designs up by the by and for telling friends and maybe foes in-laws about ologies, keeping it up on the charts by rating it and subscribing on all of your devices

and of course for leaving a review. You know I'm gonna lurk them just like a gentle happy creep so I can read one back to you. And I'm just gonna sneak in here with a fresh one from 2023 from Kenyari Ruth 14 who wrote, listening to this podcast makes me feel like I'm eating my after-school PB&J and watching my favorite Disney Nat Geo Animal Planet show.

Thank you Kenyari Ruth 14. That is exactly how I wanted to feel. Also, I would like a sandwich currently. Also, as long as we're doing a little bit of fresh info, just a side note, if anyone is going to WonderCon in Anaheim this month, I will be there Friday, March 24th, 2023 for a 6 p.m. panel about climate change and art

with my friends from the organization Functional Magic who make collectible climate solutions gig posters and donate proceeds to rainforest charities. And we have a whole episode with my friend Andy Hall, I'll link that in the show notes. So I'll be there leading a panel. So if you're at WonderCon or you're thinking about going, come to our panel Friday, March 24th at 6 p.m.

and say hello, okay. Anyway, chronobiology comes from, you guessed it, our Greek friends. Always putting things in our word holes. So chronos means time, biology means the study of life. So it's a very real branch of science dedicated to understanding how temporal rhythms affect life. And that can be such as daily or weekly

or seasonal or annual rhythms. And circadian rhythms, let's break that down, circa means around, dia, a day. So those are the kind that a lot of us might be most bent about because those are the daily rhythms. So we're gonna get into it. So thisologist, I know from Twitter,

she hosts the podcast Endocrine Disruptors which dives into things like your adrenal glands and your ovaries and your nards and how your hormones get jacked. So she got her bachelor's degree in biology at the University of Tennessee focusing on biochem and her master's at Northwestern's neurobiology program with the focus, you ready for this?

Sex differences and circadian influence on alcoholic induced gut leakiness and implications for alcoholic liver disease. She loves this stuff. So since this interview, she's gotten her PhD at the University of Illinois at Urbanis-Jampaign and scored a job at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases as a Health Science Policy Analyst.

And she says her first research love is circadian biology but she's also fascinated by how hormones affect and are affected by daily patterns. So we get into it. Now, I wasn't able to make it to Illinois to record this but I was thirsty as hell for this topic. Quite frankly, I needed to be scared straight when it came to my shitty sleep patterns.

They're so shitty, they're so bad. So she graciously crammed herself into the world's tiniest sound booth in Illinois on a hot July day and we chatted over video screen about what happens in our brain when we sleep and when we don't sleep. We talk about jet lag and alarm clocks and how rest affects your gonads and chronotypes

and giraffes and eye masks and early birds and night owls and Botox and light pollution. So go tuck yourself in and let's wade together into the comfortable darkness with chronobiologist. Now, Dr. Catherine Hatcher. Hi, you're here. Hi. We've put you in a tiny booth across the country.

Yeah, and it's Midwest summer which means it's hot as balls outside. I'm so sorry. It's all right, Bill's character. Yeah, brains. Brains, brains, brains. And so now you are a neuroscience student, correct? Yes.

Are you, you're getting your PhD in neuroscience? Yes, I am. Oh my god, how did that happen? Oh geez, so I was one of those kids in college who thought I wanted to go to medical school and I joined this lab that they were studying the impacts of different compounds on circadian rhythms and looking at very basic science questions.

And so I joined this lab and I just wanted to do it to boost my resume. And I got about halfway through that semester and I was like, screw medical school, I don't like people. And I realized how much I really enjoyed scientific research. Well, the world did not agree with me and I didn't get into graduate school when I first applied.

Shoot. Oh no. I think I applied to like six schools and nobody accepted me and that happens. And so I went and taught high school actually for a couple of years and then decided to go back to school to get my master's. So I did a master's in neurobiology

and during that time I applied to PhD programs again and got in to two out of the four I applied. Nice. One of them was one that I had applied to originally and I was like, you guys didn't accept me the first time. I'm the same person. But I knew that I wanted to, this was actually my top program.

So I'm at the University of Illinois down in Urbana-Champaign, which is basically just a bunch of corn fields and soybean fields. So Catherine's worked on various neurobiology projects while there, but her PhD dissertation, by the by, is studying this class of compounds found in plastics and polyvinyl chlorides and makeup and fragrances

to see how exposure to them affects sleep quality and depression in women who are starting to go through the menopause or like myself, whose ovaries quit early randomly. So these compounds are called phthalates and that word starts with a P-H-T-H and phthalates appear to be just potentially terrible for your body and your endocrine system,

but they are awesome for a game of scrabble when you just have so many Hs. Going back, you couldn't have always been interested in neuroscience as a tie, because you can't really poke brains as a wee one. When did you get interested in science? So I'll be 100% honest. I was like the worst,

one of the worst people for this story because I hated science for a very long time. No, this is great. Yeah, I guess it's interesting, but I've always been fascinated by animals and I've always loved animals. And I should have realized, I think my sophomore year of high school

at my school district, we took biology. And so I remember taking biology and doing dissections and stuff. And we got to dissect fetal pigs. And this is gross, but whatever. So it was myself and two other people in a group dissecting this fetal pig. And then the teacher was like,

if you get the brain out in good quality, then you get bonus points. So there I am like challenge accepted. And then I just, the two guys that were in my group, they were like, nope, not touching that. And I was like, fine, it's gonna be me. So then it was me doing it. But then I thought at the time,

by the way, I did get the brain out and it was beautiful and my teacher was impressed. Did you do it? Did you have to crack it like a coconut? Yes, there's like an art to cracking skulls. Are you ready for Catherine Hatcher? Get ready for Catherine Hatcher. So you got this pig brain out.

Yes, so I got this pig brain out. That's like my first remembrance of like anything related to brain that fascinated me, but it was more from a curiosity mechanical standpoint. But I was also one of those kids that was super fascinated by like weird medical mysteries and stuff. So I had this interest in medicine and physiology and this curiosity about it,

but I thought that I didn't think that science was anything beyond medicine. Like I didn't understand what science was. My parents, like my dad's a lawyer, my mom's an art teacher. They have no idea like anything about science. So Catherine loved writing and being creative, but took an undergrad class in how muscles work

and thought, well, this shit's cool. I'll just go to medical school, which turned into I'll study biochemistry, which turned it to weight. I love psychology and human behavior too. So maybe neuroscience is like all of that. Yeah, I thought the questions were fascinating. I have some people in my family who have alcohol addiction.

