The Circadian Rhythm
It blows my mind that the Circadian Rhythm has been written about for MILLENNIA! I am talking thousands of years … it’s not something that was created to sell you a mattress or a sleep sound machine. It really does exist and research has shown that it was documented as early as the 4th century BC! If this is new to you, by definition the Circadian Rhythm is “a natural, internal process that regulates the sleep-wake cycle and repeats roughly every 24 hours", is Latin for the words “around” and “day”and science has proven that it shows up in plants and animals, not just human beings.
According to the National Sleep Foundation, “Your circadian rhythm is basically a 24-hour internal clock that is running in the background of your brain and cycles between sleepiness and alertness at regular intervals. It’s also known as your sleep/wake cycle.”
Things can get in the way of our Circadian Rhythm and get us off track … Daylight Savings Time, travel and changing time zones aka jet lag, staying up late to watch a movie, even our stress levels that keep our minds racing all affect the quality of our sleep. But the good news is that our Circadian Rhythms are built in, not something outside of ourselves that sits on our bedside tables! Even though the rhythms are affected by our environment, ultimately we have the ability to adjust our internal clocks wherever we go. Minor as well as major events can happen influencing the choices we make but no matter what, disrupting the rhythm can leave you feeling anxious, out of sorts and basically living with brain fog. Check the end of my blog for interesting Circadian Solutions.
Recently I was having a conversation with an old friend about the rhythm of working on a cruise ship. As a former crew member, I would find myself boarding and then settling into a seafarers life fairly quickly. Just like in an office when a group of women begin to “cycle” at the same time, so too do we seafarers being to operate on the same wake/sleep cycles … a collective consciousness so to speak. As if we were babies in the womb, we are tethered to the heartbeat of our “mother”, the ship. The engines pulse a heartbeat as we sailed from port to port and I clearly remember one night as we came out of dry dock, when I awoke to the sound of silence. Eerie indeed! The AC was running in my cabin but I could not hear or feel the heartbeat of the ship … our engines had shut down and we were adrift in the Colombian River Gorge. So just like a ship, the earth has its pulse too and our bodies ebb and flow with it. As we become more self-aware, we begin to recognize that invisible rhythm and dance with it.
In the years since those days of working onboard, for three years I lived, worked, studied, mentored and taught in an ashram. Nestled in the heart of the Ocala National Forest, and embraced by Mother Nature, I brushed up against the Circadian Rhythm time and time again. Yes, I found myself waking before the sun and going to sleep with nightfall but it had nothing to do with practicing yoga. I had connected with that pulse. There were nights that were so still you could hear an owls wings as they hunted and nested in the trees around us. I can’t tell you how many times I’d sit on the dock and the bun on top of my head would be swooped by the wings a hunting owl. At first I thought it was strange but after a while, I came to realize that my internal clock had completely slowed down outside of the ticking of Corporate America and I had tuned into life around me. The animals were resonating with my Circadian Rhythm.
The Dance With The Deer
Post Yoga Nidra Meditation … resonating with the Divine Mother.
It happened time and time again but what I began to pay attention to was WHEN it was happening. What was I doing to connect with Nature so strongly? With living in an ashram, it is a choice to do your inner work. Days, weeks, months, years spent in Self Discovery, that journey inwards that shows you the breadth of your capacity to connect. I recognized that when I let go of the tenacious hold my mind had on me and opened my heart, moments such as these would come. So I started to play with it, intentionally opening myself up and doing it with such awareness and mindfulness that I encouraged Mother Nature to show up … and oh was it spectacular.
Dancing Shiva
He comes out of curiosity … open hearted interaction.
When this young deer started showing up on the ashram property, we were all amazed and delighted to have an up close and personal experience. This was no petting zoo animal however we fondly named him “Buck”. Scenes from The Yearling kept the conversation lively around the dinner table and since the story sprang from the same area were were in, life was once again repeating art. Although we kept our distance, “Buck” sought us out but we paid close attention to how he resonated with some of us and not with others. We had a reclusive and extremely introverted groundskeeper named Carolyn that he seemed to think was his mom. Carolyn wanted nothing to do with him but he didn’t care. He’d happily trot around after her, thinking it was a game. No matter what, he always seemed to come around the most when we were in either a group yoga class or a Yoga Nidra class … it was if he knew, on the deepest level that we had returned to our heart centers and re-connected with the Divine. It was the oddest but most beautiful thing I had experienced in a long time. Random visits into the tent where we practiced kept our teachers on high alert because you never knew when he would just open up the flap and walk in! Imagine the surprise of being in the middle of a meditation and a wild deer walks past you! My imagination became my reality on more than one occasion.
The rhythm connects you to all creatures great and small.
Whether holding a baby Cardinal who had knocked itself out running into the glass of our living room window when it was being chased by a hawk or cuddling a baby squirrel in the palms of my hands, trying to keep it warm when he and his sibling fell out of a tree … the Circadian Rhythm was the rhythm I lived by. The experiences I had … I would not trade them for the world.
Since we left the forest and came back out into the fast paced world, I still look for moments to slow down, reach out and touch the Circadian Rhythms around me. When we go boating, I open my heart and it’s almost as if a mermaid sings … dolphins come to the boat or swim up our channel and “blow” past our dock, loggerhead turtles surface like aliens from the deep, bald eagles soar overhead, the Screech Owls who have come to visit time and time again this winter. We end up with some of the craziest “wildlife” stories you can imagine … down to the two snakes that have now shed their skin, one on the shutter of my office window and the other one (about 4 feet long) on my path in our back yard.
What can you do to slow down and get in touch with your Circadian Rhythm or at least get it back on track?
Try to go to bed and wake up at the same time every day, even the weekends.
I find that Melatonin is helpful before going to bed.
I also enjoy a cup of Camomile tea before bed.
If you can’t sleep, a cup of warm milk laced with turmeric and honey will help you settle into the zzzzz’s.
Brain Waves … this is one of the best things yet. Dr. Jeffrey Thompson has worked with binaural beats for decades. You can find his work on Youtube. Here is a link to his Delta Sleep System that I absolutely love:
More Brain Waves … this time with the Schumann Resonance. I’ll save the details of this for another day but here is a link to a YouTube that I think you’ll find most helpful in getting to sleep.
Tension and relaxation exercises for the body.
Counted breath, starting from five and count down. If you start too high, and you lose track because you drift off to sleep, your mind will end up racing back in and you’ll be wide awake and have to start over.
Wear a Philip Stein Sleep Bracelet to bed. Ideally, with the Natural Frequency Technology, you could wear a Philip Stein watch during the day and then remove the watch and night and slip on the sleep bracelet 30 minutes before bedtime but if you are on a limited budget, go for the Sleep Bracelet.
When you know what your DOSHA is, you can find the perfect time for you to wake up and go to sleep every day. Each dosha whether you are a Vata, Pitta, Kapha, or even Try-Doshic, has its own particulars but when it comes to Ayurveda, which has been around for thousands of years, the time frames are pretty accurate. If you go past your time frame, you end up with a stimulated mind and you get caught in a four hour cycle. Here is a simple quiz available on the Deepak Chopra website.