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Camping Helps Set Circadian Clocks Straight
cold fjord writes "Counsel & Heal reports, 'Many people are stuck in the vicious cycle of late nights and late mornings. However, a new study reveals that a week of camping in the great outdoors may help people set their clocks straight. A new study, published in the journal Current Biology, reveals that if given a chance, our body's internal biological clocks will tightly synchronize to a natural, midsummer light-dark cycle. The study found that a week of exposure to true dawn and dusk with no artificial lights had a significant effect on people who might otherwise describe themselves as night owls. Researchers found that under those conditions, night owls quickly become early birds. "By increasing our exposure to sunlight and reducing our exposure to electrical lighting at night, we can turn our internal clock and sleep times back and likely make it easier to awaken and be alert in the morning," Kenneth Wright of the University of Colorado Boulder said in a news release.'"
You call naturally awakening early "straight", I call it pagan witchcraft. I'm fine with staying up late thanks.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It does the same thing, for years on end, without having to take vacation days. The funny thing is that you do actually get used to it; I was a night owl, but not anymore. Now, if I do sleep in, I actually wake up with a headache.
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Anyone who has been camping should have experienced this. It's really nice to be in sync with the day again, makes one happy. With computers (blue lights destroys Melatonin and thus makes you less sleepy), days last longer and longer.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
I wonder if this works in Northern Latitudes, and if so at what time of year.
There is certainly some merit to this research. However, be careful where you go camping. After my recent two-week camping trip to Iceland, my internal clocks are set to this insane there-is-no-night-and-your-are-never-gonna-sleep-again mode. It's been two weeks since I got back and still can't get enough sleep.
When hiking through Europe ( I once walked from Amsterdam to Rome ), it was the same for me: as long as I slept outside, in a tent, I would wake up with sunrise and get sleepy shortly after sunset. As soon as I would begin sleeping in hotels, monasteries etc. etc., I would turn into a night-owl again...
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Why not just open the blinds before bedtime and turn off the lights progressively at night... or whatever the magic is... that does this?
I assume most whacked out rythms are just either from work schedules or start from bad self-discipline keeping on watching TV or hanging on the computer way past tired. In the latter situation, with smartphones, that means not even most accessible camping is going to help.
I love camping, but having worked nightshift for the last 30 years and most likely will do the same for the rest of my carreer, this explains why I feel so out of sorts whenever I go.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Call it bullshit, but even things that you consider innate should still be held to the standard of peer review publishing. Remember, it was once innate that the earth is flat. People studying "scratch, itch, or not blink" and not too long ago smoking figure out things about health effects of all sorts of things that are innately harmless because there is no immediate affect. Asbestos, lead, and smoking come to mind.
Attacking science, no matter what popular opinion of it is, is dangerous. You didn't die of some terrible disease because scientists figured out vaccines. Engineers using what scientists figured out about electricity, magnetism, and mathematics built the computer you are using to read about this "bullshit". We already have enough anti-intellectualism in this world. There are morons in congress (and people who vote for them) that want to take a religious, "common sense", or tough guy approach to problems even in the face of overwhelming evidence.
Considering sleep quality and quantity is vital to a persons mental and physical health, sleep research is important. There might be some people reading this that have never lived in a rural area and have never been camping that might just have sleep problems that could benefit from this.
Solar panel/automotive power inverter and satellite internet.
I worked 7am-3pm for 2 months, 3 years ago. Other than that, either 11pm-7am or 7pm-3am, or random hours on call, for the last 24 years. I get all messed up on vacation or out of work for some reason. Normal circadian rhythms do not exist in my world, since when I was working on call I lived a 20 hour day for most of the week... work 8, off 12, work 8 off 12. I'm still amazed that only a very few of my co-workers have died from falling asleep behind the wheel before, during, or after work. The days of working during the day and sleeping at night are long gone.
Studies show that me picking a fight with, oh, just about anyone, will get my clock cleaned, a hunderd percent guarantee.
