From abc.net.au
Are you one of those people who wakes up automatically — just before your alarm goes off?
Many humans like routine, and if you are a person who works regular hours, you might find you open your eyes in time to stop the alarm off just before it rudely wakes you.
How does the brain know it's time to wake up? It's all about the body clock.
Sleep and respiratory physiologist Peter Catcheside from Flinders University said when an individual's 24-hour body clock (otherwise known as the circadian clock) lines up with their sleep system, it has a good sense of what time it is.
"By the end of the night, close to our normal waking time, it’s already run through the sleep processes that it needs to run through during the night, so it's naturally coming towards waking up," he said.
"So it's really that body clock sensation of time of day which is helping us to wake up at the right time of day."
The body clock likes routine
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Health experts say getting a good night's sleep is important for our health and wellbeing, and sticking to routines for going to sleep and waking up at about the same time is the best way to maintain that.
But if you are among the increasing numbers of shift workers starting at different hours of the day or night, a new parent, travelling overseas or on holiday hoping to catch up on lost sleep, routine is likely to be out the window.
People with changing sleep patterns are likely to have irregular light exposure and disrupted exercise and meal routines, all of which affect their body clock and have negative health effects, according to the Sleep Health Foundation.
A disrupted body clock can lead to jet-lag, insomnia or shift work disorder, and play a role in chronic diseases and mental health problems, Professor Catcheside said.
"When we don't get enough good quality sleep and when our body clocks are out of phase with our normal daily schedules our brains don't function and the rest of our body is on the wrong time to function at its optimal," he said.
'Holiday mode' changes routines
Sleep experts say despite the obvious benefits of holidays, a change in habits can create ongoing problems including insomnia.
Director of the centre for sleep science at the University of Western Australia, Jennifer Walsh, said many people started holidays in "sleep debt", so their bodies try to make up for lost sleep.
But going into "holiday mode" where you sleep in or go to bed earlier than usual can change regular patterns.
"It can cause problems with our sleep down the track, so some people will go into a pattern where they don't sleep well and that might perpetuate and turn into insomnia, that's the biggest risk," she said.
More alcohol, caffeine and food while catching up with family and friends during festive or cultural holidays can also exacerbate things, Dr Walsh said.
Shift work sleep routine
About 10 to 15 per cent of shift workers may suffer from "shift work sleep disorder" characterised by insomnia-like symptoms, excessive sleepiness and fatigue.
That is a significant proportion of people working outside nine to five, which in Australia equals about 16 to 20 per cent or about 1.6 million employees, associate professor in the department of health sciences at Macquarie University, Christopher Gordon, said.
People with sleep disorders and shift workers can benefit from what's called a "shift work sleep routine" to maximise their potential for shut eye, Dr Gordon said.
"[It involves] going to bed at the same time, trying to wake at the same time, reducing things like caffeine and alcohol before you try to go to sleep [as well as] heavy meals, and really trying to get that routine established," he said.
"There's other things you can do with your environment such as making the room very dark and if you can't do that, possibly wearing an eye mask and using ear plugs can also help."
'Nudging' the body clock
In the hope of addressing some of these body clock problems, Professor Catcheside and a team of researchers at Flinders University are investigating personalised sleep regimes.
"We want to solve one of the biggest ongoing problems in sleep medicine, by devising a practical way to reliably track and treat people with a body-clock timing problem," Professor Catcheside said.
Doctors and psychologists are largely using guesswork unless they have data based on the individual's body clock, Professor Catcheside said.
The team is developing technology for a personalised tracker which would measure the daily core body temperature, a key marker of when the body clock is most sensitive to being influenced by light.
"That would be new technology that could automate the process of tracking when the body is timed each day, giving information back to users about when is a good time to try and go to sleep and when to get up, and also when is the best time to get blue light exposure," Professor Catcheside said.
The good news is that initial results show that light exposure at the right time should help "nudge" a person's body clock in the right direction.
"The timing of therapy is critical because the body clock is most sensitive to blue-enriched light for only a few hours a day and can be advanced or delayed depending on light exposure timing," he said.
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