I love my Apple Watch. The ability to track my exercise, heart rate, activity levels, and sleep has enabled a real awareness of how my physical and mental health changes over time. The ability to track personal health data over long time periods outside of laboratories is one of the most exciting developments of the …
I have always been a good eater. Before I knew about time-restricted eating, back when I was in college—waking up at 4:50 am for crew practice, staying up until 1:00 am working on problem sets, and sleeping in until noon on my days off—I could eat pretty much any food in any amount at any …
What is sleep regularity and why is it important? Sleep regularity is a gauge of how consistent a person’s sleep patterns are, based on the day-to-day variability in their sleep–wake times. In general, having poorer sleep regularity, or irregular sleep patterns, has been shown to lead to many adverse outcomes in metabolism, mental health, and …
I woke up feeling groggy and lazy almost every day in the past school semester leading up to this summer. I was already doing research on sleep at that point, and I had a general idea about what I was doing wrong, but when I tried to dive deeper into the hundreds of articles on …
In this blog post, I want to point to some common symptoms of circadian disruption. The role of circadian rhythms in sleep is subtle, and many times issues that are attributed to other sources really have circadian factors as the root cause. The two process model: To understand the interaction between sleep and circadian rhythms …
Lately, I’ve been watching clips from the Olympics… …getting misty-eyed when the athletes hug at the end, and then stalking the winners on social media: a normal Saturday night in 2021. I have a shirt that looks like that, I think as I scroll through photos of them lifting approximately three times my body weight. …
I recently went on a trip to California. Coming from the East Coast, this was a three-hour shift west. To adjust to California time, I needed to delay my circadian clock. One catch, though: my flight out was extremely early in the morning. That meant, like it or not, I was going to advance myself …
What Exactly is Shift Work Disorder? Shift work disorder, or SWD, is a type of circadian rhythm sleep disorder which is caused by working shifts that do not fall within the conventional working hours of around 9 am – 5 pm. These shifts overlap with periods of significant light sensitivity which can cause shift workers …
One of the most common questions we get at Arcascope is “can’t you just do circadian phase estimation using machine learning?” Living in the data age, we have become used to thinking that big data and machine learning can do just about anything. In this post, I will break down some of the unique challenges …
It’s no secret that working night shifts does a number on your body. From increased risks of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and cancer, to excessive alcohol consumption and worsened nutritional intake, shift work is associated with a whole host of nightmarish health effects. The simple solution would seem to be to get rid of jobs that …