And who doesn't love a clean clock?
I've been tested to have a natural 3AM - 11AM (standard time) sleep cycle. I've done quite a bit of camping, for week+ periods, and it never changed that cycle. I'd still be up 'til well past midnight and totally ass-dragging 'til lunch. Saw a LOT of stars in the woods, desert, shore, though.
I doubt that they had real biological (genetic alleles) in that test, or true larks, for that matter.
... sleeping on the ground outdoors isn't really comfortable.
You're really going to claim that your personal anecdotes trump the scientific method? Did you read the paper and find specific fault with their methods? Maybe your tent just sucks.
That really depends where you are camping and the quality of your tents, I find that I wake up closer to sunrise and feel tried closer to sunset when camping irrelevant of the time of year (including winter in reasonably cold conditions where it is far more comfortable in the tent).
Also I am sure they actually measured the melatonin levels.
null
I use a dawn simulator for a morning "alarm" instead of a regular alarm clock. It doesn't keep me from staying up late, but it does make keeping an good morning rhythm easy in the winter when the sun comes up much later.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Visit Montreal or Toronto if you need to reset your Canadian rhythms. Vancouver, even.
Unless you camp like a sissy with lots of fancy equipment nature won't help you a bit in South Florida. First the heat will kill you. The insects will drive you mad as a March hatter. You will be miserable. Snakes, alligators and human psychopaths are more than a tiny issue and to make it worse we have wild boar that will kill you in the blink of an eye. One long weekend in our natural environment and you'll drop on the first air conditioned concrete slab you come to and sleep like a rock. You will feel like a victim of torture and may never be the same again for your entire life. You will most likely gain religion as much of your camping experience will be spent begging Jesus for the misery to let up.
While I think there's likely some truth in the studies' conclusion, I don't think it controls for the environmental changes and attributes it all to avoiding unnatural light, and I don't think this is necessarily an accurate assessment.
One of the things that happens when you camp and hike is that you eat less and burn more calories. One of the things that keeps us up is our high calorie diets coupled with our sedentary lifestyles, causing our bodies to burn off excess calories through stupid things like nervous twitches. You can see the same circadian fix as the one the study proposes by working out for an hour and a half a day or doing heavy physical labor.
Couple that with how much easier it is to sleep when you're bored, and the fact that there's not much you can do in the woods at night compared to day, and you get a natural gravitation towards sleeping during the dark hours of the day. Hiking may regulate our sleep, but I think there's more factors here at play.
The concept of a flat earth was never "innate", at least in Western cultures over the past 2200 years.
According to the wiki, as early as 1604, smoking was considered unhealthy, which is pretty soon given that tobacco became known after the discovery of America. Only the tobacco industry was actively trying to play down the risks of smoking.
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I work night shift You insensitive clods!
I find that even without light, sound and temp also helps regulate sleep. In the spring/summer/fall when nights are 50-68F (10-20c) I open windows at night. I find that both the coolness of the morning combined with birds chirping, and to a lesser extent people leaving for work constantly, help me to feel more alert when waking up regardless of when I went to sleep.
That said with out any kind of alarm and in a controlled environment with zero stimuli, I'll sleep almost exactly 8 hours.
There is or can be built a machine that can simulate any physical object. -Church-Turing principle
I've used 2-3 day backpacking trips to reset my clock for years. Typically, after moving for 10-15 miles in a day under the sun with 25-50lbs on my pack and then making camp, I'm ready for bed at sundown anyway. I actually have to force myself to stay up til 9 or 10pm. For the last few years, though, I've used this to reset my kids summer schedules. Typically by mid-August they're going to bed at 2-3am and getting up around 12-1pm each day. So the last week of summer for the last 3 years we've gone camping. Nothing special no grueling backpacking trips. Just camping at a campsite with tents and a fire and day hikes, etc. After a week of this they're on a sun-up to sun-down sleep schedule and ready for the new school year.