Misc

Using Nature’s Rhyme to Manage Your (Circadian) Rhythm

February 18, 2020 /

Have you ever wondered why do birds chirp and sing at daybreak or why your cat never forgets to ask for food at 4 A.M? Similarly, have you wondered why an hour feels longer waiting at the dentist’s counter and why an hour feels to be such a short time to prepare a high-stake presentation? Well, the latter can be explained by neuroscience or Relativity Theory or both. The former can be explained by a very recent Nobel winning research on mechanisms of circadian clocks.

Thanks to the Digital lifestyle that we still feel the difference in perception of time, in different ways than what typically could be a subject of formalized research. For example, one might recall how a day of heavy internet consumption alongside social media engagements would typically feel shortened and brisk. Also, a 5 hours of sleep before an early morning travel schedule would never be enough while snoozing the alarm clock.

Therefore,in the face of the convergence of Digital space with our biological sphere, we certainly need some form of assistance to navigate this digital disruption in our lifestyle. Such assistance can come from technological interventions such as an Alarm app in the smartphone or a bot to perform our digital tasks as per its supervised learning. However, there might also be few “natural” hacks to manage the overall functioning of our circadian rhythms for a happy and healthy life.

In this small I post I would try not get into the detailed and formal design-thinking approach to arrive at a solution to this issue of managing our circadian clock as in a Digitized lifestyle. Rather, I have outlined an approach to address this problem citing some of my personal experiences (storytelling) in this regard. It is my sincere belief that you may be able to tailor out a nuanced approach to your problem space, accepting that one size does not fit all.

So what’s the big deal?

It is a common knowledge now that quality of sleep matters a lot for our well-being as much as the quantity. Thus, there should be ways to ensure good quality sleep and one obvious way could be to manage anxiety in both awaken state as well as during our sleep. Regrettably, the traditional alarm systems (as well as the digitized ones as in a smartphone) are more pain than gain.  The whole concept of statically programing our subconscious to wake up at a preset time creates Alarm Anxiety.  Similarly, suddenly waking-up to the call of Alarm System or even worse of getting some extra sleep by snoozing the Alarm is hazardous to normal functioning of our brain and our overall endocrine system.

Design Goals

Therefore, the primary design goal for the problem space described above is to find or design ways that [1] ensures an anxiety free sleep tuned to our natural sleeping habits and [2] closely approximates a natural and harmonious waking up.

Design Constraints

The systems, methods and artifacts conceptualized as part of this design should strive to approximately simulate our natural sleeping and waking habits, perhaps as coded through evolutionary cycles.

Here’s how you can do that.

Be a friend of the Nature’s creations

I am an early riser by choice as well as by my genetics. I could naturally wake-up after a good night’s sleep within an hour of sunrise i.e. by say 7 A.M max. But as an entrepreneur (chewing glass all day!) I needed to be more disciplined early-riser. I decided to join the 5 A.M Club years before Robin Sharma published his book “The 5 AM Club: Own Your Morning. Elevate Your Life”. At that time I did not have much knowledge about circadian clocks, time perception in human brain etc. and went by the traditional method of setting alarm at 4:45 AM everyday (except some cheat days in between). I had been following that schedule for years and it sort of became my habit. But one thing always concerned me that I was not waking up fresh. Somewhere, that fatigue of previous day’s hustle carried forward to undermine my productivity in the early hours. I tried to include standard best practices in the morning routine such as getting some serious weight training done in a span of 20 minutes or so. But they were of not much help.

Then, since last year or so, things changed by a rather natural intervention in my life. By luck or coincidence I started living with my indoor tomcat Wily. He followed his own schedule and would make sure to wake me up by 5 A.M by settling himself behind my workspace (beside the bed) and meow till I  am (completely) awake. Interestingly, he doesn’t wake me up for his early morning breakfast alone; like a responsible master of the house he’d ensure that I am back at my desk with my morning mug of black coffee. Only after ensuring that I am awake and back at my hustle that he’d go for sleeping for hours.

So, after few weeks of this new way of waking up, I got the confidence that I don’t need the Alarm app from the damn smartphone anymore to remain in the 5 A.M club! I could sleep whenever I wanted to and Wily would definitely wake me up and see me to the desk by 5-5:30 A.M.

Long story cut short. The most interesting finding from this new arrangement established by Wily in my life is that I stopped feeling the fatigue or grogginess during the morning hours. I did not know why but I was curious enough, as sometimes Wily would allow me to sleep only for few hours (3-4 hours), still I felt refreshed and charged-up by my morning workout.

Being really curious enough I did some internet based research on this and found that the new arrangement of waking up established by Wily had removed the Alarm Anxiety from my life and that was making the difference in the level of focus and productivity after I woke up.

