The Rhythms of Our Day

 

 

“Remember: life is a rhythm between day and night, summer and winter. It is a continuous rhythm. Never stop anywhere! Be moving! And the bigger the swing, the deeper your experience will be.”

— Rajneesh

I remember hearing the words “Circadian Rhythm” in University in Brain and Behavior course.  They were tucked somewhere obsolete in one of the folds of my brain.  But as Fall falls, the words came back. I hope to give you something new (old) to think about today.

Circadian Rhythm is the twenty-four-hour internal clock that is our processor, of sorts, running in the background of our consciousness.  Where we live, amounts of light, and the cycles of night and day influence this clock.  Most of never even think of this, but it is a huge part of our lives and function as a body and its need for rest, for wakefulness, for body temperature, hormone secretions, heart rate, blood pressure, urine production, blood sugar, cholesterol levels, immune systems, repair systems, and more.  How easily we pop pills for some of this without understanding what is being influenced in our body.  Imagine how drugs, alcohol, stress, have affected biological change in us those prescriptions are used to moderate. 

In fact, there is night and day controls that are called Diurnal; monthly functions that are called Circalunar; and Circannual, which are yearly functions.  Circadian patterns control why it is hard to wake up, or go to sleep, in a twenty-four-hour cycle. And how far we have come from a time when dipping sun meant to prepare to sleep and rising sun meant time to get up.  We have deviated from what was biologically normal.  

Personality can influence the cycle(s).   Cancer treatments are effective when the doctors know how to influence our natural rhythms to accept such treatments. We have not known what scientists have learned, in that background, let alone our biological ones. 

We have decided to have artificial lights, we enter places that have artificial light.  We get up long after sunrise.  We go to bed long after sunset.  We do not sleep naturally and therefore our waking up is influenced.  We drink stimulants.  We have little blinking lights from alarms, from random things all through our night.  Some work night shifts.  We force ourselves to wake up.  We do not get our ret as we should.  Life is busy and our minds stay busy.  We do not erase yesterdays from our todays.  Just how much we have biologically changed?  How much are we, individually, allowing our biological make-up to be changed. 

Although we may not have known about these things, we have felt the body changes (and some suffer from such), intellectual changes (omg, Alzheimer’s and dementia, and hardening of arteries, and weak kidneys and heart... and…???), mood changes, and spiritual changes.  Some fuss over how other things might influence our DNA, when we have trickle down changes for generations.  Learning a bit more about our body (how and what we eat that is changing us and might change our body back to something normal.  It might change how we think and can learn, etc., It change how we feel.  It might change how we have hope and faith in something other than what we are being told we believe and have faith in.  Can we change some of this?  I do hope so and I hope to have you think on such things, today, as we have learned, perhaps, more than we thought of before.

©Carol Desjarlais 9/16/21

 **piano card jpg.