Time Changes: How To Get Your Body Clock Back On Track

With the fall time change upon us I wanted to share a transcript of a recent interview with Dr. Joseph Ojile about how to get your body clock back on track. He founded the Clayton Sleep Institute (CSI), a local sleep medicine clinical and research organization that frequently appears on Fox2 news in the morning and offers sleep information to the local St. Louis viewers. He is being interviewed by Lisa Hart co-anchor of the morning news. They will be discussing the upcoming time change and its effects on our body’s circadian rhythm and body clock along with its effects on our lives. Enjoy and go check them out!

Lisa Hart: Welcome back this morning we continue to hear more and more about her circadian rhythm and the body clock, but do we truly understand its importance? We have got Dr. Joseph Ojile from the Clayton Sleep Institute he’s going to join us with perhaps a plan to manage your daily life in an effort to harmonize your health with that internal body clock. Good morning to you Doctor.

Dr. Ojile: Good morning.

Lisa Hart: Sleep always gets us talking here, especially at Fox2 news in the morning. It sounds simple A little bit here when we talk about harmonizing our body clock but is it really?

Dr. Ojile: The first step is awareness.

Lisa Hart: OK, And for all of us understand that we focus on the fact that when we go to bed when we get up as far as our daily life

Dr. Ojile: But there is an important internal time clock a rhythm that is built into our bodies that we call our circadian rhythm which is independent of the other parts of our sleep cycle it can move but it moves very slowly and so this is the underlying sleep or underlying life cycle that goes on with two periods of wakefulness and two periods of sleepiness and so if we can get that lined up with our day to day life we have a powerful tool.

Lisa Hart: It’s fascinating that when I read some of the research some of the materials that you give us just how much this really can affect our health especially when these things are thrown off and why it’s so important for us to fix that and you have some really good tools on what we can do to regulate our daily sleep cycle.

Dr. Ojile: Well the first thing is stability and one of the things about the internal time clock that to fix that you really have some really good tools on what we can do to fix us to regulate our daily sleep cycle other things like hormones how are bar organs related to medications and other things for things with Sprint since things like diabetes and other issues from the standpoint of how we do it in our daily lives one of the important things is stability if you think about jet lag which is kind of the easiest thing to understand throwing off your circadian rhythm, What happens there is that we move time zones very rapidly and our body’s time clock cannot keep up with that, so we were discussing for instance work schedules and you all have a very unique work schedule and the key there is the stability of going to bed at the same time getting up at the same time for a steady and long period of time. Right?

Weeks, months, and in some cases years with your co-anchor. That causes certain stability in the circadian rhythm. The other aspect of that besides the stability I when you get up in the morning to get bright light to get activity and sometimes even incorporate your exercise into that those sorts of activities what it’s called entrainment that locks down your circadian rhythm for the period of days and weeks as you’re doing that that at that schedule that’s the kind of things we need to do, When we travel, we can’t move the circadian rhythm much more than one hour per day or an hour and a half per day Then it’s key to get up in the morning and get bright light and when we’re in that’ll help and get the exercise that’ll help secure your day’s activities and make you awake at the right times, when you travel east it’s the one time when melatonin works.

Lisa Hart: Mmm hmm

Dr. Ojile: Melatonin which is over the counter because it’s a naturally occurring hormone is the hormone that spikes up at bedtime when you travel east it doesn’t know to spike up quite yet so if you take melatonin 60 – 90 minutes before you want to go to bed when you go east it will help you that’s the one area that’s been studied quite extensively.

Lisa Hart: So interesting if you guys want to learn more of course you can go to our website, of course, will link you to all of that information at fox2now.com or our Fox2 app Dr. Ojile thank you so much this is always such an interesting topic we can talk about it all day I’m going to have to stop for now and send it back to John who is very good with his sleep always keeping his daily schedule on track.