How To Reset Your Circadian Rhythm
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What have your moves on the dance floor got to do with how well you sleep?
They’re both about rhythm.
Moving to the rhythm on the dance floor takes you from dad or mum dancer to Michael Jackson on his best day.
Resetting your circadian rhythm means you’ll be a powerhouse at work and still have plenty of energy left for your kids and partner in the evening.
I’m sure we’re all familiar with this scenario…
Your alarm’s just gone off and frightened you out of your skin, you scramble to hit the snooze button for just 5 more minutes…
You’ve got a headache, you have no energy, and you have lots of important meetings today.
You want to bring 110% of your best self to the office but you know you’ll be lucky if it’s 50%.
You prise yourself out of bed, your legs are heavy, and you’re stumbling down the stairs.
And if you’re a shift worker, working nights or your work takes you across time zones traveling from hotel room to hotel room and country to country your sleep patterns are going to be badly affected.
If that’s you, then it’s time to fix that. How?
By resetting your circadian rhythm and taking a different approach to your sleep.
The first place to start is to become aware of your circadian rhythm, learn how to work in harmony with them, and make them work for you and your lifestyle.
What is a circadian rhythm?
Your circadian rhythm is your 24-hour internal cycle that is managed by your body clock.
Our body clock regulates our internal systems such as sleeping, eating patterns, hormone production, body temperature, alertness, mood, and digestion over a 24-hour period.
Our body clocks are set by external cues, the main ones being daylight, temperature, and the times we decide to eat.
It’s an intuitive 24-hour process that is the product of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, so it doesn’t make sense to fight against it.
Trying to go against our body clocks is like asking a lion to go vegan. It’s not going to happen, and the lion is more than likely going to eat you:
For asking him to go vegan
Because you look tasty!
So, what does a typical circadian rhythm looks like?
Imagine you’re living on an island
Now you know what a circadian rhythm is, you need to know how you can reset them.
You have to see yourself as living on your own island. No phone, no house, no nothing.
Our ancestors didn’t stay up replying to emails, binging on Netflix, or watching YouTube until the early hours, so neither should you.
If you were living on your island, you would soon find you’d wake up to the sun rising, and go to bed when the sun set, and you naturally became tired.
At night, the temperature drops, you’ll set up a campfire, talk for a bit, look up at the stars and fall asleep.
As the sun rises, you will start your day. You’ll have some water, have something to eat, go to the toilet and then you’ll go about your day.
This doesn’t mean you have to become the next Bear Grylls, eating mealworms, and sleeping in carcasses…
It just means becoming aware of what we’ve been doing naturally for hundreds and thousands of years.
For most people living in the modern world, give or take 1-2 hours, either way, you should be waking up as the sun rises, and going to bed as the sun sets.
Use light and darkness to your advantage
Now you’re starting to think like a caveman or woman you need to start using light and darkness to your advantage to reset your circadian rhythm.
As the sun rises and we move from dark to light, we start to produce serotonin, which helps to boost our alertness.
Something that is worth investing in is a dawn wake simulator. This helps emulate waking up to a sunrise, especially in the winter when we generally need to wake up while it’s still dark.
I have one and it’s so much nicer waking up to this rather than the alarm going off and making you jump out of your skin.
You can set your wake and sleep time, and how long you want sunrise and sunset to go on for, and you can also wake up and go to bed to different sounds. Mine has waterfall and rainforest noise settings.
Here are the top 3 dawn wake simulators on the market:
This is the one I use (£33.99)
Phillips UK Kitchen and Home SmartSleep (£140.00)
Lumie Bodyclock Glow 150 (£99.99)
Blue light gets a bad reputation for keeping us awake at night, which is well deserved. But daylight is full of blue light, which helps to reset our body clock, suppress melatonin production, and improve alertness and performance throughout the day.
As you’re waking up open your curtains immediately and get outside as soon as you can. Weather depending, I’ll have my breakfast outside. Use the blue light to your advantage.
