Circadian Gymnastics: Manipulating Your Sleep Schedule

There are lots of perfectly good reasons to adopt, for a little while, an abnormal sleep schedule. Maybe you’re relaxing for the holidays, enjoying a breakfast that features cocoa and toast at 11 in the morning. Maybe you’re jetsetting around the world, and have to tune into the local timezone. Perhaps you have to adapt your sleep cycle to the demands of your work. While we always advocate normal, diurnal, schedules, the reality is that there are times when this just isn’t going to happen. Fortunately, science gives us a couple of tools for adjusting our sleep schedules very quickly, which allows us to snap back from these abnormalities.

Food Can Alter Your Sleep Cycles

Though human clinical testing on the subject is in short supply, this is supported both through anecdotal evidence and analogous experiments conducted on mice in a 2009 Harvard study. What the study found was that, in addition to the “normal” circadian rhythm, our bodies may possess a secondary clock for regulating sleep-wake cycles. This clock is tied to food, and when we are fed.

What the researchers found is that when mice were briefly starved, then only fed during times when mice are ordinarily sleeping, the mice adjusted their sleep-wake cycles accordingly. This discovery has triggered a home-grown remedy for jet-lag, where many travelers find that fasting during a flight and after landing, and following up with a breakfast at the local mealtime, is enough to quickly shake off the negative effects.

You can use this discovery to change your sleep cycles however you like. Simply start fasting approximately sixteen hours before you intend to wake up, then make sure you eat a big breakfast immediately after you do. Your food-clock will inform the rest of your body that you’ve made an optimal choice.

Note: sub-par sleep is also associated with imbalances in the hormones ghrelin and leptin, which essentially make you crave food more. If your sleep cycle is disrupted, fasting may be especially difficult, but stay strong!

Light Suppresses the Sleep Hormone

One of the hormones that helps you sleep – and which does a bunch of other, life-saving functions – is melatonin. It’s an important part of creating a healthy sleep schedule, and your body produces it in accordance with how much light you’re surrounded by. If you’re surrounded by lots of light, you’re not going to produce much melatonin, which makes sleeping much more difficult.

This can be a powerful tool in manipulating your own sleep schedule. Making sure that you that are surrounded by dim light an hour or so before bed will help your body produce more melatonin. In participants who were exposed to full indoor lighting right before bed, melatonin levels are suppressed by as much as 50%. Cultivating an atmosphere of relative darkness, therefore, should make drifting off much easier.

This can be particularly useful if you’ve got to be nocturnal. By gradually reducing the amount of light you receive at the end of your wake cycle, you can encourage your body to produce more melatonin before you finally decide to turn in.