And so this concept of like, how does alcohol affect the brain has been something that's been really interesting to me just as from a more personal standpoint. So I was kind of trying to slowly pursue those questions and then like it was this realization that, oh, science can be a career. You don't just have to be a medical doctor or a veterinarian

or a pharmacist or something to be in science. You can do so many other things. So time as always is ticking. So let's get to the nitty gritty of chronobiology. What is a circadian rhythm? How do you describe that to someone? So my favorite way to describe circadian rhythms is that they are their behaviors

or biological processes that exhibit some sort of 24 hour pattern, which means we see the same approximate peak and prof in that pattern every single day. So some examples of what these would be, I think the most common people think of is sleep and wake activity because that's obviously the most interesting to us just immediately.

We quote unquote sleep at the same time every day and quote unquote get up at the same time every day. Humans are weird because we can be conscious and make choices about when we get up or go to sleep. But generally most species, they get up and go to bed at around the same time every day. Is that just because that's when night falls and they're kind of more vulnerable?

Yeah, so there's some thought that your circadian rhythm at least with a lot of wild species or wild animals is gonna depend on whether or not you're a predator or prey and what you are hunting, what food is of interest to you. So an owl is going to be awake at night because it hunts mice, which are also up at night for the most part, most of them.

And so the owl is gonna of course be nocturnal because that's when its food is available. Hi guys, soup's on. Humans, I think we have not adapted to be functional at night most of, we're kind of weird, we've evolved to be able to make the choice of when we wanna get up or go to bed. But for the most part our food we were able to hunt

during the day or at the late parts of the day. Now you just take the Yelp app and you just toggle open now. You're like, what are my options here? 7-Eleven? Fine. Yeah, what's on Uber Eats today? What's, who's delivery fee is the cheapest right now?

I know, I wonder if that means that people say in New York where they have more open late options tend to have a different sleep cycle than people in say Sedona, which I visited and their late night eating options are shit. I ate fruit salad from Circle K after a wedding, sucked Sedona on blast. So if you get married in Sedona

have a late night food option at your wedding. Oh God, yes. Oh my God. Starving. Y'all, I drove around Sedona, Arizona at 10 p.m. Nothing was open. I went back to my hotel. I had to eat the inside of a soggy tuna wrap

with a spork in a cocktail gown. It was a beautiful wedding though. They're still married, I still like them. Also, a circadian rhythm is something internally driven but diurnal rhythms are just regarding the day or night cycle. So an outside factor like light or temperature that affects your internal circadian rhythms, that's called a zeitgeber,

which sounds like an Austrian word for like a wool bonnet or an antelope saddle. But yes, okay, light. But do you think that our environment even in the city versus a rural area changes the way that we sleep? Absolutely. Really?

I think, and I don't, there's probably some evidence in some research done looking at the differences between rural and urban populations. But I think there's kind of two major drivers, one of them being light and then one of them being food availability. But I think probably the biggest difference,

especially with humans, is gonna be the difference between light exposure while there might be some light out in the country, it's not gonna be as intense and bright as in the city where it's everywhere. You can't get away from it. Okay, so I ventured into the wilderness of research and I stumbled onto one 2014 Portuguese study titled,

differences in circadian patterns between rural and urban populations, an epidemiological study in the countryside. So after analyzing sleep questionnaires of a few thousand people, these Portuguese scientists found that compared with the urban population, the rural population had earlier sleep patterns,

nodoi, rural folks also tended to have less what scientists call social jet lag, which is when you sleep in later on your days off and then you feel wrecked on a Monday morning. But they did find higher light exposure in the rural population, a higher prevalence of psychiatric disorders in the rural population,

but fewer metabolic diseases. There was also a Bengali study and their sleep questionnaires revealed that urban adult populations had crappier sleep than the rural and the ladies slept the worst. So here we are thinking that the youth with their gaming devices and meme screens

and late night shenanigans have the crappiest sleep, but really we got a world of zombie moms and woozy women, hormones to blame, who knows? Now worst city in the US for light pollution, I looked into it and according to a study done this year by the website SleepChunky, Washington DC is the most light polluted. Sound pollution, you're wondering.

Look no further than my home, Los Angeles, which was rated the least peaceful place to live in America. I'm no data scientist, but is it any wonder that LA also ranks, and I look this up, the highest in the number of group ons sold for Botox? Let's just stay up all night, tossing and turning, and then easy peasy, inject botulism in our faces to look rested.

What could go wrong? There might be more of an inclination or maybe people who are night owls are more attracted to city life because there's more to do. Yeah, that's a good point, correlation, not causation. Yeah. And so why do we need circadian rhythm? So do they, does regularity make us healthier?

So I'll answer first question. So why do we need circadian rhythms? We know that our bodies have evolved, all species have evolved with this 24-hour pattern of light and dark. And circadian rhythms are more so related to the 24-hour day that we think of this 24-hour pattern of sunrise and sunset.

And so we've evolved to these conditions. So really we think that it's a way to optimize our biology and our behavior so that we can be the most successful in fitness and the most successful in terms of our reproductive ability, in terms of our survival. But the biggest thing is that we know that there's some sort of indirect or direct connection

between circadian disruption and health. What kinds of, say, negative effects happen when your circadian rhythm is screwed up? How am I gonna die? So there's thought that there's increased risk of cancers and yeah, I'm mainly interested in like reproduction and reproductive capacity. So I know that there's some changes in fertility,

there's changes in increased risk of reproductive cancers, there's increased risk of metabolic disorders like type two diabetes, there's increased risk of obesity, but whether or not that's a bad thing, we're not 100% sure. There's increased risk of stroke and heart attack. So I've even seen things as crazy as if we disrupt,

and these are in animals, a lot of these are in animal models, but when we disrupt circadian rhythms before an animal gets pregnant, the offspring has immunological deficiencies. Oh my God. So. Oh my God.

Yes. Oh my God, that's so hard. Why is this happening? What types of protein messengers? What is, do you have any idea from a structural chemical standpoint why this is? So there's this idea of internal synchrony among our different clocks.

So we like to say clocks in the field, of course, because we're talking about time. It's about time. So it's thought that each, like there's one part of your brain that's considered the quote unquote master clock that is called the super chiasmatic nucleus. So if you saw me on Twitter, my name is super chiasmatic,

there's a reason for that. I am a little bit of a nerd. Again, that Twitter handle at super chiasmatic, she's committed to this tiny, tiny piece of brain anatomy. And I respect that. But so this part of the brain actually sits right above the optic chiasm.

