RESET YOUR BODY CLOCK
How a night away in the great outdoors can lay foundations for sounder slumber back at home
Why a weekend camping trip can give your sleep cycle an outside advantage
It’s no secret that a predilection for double-screening Netflix and Instagram leads to an anti-social relationship with your morning alarm. But even for those who evade the dreaded ‘ blue light’, your production of the sleep hormone melatonin could be experiencing some drastic urban decay.
Data collected at the University of Colorado Boulder reports modern living reduces your exposure to natural light by a gloomy 13 times when compared with optimal outdoor levels. This delays melatonin production, stalling your internal body clock by up to two hours. Thankfully, the same research suggests that using the upcoming bank holiday to flee Gotham could undo a winter’s worth of damage to your sleep cycle. In a study published by Current Biology journal, participants who spent time camping, safe from any sleep-disrupting mobile phones and other LED sources, avoided the typical weekend pattern of late nights and long lie-ins. Combined with greater exposure to daylight, this produced a biological timing shift, resetting their body clocks an average of 100 minutes earlier.
Outwitting the nightly staring contest with your ceiling will require more than one long weekend in the Brecon Beacons, mind. Consistency is key to keeping your sleep on track. Maintain a regular schedule, increase daily exposure to sunlight and save your social media for the morning commute to prevent your circadian rhythm from switching to fast-forward. Then it’s simply a case of stifling your smugness as the only man not yawning through 9am meetings.