Design the right hack for that Alarm clock

Now, in the Digital Age it is foolhardy not to take the advantages of numerous technological solutions to  make our life better and more productive. So, our good old Alarm System is going to remain in our lives, but we must be able to put it to even better use. After experiencing immense improvement in my sleep quality and the improved productivity in the following mornings through the natural Alarm System created by Wily, I did some more experiment with the Alarm clock of the smartphone as a general aid to waking up. Given below are three hacks that might be able to help keep your circadian clock tuned to the natural sleep patterns.

Don’t use Alarm. Instead, replace the role of Alarm App with a Timer App!

This, I found to be most effective hack in managing your circadian rhythm through a very simple intervention. I can’t provide evidence of this beyond an account of my personal experience at this point of time. But I can surely testify that it works miraculously to wake me up in good mood even though I might have fixed the timer for rather short time 1-2 hours. My conjecture is that the very act of fixing the Alarm system/app itself introduces the seed of Sleep Anxiety somewhere in our subconscious and consequently we suffer when the alarm actually goes off. On the other hand when we’re fixing a timer we’re probably invoking the reward system in our brain by feeding the information – we’re in “control”; making our own decision and choosing the hours we’d allow ourselves to sleep.

Feed the Alarm System with sounds of Nature.

Record or Download sounds of birds chirping and singing, a morning rooster sound effect or record your own cats meowing for his/her breakfast. Then load/add that/those files as Alarm/Notification in your smartphone using Settings. You can even download a Multi-Alarm and load in your smartphone. It might be that somewhere in our brain these sounds (birds chirping, rooster crowing, cat meowing etc.) are hardwired through evolutionary cycles that we may still be able to invoke and thus approximate being close to the natural sleep-wake cycles.

Configure alarm system to start music that wakes you up gently.

The correlation between music and sleep is long established. However, the role of music in waking up is relatively new. Essentially, the researchers from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology observed and noted that “songs with melodies seem to have an energizing effect, “increasing arousal, cognition and attention,” which helps you feel less groggy as you wake up” Now,  from my personal experience I found that configuring the alarm system to start (with gradually increasing volume) off certain music which has trance like effects does the trick for me. To be more specific I found the number Weightless by Marconi Union as recommended by neuroscience very effective in minimizing/avoiding sleep inertia. Similarly, I discovered long back (about two decades ago) while trying some recreational substance that there were possibly some correlation between sleep-awake state and shamanic and/or psychedelic music. I have used a particular number from the arguably the most famous Psychedelic Rock band – Pink Floyd to effectuate a very gentle and soothing alarm system and it is none other than the famous Shine On You Crazy Diamond. But I would recommend the 1994 live [Pulse] version by David Gilmour rather than the 21 minutes long original version (Part 1-9) to feel the real difference in waking up gently.

Never mind being little technical

So far we explored living beings, their sounds or other human or technical interventions to mange our circadian clock toward a happy and healthy lifestyle. Now, I am going to present another possibility of piggybacking nature’s creation to the same effect. But this time there would be more artificial elements!

Our brain is hardwired to light receptors in our eyes that senses the surrounding light to alert our brain (consciousness) that it is daytime. It (light receptor in eyes) is also the primary reason why it is difficult to sleep in an intercontinental flight. So, another way, other than the sound based interrupts (like Alarm System), to wake up gracefully is to use light as a stimulation for waking up. Now, you can buy expensive Alarm Lights from the market or think of designing your own (DIY). In this section I would briefly outline how you can possibly think of creating such a light based Alarm system.

The easiest way I can think of is to mechanize the in-built ambient light sensor in your smartphone or laptop to change the brightness of a large connected monitor in the room. This is a software intensive solution but highly dependent on the operating system and underlying hardware interfaces in your devices. Thus, a detailed discussion on this remains outside the scope of this post.

Alternatively, you can even take a more hardware intensive approach. You can consider an Ambient Light Sensor pasted on your window pane to sense daylight, interface it to an Arduino board and then code some kind of Ambient Light Actuator subsystem to simulate or modulate the Lux intensity of indoor lights. You may additionally need a variable resistor circuit to effectuate the variable Lux into the indoor light system (as coded in the Ambient Light Actuator subsystem).

End Note

Through this small post I have tried to describe the problem space as it stands in the realm of Digital lifestyle. Furthermore, I have delineated the design of a mechanistic approach to use the various digital technologies in a harmonious way alongside the some elementary natural phenomena, in order to enable a healthy and productive Digital lifestyle.  As stated earlier, this is not a formal design note and is kept open ended in order to include feedback as well as new findings at a later time, as appropriate.

 

 

0 Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

RSS
Follow by Email
Facebook
Facebook
LinkedIn
Instagram