And so it's in the part of the brain called the hypothalamus, which is involved in regulating a lot of very basic systems in the body. So this little brain area receives direct information from light. It receives direct information from the retina, which gets stimulated when light hits it. So then that communicates chemically

to that part of the brain, then that part of the brain sends signals all over to other areas in the hypothalamus, to other areas outside of the hypothalamus in the brain, to the brainstem, which then those brain areas communicate to the body. So the hypothalamus, side note, is a small area in the center of the brain

that's partly responsible for hormone release. And the suprachiasmatic nucleus, SCN, is a teeny tiny part of that. And it registers info about light and dark and it sends signals everywhere, just to let your body know what's up out there. So there's this main clock in the suprachiasmatic nucleus, or SCN,

and that is thought to orchestrate everything going on in the body when it comes to light exposure. But then, yeah, yeah. So when light exposure goes wrong, but then outside of the body, or outside of the brain, there are other clocks,

like there's a liver clock, there's a clock in your gut, there's a clock in your stomach, there's a clock in your muscles. And when we talk about clocks, we're generally referring to a set of proteins and genes that have been shown to be rhythmic. And almost every single cell in the body

expresses these same genes, but we don't know their function in every area of the body. In the part of the brain I mentioned before, the SCN, again, suprachiasmatic nucleus, SCN, we know that they respond to light and then their rhythms change and respond to light, which is thought to lead to downstream changes in other proteins and hormones and other signals

that would communicate to the brain, the rest of the brain. But we don't know exactly their role in other body parts. So that's one thing that a lot of people are trying to figure out. So the concept of internal synchrony is that this SCN is at a specific pattern and all of your other organs and tissues are at a specific pattern every day.

But when something goes wrong, they get out of whack and they, quote unquote, desynchronize. And so it's thought that this desynchrony is somehow kind of tugging body, certain body functions to be performing when they might not supposed to be performing or the brain is trying to do something when the brain shouldn't be doing something.

Please, not now. It's probably much more complicated than that. But we don't, and I, like, I know there's some hormones that are thought to be involved in regulating it. So melatonin is a big one that a lot of people hear of. So when you're circadian rhythms or when light, you're exposed to light at night, your melatonin rhythms get screwed up.

When you're exposed to light at night, your cortisol or what's thought is your stress hormone, that gets messed up. So it's thought that those signals can also attach to different body areas and signal, hey, something's going wrong. And it's likely that the chronic exposure to circadian disruption is what's causing all of these issues.

So pretty much anybody in a city or suburban area is exposed to light at night. Oh, God. Wait, what is your... Tell me about your sleep hygiene. Out with it. Oh, God. So it's kind of ironic,

because I actually, like, run an Instagram account that's, like, dedicated to self-care and, like, mental health for graduate students. And I'm, like, one of the worst people to ask about this. Now, that's the bad news. First of all, like, I have what I like to call sleep procrastination, and I don't... I didn't make up that term.

I think this is a problem with a lot of people where we're like, oh, my God, I have so much to do. And so you watch Grey's Anatomy for 12 hours instead of doing anything. And then all of a sudden you're like, oh, it's 10, 30, 11 o'clock at night, I need to get stuff done. So then you work until 2 or 3 or 4 in the morning.

Yes, you've read my diary. You're reciting my diary. So I'm definitely one of those. I try to sleep better. And honestly, like, my sleep hygiene only needs to be adjusted when I start to get stressed out. That's when I tend to need to hone in. But most of the time I'm in my...

I'm on my phone in bed. I'm watching TV in bed. I'm so bad. But honestly, like, blue light. Yes, it's everywhere. It's everywhere. OK, so big cities have more light pollution. But what about the light you curl up with and personally

jam into your retinas before bed, the blue stuff? Should we all be wearing glasses like Bono? Catherine says that the SCN is most sensitive to blue light. Whereas red light, it's not picked up as well in the brain. So you still sense it, but it's not going to stimulate those cells that contribute to this light signaling in the brain. So we see it and probably has a minor effect,

but it's not as dramatic and as intense as blue light. Now, what happens if, let's say, hypothetically, you're a person who falls asleep with the lights on five nights a week? It's me. What is happening in your coconut? So I was thinking about this because I saw your question. And I think it would be because when we close our eyes,

we still see the light. The light is still coming through our thin little strips of eyelids. So you're probably being exposed to dim light at night, which is maybe not as bad as bright light at night, but it's bad. So all the things that you would expect to come from light at night are going

to be coming from having your light on while you sleep. So yeah. And the fact that you're doing it, the fact that you're doing it almost all of the time, yeah. Yeah. I've got to go around. Maybe you could get around it and put the orange lights or whatever they are in your bedroom instead.

And it wouldn't be as bad, but then it's hard to see things. That's very generous that you think this is occurring in a bed and not on the couch with a laptop under my face. So sleep procrastination. I'm going to research and aside on how to stop sleep procrastination. OK, so side note.

About five years ago, a group of scientists from the Netherlands identified this phenomenon of sleep or bedtime procrastination. And they defined it as, quote, failing to go to bed at the intended time while no external circumstances prevent a person from doing so. So that last half of the sentence is like, it's your own damn fault.

So what causes this? They think deficits in self-regulation or having ADHD or anxiety or perfectionism or work compulsion. I did some digging and one 2019 Turkish study entitled, life is short, stay awake. Death, anxiety, and bedtime procrastination found that a fear of being a corpse eventually is one cause for sleep procrastination.

So less time awake means less time to be conscious, to experience life's rich pleasures, such as watching dog videos and going down social media rabbit holes to see where your ex-boyfriend went on vacation. So I read roughly 17,000 different blogs and websites about how to stop. And there was advice like, take a nice bath at night and stop using your devices in the evening.

Give yourself an hour or a window to get ready for bed. Or on your to-do list for the day, set up bedtime first and then work backwards, scheduling your entire day. In essence, the advice is like, suck it up, realize your brain hates you for doing it, and then knock it off, dipshit. Or maybe you could just go banish yourselves to the woods for a while.

What about people who go on like circadian cleanses and they go camping or they don't use artificial lights for like a week? Does that reset anything? Does that help at all? It probably temporarily resets things, but let's be honest, if you go straight back to what you were doing before,

the purpose of circadian rhythms is to be able to adapt to changes. So we don't quite know if like one small disruption of circadian rhythms has lasting effects on the body. It probably doesn't. It's probably the chronic exposure, like I mentioned before. This is the chronic. So if you only go away for a week

and you're living in the wilderness with the moonlight, it's probably not gonna be as beneficial as just making more permanent changes at home on a regular basis. That makes sense. Now, what about animals? Are there any animals that have really weird circadian rhythms that are like up and down and up and down?

Cats basically don't have. They have circadian rhythms, but not in sleep wake activity. Really? How does that work? They just sleep all the time. They're carnivores. They don't have to worry about it.

They eat whatever the heck they want. Well, house cats, they're lazy and they'll eat whatever food you give them. But like if you think about cats, they've evolved to be just eat whatever the heck they want whenever they can get it. They're kind of at the top of their food chain. They don't have to worry about what food is available

and when, so they can kind of just be lazy and sleep like all the time. I think they sleep like 16 hours a day or something. Oh God. I know, right? But they're like koalas or something. Don't koalas and sloths sleep like 16, 8, 20 hours a day? Yeah, they sleep a lot.

