Of course, your work schedule or family life may dictate when you have to get up in the morning. That means night owls shouldn’t try to force themselves to bed at 9 or 10 if they’re not tired. “Thirty or 40 years of professional life aren’t going to change them.” “These cycles have been established for hundreds of thousands of years,” Walker explains. And no matter how hard you try to reset or reschedule your circadian rhythms when it comes to bedtime, there’s just not much wiggle room. “The idea that you can learn to work at night and sleep during the day-you just can’t do that and be at your best.” Your brain and body’s circadian rhythms-which regulate everything from your sleeping patterns to your energy and hunger levels-tell your brain what kind of slumber to crave. People who slept for five hours a night for just a week had a higher heart rate during the day. Even shortened sleep has an effect, one recent study found. In one study, people who had experience working at night had lower scores on standardized tests of memory and processing speed than those who hadn’t-and people who had a decade or more of shift work experience had such pronounced cognitive deficits that they equaled about 6.5 years of cognitive decline. Shift work has been linked to obesity, heart attack, a higher rate of early death and even lower brain power. That’s unfortunate news for nightshift workers, bartenders and others with unconventional sleep-wake routines, because they can’t sleep efficiently at odd hours of the day or night, Walker says.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |