Your brain is losing its rhythm as we speak
Our circadian rhythm is our internal body clock and is what determines our natural sleep and wake cycle. This degrades inevitably with age and disease, in ways that no amount of “better sleep habits” can fix.
New research shows over time, our brain and body undergo “profound reprogramming.” Circadian rhythm doesn’t just affect how long it takes to fall asleep, or how long you sleep. In fact, it has a significant impact on the Neural Function of Sleep, the vital processes that make sleep rejuvenating. This reveals a gap in existing sleep solutions that don’t address this relationship.
Circadian rhythm plays a crucial role in our ability to sleep in one consolidated block of time at night and stay up for around 16 hours a day. The primary mediator of this is light. As the sun sets in the evening, this triggers our brain to produce melatonin, a hormone that induces sleepiness. Our core body temperature also drops, our alertness decreases. In the morning, as exposure to light increases, cortisol production increases, body temperature rises, promoting wakefulness.
Think of circadian rhythm as a conductor leading an orchestra. The conductor doesn’t play the instruments. They are responsible for the precise timing signals that enable the orchestra to perform to perfection. In your brain and body, these timing signals are sent through hormones (i.e. melatonin and cortisol).
The Neural Functions of Sleep are the orchestra. The key thing to note here is that the conductor tells the orchestra when to play. The orchestra does the work of creating the music, in this case performing the cascade of vital processes to restore you. Both are essential. When the conductor’s timing is off, the orchestra doesn’t perform well.
What disrupts the conductor
Irregular schedules, shift work and jet lag are all common disruptors to our circadian rhythm. These factors affect our natural light and dark exposure which are key levers for increasing our melatonin and dropping our cortisol, critical coordination signals for our brain and body’s conductor.
However, these disruptions aren’t the only threat. Age and disease contribute to a natural weakening of our circadian rhythm. When this happens, cortisol levels can remain at high levels while we’re asleep. Such hormonal imbalances impair Sleep’s Neural Function to operate effectively.
When brain cells rewrite their sheet music
Latest research shows that circadian disruption also occurs at the cellular level. This refers to the predictable patterns of activity within our brain cells. These biological rhythms explain why certain processes become more active at some times of the day and less active at others. In this study, they found over 2,100 genes within the brain that had their own rhythms.
When compared to aged and early Alzheimer’s tissue, many of these genes had lost their usual rhythms. In Alzheimer’s tissue, some of these genes even gained new rhythms that didn’t exist before in the healthy tissue. This demonstrates that the role of our circadian rhythm extends far beyond timing our sleep based on external cues (like changes in light exposure). It also affects the coordination of our brain’s vital processes, and when this coordination fails from ageing or disease, the Neural Function of Sleep is impaired.
Menopause provide another example of what happens when circadian function is dysregulated. According to recent research in Nature’s Women’s health, as women transition through menopause, hormonal changes can impact their circadian rhythm, leading to the sleep disruptions we typically see in this stage of life.
Collectively, this reveals a critical limitation in how sleep health is currently approached. The sleep industry almost exclusively focuses on behavioural interventions. Sleep trackers that focus on duration and achieving consistent bedtimes will not stop the natural weakening of our circadian rhythm.
Although we want to maintain circadian function as much as possible, we can also directly overcome this limitation by enhancing the Neural Function of Sleep. Researchers around the world have proven this is possible through neurostimulation, and it is exactly the type of breakthrough that moves beyond adjusting routines to direct measurable impact.
Here at Affectable Sleep, we focus on enhancing the vital processes that happen during sleep that support your brain and body to function on the daily. We’ve spent the last 5 years developing neurotechnology to enhance Sleep’s Neural Function without altering sleep time. Affectable Sleep is pioneering a new type of wearable, that goes beyond harvesting our data and showing us pretty graphs, to directly affecting our biology, physiology, and neurophysiology to improve our health in real-time.
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