I don't know the exact numbers, but they do sleep a lot, yeah. Side note, of course I Googled the animals that sleep the most and giraffes apparently all have cocaine problems because they sleep four to five hours a night, get up and take a spin class or some shit, I don't know. But giant armadillos, get this,

apparently sleep 18 hours a day and koalas and little brown bats have been observed snoozing for almost 20 hours a day. But they were curious about sloths so they fitted wild ones with little Fitbits or something and they showed they only sleep nine and a half hours a day. This is not too shabby. Sloths, sloths are like, yeah,

remember that time you needed a word for laziness? So you just called it us, get bent. What about some circadian flim flam? Any pervasive lies that you have a soapbox you wanna get on? I'm so excited about this question. So, let everybody know. Cercadian rhythm is not a thing.

There is not a circadian rhythm. Not singular. It's not singular. Cercadian rhythms, like the word circadian, literally means about a day. It's referring to rhythms that occur about a day. It's any rhythm in the body. You don't have a circadian rhythm.

You have circadian rhythms because there's so many different rhythms in the body that act on completely different patterns. So we can't just refer to one thing. Now, I get most people are referring to sleep wake activity that's generally what people think of, but that's just one example. So if you say go potty at the same time every morning,

that's a circadian rhythm in and of itself. Yeah, there is actually, there's like circadian rhythms in a lot of things. You think of it, there's probably one. Oh my God. Can I ask you a Patreon question? Yeah. Oh my God.

Okay, I'm getting to them a little bit early because we have so many. And I highlighted a lot. And there are so many questions that I want to ask, but I want the patrons to be able to ask them. So I'm just like, let's get into it. Okay. But before we get to your questions,

let's make some dreams come true and donate some money to a charity of the doctor's choosing. And this week she asked that it go to the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos, Hispanics, and Native Americans in Science. And this organization aims to further those students' success in obtaining advanced degrees, careers, leadership positions, and equality in the STEM field.

They are linked in the show notes to find out more about them. That is the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos, Hispanics, and Native Americans in Science. And the donation was made possible by a very special sponsor this week. Today's episode doesn't have a bunch of ads because it's exclusively sponsored by SOTFA. I love our sleep episodes.

I love our dreaming episodes. I love this circadian rhythms episode because sleep is so important. And even though we don't understand everything about it, we can all agree that we need it literally to live. And with a SOTFA mattress, you do not have to go bankrupt. You do not have to max out a credit card or borrow money from your stepmom

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Okay, Patreon questions. So many millions of them. ForestDots, hi Forest, says why is mine so fucked up and what can I do to fix it? Just straight up. So I have to say hashtag same. So I would say our circadian rhythms

most likely referring to sleep wake activity, like I was just saying. They can get really screwed up for a lot of reasons, but I think the most common for most people is lack of structure. So this might be an answer to a lot of questions, but having a very consistent routine, especially with when you're getting up and when you're going to bed,

and then when you eat food, those are going to be like the biggest, two most important scheduled things to have to help improve your rhythmicity. This just in, I looked it up, and rhythmicity is a real word. Our body loves consistency. Our brain loves schedules. Even a lot of us think that we don't,

but at least our circadian rhythms do. You have similar circadian rhythms to a mop, so you're not going to be like, you're not as in complex as you want to think you are. So having a consistent schedule, especially with light and food and sleep, those things are going to be the most beneficial for fixing your rhythms.

Oh my God, I feel very attacked, very seen. Allie Brava wants to know, what's the best way to get blue light in the morning so when you wake up before the sun comes up? Is blue light in the morning good for waking us up? It looks like there's some evidence for what they call dawn simulation. So it's similar to those fancy alarm clocks

that you can buy that slowly bring light or using a bright light simulator so you can have those desktop ones that people use for seasonal affective disorder. Using something like that in the morning can trick your brain into thinking, oh, the sun's up, it's morning, it's time to do stuff. So there's been some evidence to show

that that actually improves our attention and improves our cognitive performance in the morning as opposed to not using them. Are alarm clocks kind of evil when it comes to circadian rhythms or are they just a tool we need to stay on track to circadian rhythms? I think they're a tool we need.

Now, I've noticed mine has a really bright light that I can't dim so I should probably get rid of it and get a new one because I actually can see it through my eyelids when I'm trying to sleep. But yeah, I think they're more so a tool to kind of keep you consistently on schedule, especially when you have to get up

and go to sleep at a specific time of day and you don't have as much flexibility. Man, we need what we really need. Hear me out. We need alarm clocks that are sleep clocks that are like, and you're in bed. You know what I mean? Yeah.

Like, we need a 1030 alarm that's like, okay, all right, fucker, time to brush your teeth. Have you tried doing that on your phone? No, but tonight's might be night number one. Okay, side note, when it comes to waking up, if you're in the market for a new morning alarm clock, I looked for the weirdest for you. And there's one called Clocky that's on wheels

and it runs away from you until you catch it and turn it off, or I guess set it on fire if you want to. There's another that requires you to shoot a laser pointer at a target before the alarm shuts off. There are bedside mats you have to stand on before they'll stop wailing. There's the terrifying sounding shot clock that seems to zap your wrist,

maybe with an electric current until you accept that it's a new day. There's another that's called the Sleep Squad that utilizes a police siren every morning. I don't know why they called it Sleep Squad when they could have named it the Wakey Brigade. Also, I found a $450 option that makes pour over coffee at your bedside.

And I don't know why you couldn't just use like a $30 black and decker coffee pot with a timer instead. It's done in my business. But in terms of the most potentially sculptural, there is a contraption called a Dream Time Water Alarm. And it relies on you filling it at night and then a steady drip of water all night. Changes the balance on a scale until like a soft bell.

Ding, it's hit in the morning. It does not, however, spray you in the face, which is what I was looking for when I stumbled upon it. Oh, when it comes to light-based solutions, there are all manner of sunrise alarm clocks. They have great reviews. There are higher end ones by Philips that are a couple hundred bucks to like the $20 Home Labs options.

Because all of us know too well that the sound of an iPhone alarm brings deep, terrible morning dread. Now, what about if you use it the night before? You want it to know. Logan Levoe asks, is using my phone for a while before sleep actually fucking me up like my dad insists?

Mr. Levoe. Honestly, because we also have light and TV on, just your phone is probably not as bad as we want to think it is. There's a lot of other light factors that are fucking us up, let's be honest. But there is some thought that because of how bright it is and how close it is to our faces

that it might be more stimulating than a TV like across the room or a dim white light in your layup with a layup shade. So it is possible that it's more fucking upness but we're not 100% sure. New words, rhythmicity and fucking upness. So put those in your pocket. Now, a few of you had sleep mask questions.

I'm looking at you, Emily Reed, Julie Baer and Amanda Jay while I'm looking your direction but I don't see anything because of the mask thing. Do you have a sleep mask that you prefer? Do you sleep with a sleep mask? I do sleep with a sleep mask and I bought whatever was relatively affordable on Amazon. As long as it blocks out all the light

and doesn't like fall on my face, I sleep with a blanket on top of my head though to be honest because my partner snores. So... And I sleep with a sound machine and two fans because I'm a mess. I have a travel fan that I actually fly with me when I go places.

