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 …
What we talk about when we talk about chronomedicine Read More »
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 …
Don’t use your phone before bed! Turn off overhead lights in the evening! Block blue light as you wind down! There are tons of recommendations out there for helping you get to sleep at night that deal with light and technology, and—spoiler alert—I think they’re right on the money. But missing from the standard advice …
At Arcascope, we’re focused on helping shift workers get more sleep and feel better with circadian-specific interventions. In particular, we’ve spoken to a lot of shift workers in the healthcare industry about their experiences working nights. A lot of the lessons we’ve learned are echoed in this recent survey we ran with 218 nurses who …
Running the numbers on health care shift workers Read More »
Over and over again, I’ve heard shift workers say something like the following: “I have no rhythms.” “It’s just a constant experience of bleh.” “I get off shift, and more than tired, I just feel… flat.” “Ah,” I think when I hear this. “The amplitudes of their circadian rhythms have been squashed.” To steal an …
We’ve already looked at the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA) dataset—an absolute treasure trove of sleep data, available from the NSRR at sleepdata.org—once, through the lens of sleep duration. But what about other dimensions of sleep health? After all, sleep regularity may be just as important as sleep duration in a number of contexts. We …
We’re back! If you’re just now tuning in (check out part one here), the title pretty much says it all. We take sleep-related memes we find online, we use them as an excuse to talk about sleep and circadian science, and we rate ’em. Meme #7 Good news: If this is you, it might not …
Imagine you’re on a swing on a playground with a friend standing behind you. This friend is not a jerk, so they’re going to push you when a normal person would push you on a swing—right when you’re at the end of your backwards motion and ready to start moving forward again. They, like a …
Back by popular demand, here is part two of the “We Rate Sleep Memes” blog series. If you’re just now tuning in (check out part one here), the title pretty much says it all. We take sleep-related memes we find online, we use them as an excuse to talk about sleep and circadian science, and …
So you want to help shift workers feel better—sleep better, be safer, have fewer of the long term chronic health problems that go hand in hand with shift work. How do you do it? Where do you start? As some of the most circadian-wrecked people around, shift workers have been the topic of no small …
