You might have heard the term, Circadian Rhythms, and you might even know that it has something to do with sleep, but really, few people have a clear grasp of what this means. And that needs to change, because this is really important to your health.

Circadian rhythms refers to the internal “clock” all living things on earth possess. And it doesn’t just refer to sleep—even though that is a huge part of it. It has to do with when we get hungry, our hormone production and activity, brain waves, cell death-birth-regeneration and more.

Just last week, 3 American researchers won a Nobel Prize for their discoveries related to circadian rhythms.

First, let’s imagine how your day would look if your circadian rhythms were ideally synced.

• At about 6:45, you would wake up. You’d have a 45 minute wake-up routine (might include stretching, drinking water, meditation, etc.)
• At about 7:30am you would be alert and ready to start doing things (working, hunting, childcare, etc.)
• At about 8:30, you’d have a bowel movement.
• At 9am, your testosterone would spike, putting you into peak mental and physical performance mode. This “performance mode” lasts about 6-7 hours, peaking around 5pm before your body starts to wind down.
• About 9pm, melatonin production starts back up again and you’re in bed by 10pm.
• At 2am is your deepest sleep.
• It all starts up again at 6:45am.

Does that sound like you? Probably not.

Most of us get way less sleep than that. The average American gets less than 7 hours and some of us are running on 5 hours or less for weeks or months at a time.

How do your circadian rhythms get off track?

For people who work night shifts, it gets flipped upside down—which is not ideal. For people trying to change their bodies (bulk up, lose weight, gain weight, etc.), it gets off track. But for the vast majority of us, it gets out of sync because we de-prioritize mealtimes and sleeping below everything else in life.

Just as an example, let’s say you live that average American life:

• You wake up at 6:30, you throw on a pot of coffee, you drag the kids out of bed and rush around for 45 minutes to get them to school by 7:30. But you’ve got to be at the bus stop at 7:20. You get them on the bus and you’re hungry.
• You eat a pastry or a granola bar or something.
• You get into work at 9am. You’re putting out fires until lunchtime, when you go out with your co-workers at whatever restaurant is nearby where you eat carbs and processed meats.
• At 1pm you’re back at work.
• At 3pm it’s time for coffee and a donut.
• You leave at 5, get the kids from wherever they were, get home at 6, everybody’s hungry.
• You microwave some meal-in-a-box, get the kids to bed by 9. It’s finally me time!
• You veg out in front of the TV or scroll on Facebook on your iPad until way too late, getting to bed at midnight or 1am. You wake up and repeat the process.

Your body has really no idea what’s going on. You probably didn’t ever get to peak deep sleep during that 5 hours of sleep. You woke up and immediately started stressing out, which released cortisol (causing weight gain).

That pastry or granola bar you ate for breakfast spiked insulin, as did lunch a couple hours later, then again during your coffee and cake break, then again at dinner. There’s also a good chance that when you were up late scrolling Facebook, you had a snack. What happens is that insulin and cortisol are basically at a constant drip in your system for 18 hours a day. You gain weight, your cells become desensitized to insulin (insulin resistance), blood sugar goes up, etc.

Also, your blood pressure and heart rate are operating at “performance mode” levels the entire day. This is tough on your cardiovascular system.

Why you should respect the rhythm

When you sleep, your body does repairs. This is when damaged cells die and new cells regenerate to replace damaged tissues. The reason for this is that being awake and working and taking care of kids—and especially digesting food–and everything else takes a lot of energy.

So your body counts on sleep time to address whatever issues arise during the day. When you don’t sleep enough, there’s not time or energy to fix everything and you build up a debt to yourself.

In an effort to manage damaged cells and tissues, your body sends the immune system to “manage” damage. This results in inflammation, which can eventually become system-wide and lead to every health condition under the sun from cancer to Parkinson’s to heart attacks.

It goes even deeper. What these Nobel Prize-winning researchers found and published just this year is that you don’t just have one biological clock determining your Circadian rhythm. Every cell, organ and system has its own biological clock. So when you time your sleep, when you time your meals and when you time physical/mental activity affects your physiology.

For example, if you eat a huge breakfast, skip lunch and eat a moderately-sized dinner, you’ll gain weight (or lose less weight) compared to someone who skips breakfast, eats a big lunch and eats a moderately-sized dinner (which goes hand-in-hand with intermittent fasting).

So to summarize, ignoring or working against your body’s many Circadian rhythms contributes to weight gain, insulin resistance, diabetes, inflammation, heart disease, stress and early mortality.

But right now you’re saying, “Dr. Ernst, what else am I supposed to do? I have to get the kids to school, I have to go to work, I have to feed the family. There’s no alternative!”

I say BS.

Here are several things you can do to get your Circadian rhythms back on track.

One study showed that you can reset your Circadian rhythms by camping for 5 days. If you go camping for 5 days, without the TV, the fluorescent light bulbs, the iPad, etc for five days, you’ll come back 100% reset. Why is that?

Because one of the biggest disruptors in the modern world is blue light, which is what emanates from the screens we’re always staring at and the light bulbs in our office, homes and public buildings we frequent.

A couple other tips: realize that caffeine (coffee, tea, soda) has an effect in your body for roughly 12 hours. If you drink coffee at 3pm, it’s not out of your system until 3am.

Don’t eat past 7 or 8pm. Your body tries to stay awake to digest food. And if you do fall asleep with a full stomach, you’ll likely never reach a state of deep sleep because your body has to keep the digestive system working at full throttle while you sleep.

Don’t sleep with your pets. Truth is, it prevents you from sleeping deeply.

And perhaps the biggest one: turn off the electronics AT LEAST an hour before bedtime.

So, as an exercise, let’s accomplish all the same necessary things from our previous example but do it in a way that causes less disruption to our Circadian rhythms.

• You wake up at 6:30 and drink a large glass of water. You stretch or do yoga or meditate for 15 minutes. You get the kids up at 6:45, get them ready and have them to the bus stop at 7:20.
• You don’t eat breakfast (because you’re intermittent fasting). But you do have a cup of bulletproof coffee.
• You grab your lunch that you had prepped the night before from the fridge (it consists of fats, proteins and leafy greens) and get to work by 9am.
• At noon, you eat lunch outside (weather permitting), allowing the sun to shine on your face for at least 30 minutes.
• At 3pm, rather than coffee and cake, you have caffeine-free tea and a handful or two of nuts.
• You pick up the kids after work as usual, having them home by six. The night before, you prepped as much as you could for tonight’s meal (cutting vegetables, maybe pulling your protein out of the freezer to thaw) and you cook it relatively quickly. Everyone is eating dinner by 6:30-6:45.
• You and the kids go outside after dinner for a walk or to play a little game of soccer or tag.
• You have them in bed by 9pm.
• You prep tomorrow’s lunch and as much as you can for tomorrow’s dinner.
• Take an hour or so for yourself, but make it SCREEN-FREE. Read a book or magazine, or work on a creative hobby.
• 10:30pm – Go to bed

Do that for 21 days straight. It will change your life.