Oh my God, I love how prepared you are. I'm very picky when it comes to sleep so I try to do as much as I can to make it happen. There's this great invention I covered it on Innovation Nation and it's called a bee fan and it's a fan that sits at the foot of your bed and it goes up in the bottom of your covers and it targets just one person in bed

so if one person isn't hot and the other is and it goes up and it just like goes under your covers, it's so magical. It feels like you're in a marshmallow and yeah, it's called a bee fan. The guy who invented it invented it for his mother-in-law who was going through menopause. That's awesome.

Yeah, I know and it's like I've been in a bed with it and I'm like, oh that's really nice. Yeah, this is a side note but it's relevant to what we're talking about. Temperature is very important for sleep. People are like, I like to be hot when I sleep. No, your body actually decreases its temperature at nighttime so you sleep better.

It's actually better to have a slightly cooler space when you're trying to sleep. Do you think that's because evolutionarily we just got used to night being cold? Probably, like it's always relatively cooler at night than it is, I shouldn't say always but most of the time relatively cooler at night than it is during the day.

Okay, some of you wanted to know if sleeping under a tree outside might help your screwed up circadian rhythms like Anna Thompson, Monster Cat and Anita Sturzinski-S at home, I'm a night owl. When I go camping, I so easily fall into the rhythm of sleep when it's dark, awake when it's light. Why does this happen so readily?

And is that what my body actually wants? Yes. And you're probably away from a lot of light pollution and our bodies develop with this, our brains develop with this light dark cycle so if we go back to, again, we can easily adapt to the light cycles but this is naturally what we would normally be around.

Now, will it be the same in a thousand years if the planet still exists? When we've adapted to light pollution, I have no idea but at least for now we adapted and we evolved to normal light dark cycles being the sun and the moon and the sun and lack of sun. So, of course, we're going to feel comfortable

and happy and at least our sleep will when we're back with nature. That makes me want to go camping and cover myself in deep. Just do me a favor. Check your crevices. Thank you. Now, all of us, I'm sure, want to know about the blues and the blue light and anxiety and sleep

such as Evan Jude, Chris Brewer, Heath Allen, Becca B, Megan Lucien, Hannah N, Sarah Wingfield, Cranolation, Hassan N, Sarah Clock, Casey Rose, and Becky Baker says, why do I need to sleep 14 to 18 hours a day when my depression flares up? Also, asking for a friend, is that why some people have clean houses and obedient children?

So, oh, this is a good question. I think that I'm not 100% sure but I think that with depression the symptoms is fatigue. So, it might be that we're trying to combat fatigue with more sleep instead of our normal, whatever, if you're Allie, probably three hours of sleep. If you're me, maybe six or seven hours of sleep,

normally that's what we get but then we try to make up for feeling fatigued when we're depressed by sleeping more. Depression and sleep are very, very tightly tied together and so it's really hard to figure out which comes first. Are you depressed because you're lacking sleep or are you lacking sleep and feeling fatigued because you're depressed?

It's likely a some combination of the two. Okay, side note, I looked into this and I'll give you just the gist. Mental health and sleep are very linked. Sometimes sleep issues are a symptom of mental illness and sometimes they can cause mental troubles. Often they just keep cyclically making the other worse. So, what can you do?

You can see a doc, but before you go in you might want to keep a sleep journal for two weeks to show them when you slept, for how long, what troubles you had. Doctors also suggest a bedtime schedule and a routine, of course, very helpful, as is limiting stimulants altogether or at least in the afternoon.

They suggest getting plenty of sunlight or using a light box that mimics the sun if you have seasonal depression, especially up here in the US where we're in the darkest days. And I'm not talking politically, I just mean winter in the northern hemisphere. Speaking of which,

some patrons had seasonal and latitude questions such as Misty Clarty, my Montana cousin Nathan Bronick, Michelle Lee, Deli Dames, and first time question asker, Evan Jude, asks, how many humans, plants and animals who live closer to the poles and experience continuous daylight and nighttime

around the winter and summer solstices in white nights in Russia, how have they adapted or evolved differently? How do they deal? And have you seen Midsummer? I haven't seen Midsummer, do I need to see it? I think it's about a white night. I think it's a horror movie that takes place

in a continuous daylight night. Yeah. So my friend is actually one of those people that's lucky and gets to go to Antarctica, so I've tried to ask her like, yes, yes, she's boss. Um, I tried to ask her, you know,

what is it like there in terms of, because they go during the Antarctic summer, which is our winter, but then it's light all the time down there. And, you know, she said that, yes, it's harder to get sleep, but most of the time they, you know, they have ways to control the light and dark

in their facilities, but there's really not a lot of research done on the people that live in these polar areas. And I think I recently saw an article that they're finally starting to do studies on the resident scientists that live in Antarctica, which is like, that's the perfect population of people. It's a very controlled environment,

very controlled food, a lot of controlled factors. So I think they're finally going to start looking into it because my educated guess would be that there is probably higher rates of depression, there's probably higher rates of things that we associate with continuous light exposure. We haven't adapted to those areas yet, as far as I know, I could be wrong,

but there's probably increased risks of all these morbidities that we associate with light at night exposure and these people that are at the higher or lower ends of the earth. Also like during the long or during the winter, their respective winters, I think that's probably where the increased depression

might poke itself through because they're not getting enough light. Like we need light, even if it's not warm outside, we need light exposure. Quick aside, I poked through some reports about mental health and latitude and found one really fascinating study which looked at how rare suicide was

in pre-colonization Greenland versus modern lifestyle. And apparently birth month and birth season tended to affect those kind of mental health issues and while those types of deaths increased a lot post-colonization, the seasons had less of an impact because of the introduction of artificial light. So knowing the amount of light and darkness

that our super-chiasmatic nucleus receives can have major impacts on our hormones and mental health, what about when we futz with the clock itself and throw the whole system off twice a year? Julie Bear asks, daylight savings time, abolish or keep? Abolish! Okay, she says we can't be friends if you say keep.

Actually, the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms, they just released a statement about why we should abolish the daylight savings time. So the people who are in charge of studying circadian rhythms and other biological rhythms are like, get rid of it. So it's a waste. Like, we don't need it anymore. And don't they say that when they kind of shave off

an hour of sleep, there's a lot of heart attacks and a lot of health problems occur like the following week after I've read that somewhere? It's basically jet lag. We're forcing jet lag on people. That sucks. Oh, and I know that there are questions about jet lag. Okay, we're going to get to those in a sec.

