This disorients your circadian rhythm and puts your body in starvation mode. Once you’re up and ready to go, what then? If you’re trying to shed some extra pounds, dieticians are adamant: never skip breakfast. muscle aches, headaches and moodiness were reported to be lowest by participants in the study who awoke then. The optimum moment has been whittled down to 7.22 a.m. has deleterious effects on health unless exercise is performed for 30 minutes afterward. One study found that even rising at 7.00 a.m. The average urban resident, for example, rouses at the eye-blearing time of 6.04 a.m., which researchers believe to be far too early. While contemporary living can sometimes appear to subjugate biology – after all, who needs circadian rhythms when we have caffeine pills, energy drinks, shift work and cities that never sleep? – keeping in synch with our body clock is important. Knowledge of chronobiological patterns can have many pragmatic implications for our day-to-day lives. Plants appear no more malleable in this respect studies demonstrate that vegetables grown in season and ripened on the tree are far higher in essential nutrients than those grown in greenhouses and ripened by laser. Recent therapeutic developments for humans such as artificial light machines and melatonin administration can reset our circadian rhythms, for example, but our bodies can tell the difference and health suffers when we breach these natural rhythms for extended periods of time. Scientists have limited abilities to create durable modifications of chronobiological demands. This is a benign variation within circadian rhythms known as a chronotype. ‘Night people’, for example, often describe how they find it very hard to operate during the morning, but become alert and focused by evening. Not everyone has an identical circadian rhythm. Aside from sleeping at night and waking during the day, each cycle involves many other factors such as changes in blood pressure and body temperature. This is the complete cycle our bodies are naturally geared to undergo within the passage of a twenty-four hour day. When it comes to humans, chronobiologists are interested in what is known as the circadian rhythm. A third group are known as crepuscular: they thrive in the low-light of dawn and dusk and remain inactive at other hours. Nocturnal animals, such as bats and possums, prefer to forage by night. Numerous creatures, humans included, are largely diurnal – that is, they like to come out during the hours of sunlight. Animals tend to be active or inactive depending on the position of the sun or moon. Marine life, for example, is influenced by tidal patterns. Chronobiology might sound a little futuristic – like something from a science fiction novel, perhaps – but it’s actually a field of study that concerns one of the oldest processes life on this planet has ever known: short-term rhythms of time and their effect on flora and fauna.

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