You fall asleep just fine… but then suddenly you’re wide awake at 3:00 AM, staring at the ceiling. Sound familiar? If this happens often, your internal clock, or circadian rhythms, might be playing a bigger role than you think. Let’s break it down with an analogy. Your Sleep System is Like a Water Cooler Picture […]
Imagine it’s summer, and you live way up north. The sun is up for 22 hours of the day. Sunlight is good for sleep, right? Your sleep must be great. Except, no. It sucks. And the reason it sucks isn’t just because it’s hard to sleep when it’s bright outside (people in northern latitudes know […]
Let’s start with a couple obvious things. If you lived in a bunker, and you never ever saw the sun, the choice between permanent Daylight Saving Time and permanent Standard Time would really not matter to you. We could just pick one and roll with it, and you would continue to be a person who lives […]
Let’s say I want to boost circadian amplitude as much as I can. What light/dark schedule should I put myself on? This is a very tough question to answer experimentally, given how many possible light/dark schedules there are (infinite) and how expensive experiments like this can be (near infinite). But mathematical modeling can give us […]
“If you want to become an earlier chronotype, get more zeitgeber during your phase advance region and less zeitgeber during your phase delay region.” My head is in my hands. At parties, if no one stops me, I will often rant about math’s UI/UX problem. Listen, I say. We just casually drop that sin-1(x) is […]
This blog is the spiritual sequel to our last blog post on ways of measuring sleep regularity. Unlike the last one, though, which was based on an excellent review article, this post is Olivia’s off-the-cuff (and extremely wonkish) thoughts on the topic of circadian amplitude. There’s a reason for a lack of formality, though, which […]
Recall, if you will, that elementary school classic, “Guess How Many Beans Are In The Jar.” Over the years, I’ve guessed at many beans in many jars, but none sticks with me like the first: Halloween, 1998. I was dressed as the Mona Lisa. The jar was filled with jelly beans. I counted all the […]
Like anyone talking about anything, I tune my content to the audience. When I talk about our tech to travelers, I tell them our apps can help them get over jet lag faster. When I talk about our tech to shift workers, I highlight how we can help them sleep more and get them to […]
I was reading this article on circadian variation in immune response a couple of weeks ago when I came across this quote, seemingly engineered in a lab to get my adrenaline pumping: “McKeating [says] that when she thinks back to the long line of failed vaccines in this field, she wonders whether timing may have […]
Here’s a weird thing about shift workers: Their sleep duration doesn’t always predict how sleepy they feel. Which is weird because… shouldn’t it? After all, somebody who sleeps for a longer period of time should feel less sleepy than someone who sleeps only for a short period of time, right? This paradox isn’t actually that […]