There's just a 2023 update for y'all. So no, you did not hallucinate stories about the abolishment of daylight savings time. Let's go back though. Ever since it was implemented in 1918 to save fuel during World War I, it's been contentious. So for decades, states and towns in the U.S. at least talked amongst themselves

and decided to adopt it or not until the Department of Transportation was like, can we just be on the same page about this and pass the Uniform Time Act of 1966? But then in 1972, big sigh, the act was amended and Arizona noped out, Hawaii was like not into it,

many other island territories also do not observe daylight savings time, but a bipartisan group of lawmakers are like, let's just ditch this once and for all folks and got the Sunshine Protection Act passed in the Senate, but it died in the house. And I asked Catherine what her take on this recent news was, and she wrote me yesterday to say,

no major updates despite the Sunshine Protection Act, which has yet to pass the house. There are no plans to either maintain daylight savings or end it. Proponents of permanent daylight savings time say it's better for the economy, whereas most people in the research and medical communities agree that permanent standard time aligns best

with our normal sleep and wake rhythms and is likely to be better for our overall health. So that's the latest. And yes, in the US, we just turned the clocks forward on Sunday. So you're not imagining it. You might feel a little wonky adjusting even to the one hour shift, but I like to use daylight savings time as an excuse

through like September. Still adjusting. But first, another very important question. Julie Bear also wants to know, do you giggle and snort when you hear and say the word diurnal because it sounds like a pair of urinals next to each other? Yes. Good.

It's a fun word. It's a fun word. That makes you feel better. Patron Alyssa also asks this next question. Paulty Simmons says, I have read that folks who are blind, even with no light perception, still have melatonin cycling and diurnal rhythms.

So what alternate mechanisms other than visual perception to our bodies have to regulate our circadian rhythm? Like, does our skin know that it's light out? Our skin doesn't know, but I'm actually really excited about this question because we didn't get to talk about these little guys. So it's not actually the visual cells in our retinas that recognize light.

So they do, obviously, but not for circadian rhythms. They are just doing it for visual perception. So there's actually these other little guys. They're called intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglia cells. What? IPRGCs, basically. Oh, my God.

But there are these, I think they make up less than 5 or 10% of the cells in your retina. And they sense light, which most of the cells in your retina do, but they sense light and send it specifically to that suprachiasmatic nucleus, or SCN. So they're the ones that are like, hey, master clock, light is happening right now.

So they're the ones that are communicating directly to that brain area. Now, depending on why an individual is blind, there are different reasons why a person might be blind. If those cells are still intact, they're still gonna have circadian rhythms. They're still gonna be fine when it comes to perceiving light and dark in the sense of regulating biological rhythms

in that way. So if there's a different reason and those cells are no longer intact, they will actually no longer exhibit circadian rhythms. Well, they will, but their bodies are basically constantly in what we call free-running, which is as if you were to throw somebody in a cave, in the back of a cave,

and have them be completely isolated from environmental cues. Oh, wow. So it depends on why an individual is blind, but some individuals who are blind can still have sensing of light through those specific cells. Oh, whoa. That's crazy. That's cool.

New question asker Lauren Marie asks, why do I feel like a sack of shit in the mornings when I've had eight hours? Oh, geez. I mean, there could be lots of things. So things that make you feel like sacks of shit even if you get enough sleep, or what we think of as enough sleep.

Maybe you consumed something, some substance that made your sleep crazy. So alcohol puts you to sleep, but does not help your circadian rhythms at all. So it makes your sleep cycles kind of wonky. I don't know the specifics, but I know it's not good. Hella fast. I looked this up and alcohol can inhibit REM sleep,

which is the most restorative type of rest. It can also wake you up in the middle of the night and make you go potty. I mean, it could be that this person needs more or less sleep. That could be a fun experiment to give a try. Some people do better with exercising at specific times of day. So depending on when this person's exercising,

I've read some places that heavy exercise in the evening is not good, but then I know anecdotally, I can go to a boxing class and be fine. But I think it just depends on your needs. I don't think there's a straightforward answer for why a specifically eight hours of sleep makes you feel screwed up. It probably depends on a lot of factors.

That's a good call. And so many patrons asked, and I will put their names in inside and I will read them quickly. These folks are Elise Knowles, Don Schwartz, John Yerich, Renee Jenning,

Megan V. Pearson, Katherine Harshman, Mark James, Michelle Lee, Becca Decker, Celia Ford, and Hallie, who all asked about naps

and about segmented sleep and this notion of like sleeping and then waking up in the middle of the night for a couple of hours and going back to sleep. Is that really a thing? I have not found any definitive evidence indicating that that is actually beneficial. At the same time,

I haven't found any definitive evidence saying that it is hurtful. Now, the only thing that I could think of that would make this bad is if you're exposing yourself to more light at night because you're waking up in the middle of the night. So if you're getting up in the middle of the night,

it probably is not a good idea to then get on your phone or like go watch TV for three hours and then go back to sleep. I don't know what you could do. Well, I do know a few things that you could do in the dark. But, you know,

I think, you know, you'd have to maybe try something that's not getting you exposed to more light. There is some evidence that things like napping during the day, as long as you don't take long naps, that that is like a normal aspect of like human sleep patterns, especially because we eat a lot during the day.

It's hotter during the afternoon generally. And so those types of cues are like making us sleepy. And so we take a little quick nap and then we're fine. We can get up and move on. But I haven't seen a lot of evidence about segmented sleep, especially at night saying

that I've heard a lot of people talking about lately. I think it was a historian or somebody who brought this concept up. And then that's kind of all we've gotten since then. Yeah. Okay. So alongside rhythmicity and fucking up in this, this is another good pocket word.

And it means of the dawn or dusk of the gloaming. It's great. Crepuscular. Ira Gray wants to know, what is up with crepuscular animals? How does that work? And how is that cycle advantageous to them? I think it comes back down to

what are these animals eating? What are they foraging for? I love this question from Vidhipong. Does going early to bed and early to rise actually make you healthy, wealthy and wise? I'm going to say it depends. So depending on what your chronotype is, whether or not you're traditionally,

we say night owl or daylark, whether or not you are a person who functions better during the evening or functions better during the morning or somewhere in between, that's probably going to make you more wise, sticking to that schedule. Healthy. Probably depends on your light exposure again.

It's all coming back to light. And then wealthy. Good luck. That's all I could say. But yeah, I would think the biggest thing is going to be related to chronotype, but then also depending on what job you choose and maybe there's some correlation

between our chronotype and what jobs we tend to gear toward. But yeah, I would say chronotype is probably going to be the biggest determining factor, which is a thought to be potentially genetic. So yeah, and so many patrons asked that question. Many of you little birdies had chronotype questions, i.e. night owls versus morning larks, such as Stephanie Breherty's, Sarah Jane James,

Chelsea Fruitfly, Molly Henning, Jasmine McLean, Michelle Minert, Anna Thompson, Hannah Claire, Rachel Mount, Sophie Kosano, Emma Glide's game, Teresa Pasanova, Justin M. Gifford, Charlotte Fielkegaard, Hennie Bergstrom, Kelly Brockington, Erin Pandora, too. First time question asker, Lara Dergovich, Erica Butler, Madeline Winter,

Brea Johnson, Charlie Wong, Heather Woodford, Beatriz Bellacuava, Heath Allen, Kayla Perez, Sarah Sexton, and Erica. Is there such a thing as a night owl in an early riser? Is that a thing? Yes, it is a thing. And it's a thing too, depending on age. So our chronotype actually does change as we age.