Once the sun has gone down, and it’s been dark for some time, we begin to secrete melatonin. This is the hormone that regulates our sleep and responds to light and gets us ready to sleep.
Think about your current bedtime routine – have you got lights blazing before you try and go to sleep? It could be the reason you’re struggling to get off to sleep at night.
So, as you’re coming off the day and you’re beginning to wind down in your bedroom, make sure your room is completely blacked out, and you’re away from all blue light so you can start to produce melatonin.
Take advantage of peak sleep times
Our urge to sleep is highest at night (2-3 am), and this is mirrored 12 hours later (1-3 pm). If you’ve had a bad night’s sleep you can utilise the afternoon slump we can experience to your advantage. Have a nap instead of fighting the urge to go to sleep and being less than productive at work.
You can see why people working at night, traveling from country to country, and staying up late will struggle to sleep well. They’re fighting against their body’s natural urge to want to sleep at night.
Don’t rush your mornings
If you’re getting out of bed 5 minutes before you need to be in the car or on a train to the office, grabbing a coffee and a snack, it will impact your circadian rhythm and your body clock.
If you were on your island, you would not be getting up and rushing off to work straight away.
You’d wake up, get the fire going, have breakfast, drink some water, go to the toilet, and then you would start your day.
What you do as you wake is as important as the time you spend in bed.
When we first wake up, we need time to come around. Not rushing to get to work, replying to emails, and pumping your body full of caffeine.
Personally, I wake up to a dawn wake simulator at 4:30 am, I have a 30-minute window where I won’t touch my phone, and it remains on do not disturb until 5:00 am when it automatically switches off.
I immediately open my blinds to start the production of serotonin and suppress melatonin. I make the bed, have a shower, have some breakfast, listen to a podcast, go to the toilet, and do some priming.
Waking up isn’t a rushed process, I’ve lined myself up with my circadian rhythm and I do tasks that don’t require too much brain power. By the time I’m in the office I’m awake, firing on all cylinders and ready to do my most creative work.
I like to think about a morning routine like warming up before exercising. You move through a staged process, going from lower intensity to higher intensity work.
Don’t rush your evenings
In the same way, you shouldn’t rush your evenings either.
When you get home, there’s still plenty to do before your day is done.
Spending time with your family, cooking dinner, eating together, playing with your kids, and I’m sure there will even be times when you need to open your laptop and deal with an urgent work matter.
It’s important not to rush getting into bed.
The last thing you want to do is rush getting into bed, and then be wide awake for the next 3 hours stressing because you can’t sleep.
You want to give yourself time to come off the day and get to the point where you’re ready to sleep.
If I am on my laptop late at night, I won’t come off it and immediately go to bed.
I will come off my laptop and phone, blackout my room to start the production of melatonin and read to take my mind away from work.
I like to think of a night-time routine like you would a cool down after exercising. You move from the higher intensity work you’ve been doing in your day, to resting where you’re ready to sleep.
Resetting your circadian rhythm
We are a supremely arrogant species: we feel we can abandon four billion years of evolution and ignore the fact that we have evolved under a light-dark cycle. What we do as a species, perhaps uniquely, is override the clock. And long-term acting against the clock can lead to serious health problems.” – Russel Foster, director of the Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Insitute at the University of Oxford.
Artificial light has only been around since the 19th century. We haven’t evolved to be able to sleep in harmony with this.
To recap here’s how you can reset your circadian rhythm
Imagine you’re living on an island. Go to bed when its dark, get up when the sun rises
Reset your body clock with light and get yourself a dawn wake simulator. As soon as you wake, open your blinds, and get outside
Take advantage of peak sleeping times, 2-3 am, and 1-3 pm
Don’t rush your mornings. Rushing off from the word go will disrupt the quality of your sleep
Don’t rush your evenings. Take time to come off the day and get ready to sleep, rather than getting in bed as soon as you can
This is how to reset your circadian rhythm and wake up feeling refreshed.
