The author lived underground for 10 days to study sleep, happiness, health

In an effort to better understand how factors like when we eat and how much sunlight we get affect our ability to feel rested, happy and balanced, Lynne Peeples went 50 feet underground for 10 days.

Peeples, science journalist and “Internal clock: Living in sync with our circadian rhythms“, he found Airbnb in Arkansas This was a bunker during the Cold War.

“This man bought an old nuclear missile silo from the government and dug it up,” he said in a newspaper excerpt.Better everyday with Leah Smart” podcast.

In the bunker, “there was no daylight,” he said. Peeples also got the Airbnb host’s permission to cover all the clocks on their digital devices with black tape so they would have no idea what time it was down there.

The lights in the bunker were dim and red. “We know that red is the wavelength of light it least affects our circadian rhythms“, he said.

For his book, Peeples wanted to explore what would happen to his internal clocks “if I cut myself off from those signals that are supposed to tell the time.”

During her stay, Peeples documented her experience through voice recordings, with a plan to use timestamps to see how closely it fit with her regular schedule, such as when she ate breakfast or went to bed.

“For the first two days, it was a miracle because I looked at the time stamps on the voice recordings I made later, and I was pretty accurate about living through a 24-hour day,” he said. “Our internal clock keeps pretty good time.”

But halfway through the experience, Peeples began to feel “very out of shape,” which she likened to severe jet lag.

“At my worst, I completely flipped out. I was going about my day from the floor when everyone else was asleep. So I was up close to 12 hours,” he said. “I felt the effects of that.”

Peeples’ moodiness, “feeling hot and cold” and hunger began when her internal clock became out of sync with its normal schedule. He also noticed that his thinking was more clouded, and that he was more clumsy than usual.

“Not that it wasn’t expected, but to actually feel that was pretty profound.”

When your circadian rhythm is out of sync, you may experience fatigue, insomnia, headaches or even depression. Cleveland Clinic. The results of Peeple’s experiment further prove what research has shown about how certain factors like exposure to sunlight can affect your circadian rhythm.

“It’s about maintaining that calibration getting adequate bright light, especially in the morning” said Peeples.

“If you expose your eyes to bright daylight within the first hour or two of waking up,” you’re in good shape.

Take a 15-minute walk in the morning and “stay as close to a window as possible during the day,” he suggested. at night, turn off the lights in your house as you get closer to bed to prepare your body for bed.

Aligning your lifestyle with the 24-hour cycle is essential for your body’s functions, including processing food properly and “boosting our immune system” to fight certain pathogens. It’s the best way to “keep all those body systems doing a better job of doing the right things at the right time.” himself he said

Peeples also provided a list of things that can disrupt your circadian rhythm and affect more than just the quality and quantity of your sleep:

• Darkness during the day
• Too much light at night
• Eating at the wrong times of day (snacking anytime)
• Changing the time of our clocks twice a year, when we “fall back” and “spring forward“
• Traveling across time zones

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