So obviously, like, children tend to be more daylarks. Teenagers are night owls. That's not a lie. It is actually a thing. And then as we get older, we move more and more toward daylarks. And older individuals tend to wake up earlier in the day, but their sleep is all screwed up anyways. Wait, why is their sleep screwed up?

So one thing is change in hormones. So lack of hormones or extreme levels of hormones compared to what would normally be occurring during, quote, unquote, reproductive age. But then also it's thought that the areas that are most involved in regulating circadian rhythms age as well. We don't know what that aging looks like, but it's thought that those brain areas,

just like other brain areas, could potentially be aging and not functioning as properly as they normally would. Oh, wow. Yeah, because one patron asked about older folks and why they get up so early. Greg Wallach asked, ever since I got a weighted blanket, I fall asleep with the lights on constantly. Is that bad?

But Greg Wallach wants to know also, do you like the song Day Sleeper by R.E.M. where Michael Stipe actually croons about circadian rhythms? Talk of circadian rhythm. I see today with a new scratch. Gray, my night is color. Had a great day sleeper. Is it bad that I haven't heard it?

I'm going to have to send it to you. How dare you? How dare you? Not getting a PhD until you can karaoke that entire song. I know like the really popular R.E.M. song, but... Well, this is about to be perhaps your favorite. I'm going to send it to you. Oh, I do want to get to one more that so many patrons asked.

Patrons, I'm looking at you, Barb Wilkinson, Amanda Rincon, Sarah Lachesi, Sam McCarthy, Jim Spickard, Danny Q, James Capaldo, Riley Mckinnis, Emily, Tutorace, Raymond J. Deutsch, Rachel Fallon, Yana Wiesnowski, Joey Taub, Heather Densmore. Y'all had some real jet laggy questions. Mainly, how not get this?

What strategies for combating jet lag are there without using medication? Do we just have to suffer through it? Or are there behaviors we can to adjust faster and more easily? Like, what is jet lag? What's happening? So, jet lag, I think, is generally thought to be, again, the desynchrony between our internal pattern

and what we are used to versus whatever's happening outside of us. We are basically going from, hey, I'm used to East Coast time or Central time or whatever. You're used to that light pattern, and then all of a sudden, literally within a few hours, you're in a completely new lighting pattern and completely new social cues, completely new food cues.

So, all of a sudden, your body is like, oh, shit, what's happening? And so, you know, that's the actual scientific term. Oh, shit, what's happening? And so, it's thought that maybe there's this, the brain is slowly but surely trying to catch up, and different parts of our bodies can catch up with this new timing at different rates.

So, I would say there's kind of two, maybe three things that seem to hold the most weight in terms of re-synchronizing yourself to your new environment, depending on how long you're going to be there, honestly. If you're only going to be somewhere for a couple of days, it's not worth your time. Just deal with it and go back home and go to normal. But if you're going to be somewhere for like a week or so,

I would recommend trying to re-synchronize your schedule to whatever your new schedule is, but doing so in smaller increments. Like if you could change your schedule every 15 minutes, every couple of days, that's probably going to be more beneficial than you just trying to make it all happen at once. Yeah, there's some thought that we can adjust to,

15 minutes is some magic number, that it's easier to adjust to that change than like an hour or two hours or three hours. Now, that's hard to say when you jump from like New York to Sydney. My God, your brain is probably a mess. But and then eating on a regular schedule, trying to sleep on a more regular schedule, even socializing on a regular schedule,

that will help cue your brain and your body to know what time it is or what the new time is. Oh, and I realized later that we didn't touch on circadian rhythms and shift work enough. And a bunch of you, many of you, too many of you to list had questions. McManusaur, Michael, Don Ewald, Nelson Vietoro, just a few of you.

So many others asked essentially, what can shift workers do or how bad is shift work? And I wish we talked about it more. So I emailed Catherine and I asked, how fucked are shift workers? She wrote right back and I shall read it verbatim. She says, generally speaking, shift workers are fucked. We don't quite understand why,

but when looking at disease risk, shift workers have increased risk of developing a multitude of diseases, including cancers, metabolic disease, cognitive decline, et cetera. We don't know why. It's likely a mix of our physiology going out of whack, like your hormones go crazy,

your immune system goes nuts, so on. This is obviously mediated by sleep disruptions, but we don't know to what extent. Another interesting tidbit, she says, is it's not just the light exposure during shift work that's fucking us up. So our brain and our body are like, ah, what time is it?

So your liver thinks it's noon because you're eating, but your brain thinks it's 2 a.m. because it's dark outside. And yeah, we don't know exactly what's going on here, but shift workers are a mess, physiologically speaking, at least. So shift workers, my heart goes out to you and your heart, I know it's so hard. Now, we did a two-part somnology episode last year,

and as we noted in that one, shift work is listed as a carcinogen. The yikes. And I don't know what the answer here is, because shift workers are literally saving people's lives, and oftentimes you don't have a choice as to what your schedule is for work. You have to go where they pay you.

So be nice to a shift worker. I think there should be a national shift workers' day. We should all have to get up and give you presents in the middle of the night just to see what it's like one time. So I don't know, but I want everyone to take care of themselves as best they can. So the main point, let's get control of our sleep people.

Do what you can. A lot of folks asked about how much control, though, is too much. Like, what about sleep hacking? Rebecca Wendell, Joey Tabb, and Ron LeBlanc wanted to know. What do you think of all the tech bros that are trying to hack their sleep and intermittent fasting? Are you like, come on. I'm sure there might be some small benefit to it,

but it's... I've heard recently of like people trying to hack fertility using light, and I think I'm like, maybe, maybe... I would say if it doesn't hurt you, sure why not, but there's not enough evidence to say that it actually works. So that would be my one caveat is go into it knowing that we don't know if it works at all.

I've heard of people like trying to hack circadian rhythms or force themselves to be one way or another. To some extent we can, but we only have so much control over what our body naturally wants to do. P.S. I just went down a rabbit hole reading about people who sleep on magnetic pads and they tape electrodes to their face and nap for a few hours at a time all day and all night.

Folks who strap ice packs to their body. Sounds like a giant pain in a biohacker's ass. P.S. Do you need to fall asleep quickly? I shared this in the Sumnology episode, but my mom taught me a brain trick where you think of a category like fruits or movie titles or things you'd find in a purse and then think of something that starts with an A

and then something that starts with a B and a C and on and on alphabetically until you drift off. We call this the fancy Nancy. So I hope it helps if you need a tactic to lull you into dreamland. I use it all the time. Thanks mom. Okay, moving on. And last patron question, Allie Cooper wants to know blackout shades.

Friend or foe? I would say friend. Okay, so even if the light doesn't come in in the morning, is it better if you use blackout shades and then you just like wake up at six? Like, all right, light. Here we come. I would say if you could maybe in an ideal world, if you could have blackout shades,

red or amber light bulbs in your house at night and then maybe one of those fancy sunrise alarm clocks and things like that that can slowly simulate a normal light dark cycle, that's probably going to be the most beneficial to us than just like one thing. If you just put blackout shades, you're right. You're going to be blocking out the daylight in the morning.

So it might be harder to wake up. But then if you add a little sunrise simulator, that's going to wake your little butt up easier in the morning. So, you know, where we could all just sleep on the porch with no light pollution. Yeah, this is this big ol' ugly street lamp that's like right outside my bedroom window

that just makes me sad every time I see it. Like you're killing me slowly. What else just kills her? Okay, worst thing about your job. Shittiest thing about your job, what sucks. Okay. Other than me cramming you into this like tiny, hot recording booth in July.

Honestly, the recording booth isn't that bad. It's the literal, I don't know if you can see it, but like footstool that they put in here. My butt is so sore. It's fine. It's basically like simulating a squat for an hour and a half. But my thighs will be glorious. So I wanted to say emails because they suck,

but I'll be honest. I'm somebody who I check my email like 30 times a day because there's something satisfying about getting an email. I feel like I'm wanted. So really the thing, and this is, you know, anybody who's potentially interested in doing circadian rhythms research, there's this running joke

that in order to study circadian rhythms, we have to fuck up our own. So my master's experiments, I would have to go in from like 10 to 11 at night and then be back in lab at 6 a.m. in order to run my experiments. I've done experiments here at Illinois, where I had to be in lab from like 7 p.m.

to like 5 a.m. checking animals. Circadian rhythms research be prepared to not have any more circadian rhythms, like just fucking all of them. Oh my God. I mean, this is like doctors. Doctors have like the worst health. What is the best thing about what you do?

What do you love the most about it? Or about circadian rhythms? So I'll answer this with two things. So I'm going to cheat. So my favorite thing about being a scientist in general is like that moment where like your data start to slowly make sense, and they never really fully make sense

because that's life. But when you start to create a story with your data, it's some of the most exciting, exciting moments of your life as a researcher. And then you get to talk to people about it, either through podcasting or through social media or through conferences or writing papers. It's some of the most exciting times of being a researcher.

And then also you start to develop new ideas and new questions because science never ends. About circadian rhythms in general, we didn't get to talk about this, but circadian rhythms don't just regulate hormones, but they are also regulated by hormones themselves. So things like estradiol or estrogens and testosterone and cortisol and all those fun hormones we like to talk about,

those actually feedback and regulate circadian rhythms too. So circadian rhythms don't just do things, but they also then get feedback and get regulated by not just environmental cues, but also internal cues too. And I think it's just so fascinating. It comes back to my love of homeostasis again. I don't know why, but it exists.

So I'm realizing in summation, I can't treat my body like a robot. I'm a human organism, and I have to treat it at least as nicely as I would my dog. Yeah, love your dog, love you. Right? Yeah. I mean, I would never expect a poor dog

to like not eat for most of the day because it was like working and then just give it a bunch of donuts and Pepsi and then keep it up all night and be like, what? Why do you feel like shit? You would never do that to an animal. No, no, we're not machines. This is interesting.

I feel like the takeaway from this is that we're fragile beings. Yeah, we need love and tenderness. And sleep and food and schedule. And schedules and routines even though we hate them. Oh my God. So routines are our friends. Oh, why have I resisted? Especially for people who have sleep.

And now insomnia is a completely different beast. Insomnia needs tender love and care from a different perspective, but just like sleep procrastination, general sleep difficulties, like trouble getting to sleep that's not related to insomnia. Get a damn schedule. Get a damn schedule.

Thank you, almost doctor. Almost doctor's order. Yeah. So for more on Catherine Hatcher and the podcast Endocrine Disruptors, co-hosted by Shreya Patal, go to endocrinepod.com. Catherine is on Twitter as super charismatic.

There's a link in the show notes. There are also links to all the sponsors and to the charities. I'm Ali Ward with 1L on Twitter and Instagram. Say hi over there. We are at oligies on both. You can check out the show notes for more links, including links to merch. Thank you, Bonnie Dutch and Shannon Feltas,

for managing the merch. They have a podcast called You Are That. It's charming and funny. And to Erin Talbert, for admitting the oligies podcast Facebook group. Thank you to assistant editor, Jared Sleeper, of Mind Jam Media, and the Mental Health Podcast, My Good Bad Brain.

Thank you to Emily White and all the transcribers in the oligies transcribers group. I see you. I love you. Bleaped episodes for kiddos and transcripts of some of the episodes are available at alleyward.com. A link in the show notes. And of course, thanks to the man who was guided

not by light or by dark, but by the beacon of ambition from his mustache. Lead editor, Stephen Ray Morris, who also hosts the Percast and See Jurassic Right. Please get some more sleep, Stephen. The theme song was written by Nick Thorburn of the band Islands, which is great band. And at the end of the episode, you know,

I tell you a secret. And this week I woke up and I was like, I love the smell of a Christmas tree in the house. And then I remembered, we don't have one. And that I had left a pine scented candle burning all night in my office. I'm very lucky nobody died. It smelled so good.

The psalates literally likely killing me. So please get some sleep. Please do not do it with any candles burning. Let me be a lesson. I got very lucky. Get some shut eye.

Your super charismatic nucleus is begging for it as am I. So be good to yourselves. You little monkeys. I'm so glad to be back. I slept so much when I had the flu. And that coupled with this episode, perhaps has changed me forever.

I'm kind of like sleep. It's cool now. I get it. Goodbye. Pachydermicology, Hypnozoology, Litology, Nanotechnology,

Meteorology, Hypnozoology, Anthology, Cereology, Cellulogy. You been up all night? Of course I've been up all night. Not because of caffeine.

It was insomnia. I couldn't stop thinking about coffee. I need an app. Just one final word of thanks to our sole sponsor for this show, Satva. They are our sleep crush. We love them.

And if you want to start prioritizing sleep and rest, please do. As someone who used to think I was too tough for sleep and have learned that sleep is one of the best things you could do for yourself and it is worth the investment of time and the

investment of a new mattress. You deserve a mattress that is top of the line without having to take out a second mortgage while you're at it. Satva mattresses are for you. So visit satva.com and you can save $200 when you purchase $1,000 or more.

That's S-W-A-T-V-A dot com slash ologies. And thank you again, Satva. Sweet dreams. Bye-bye-bye.