When the night fell earlier and the cold weather arrived as expected, people began to become gloomy. If we adjust the pace of work to the changing seasons, our mood will improve.
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Editor’s note: Every winter, getting up to work becomes an extremely difficult task. However, is this really because our willpower is not strong enough? Or is there a scientific basis and corresponding countermeasures that can be explained? The author of this article, laurie Clarke, introduced the phenomenon that our biological clock shifts backwards as a whole in winter, and suggests that businesses and individuals consider delaying getting up and going to work on cold and gloomy winter days. This article was translated from Wired and was originally titled “Science Explains Why We Should All Work Shorter Hours in Winter”.
For most of us, the cold winters and long nights of winter usually bring a degree of discomfort. When it was still unclear, I dragged myself up from the bed, and curled up at my desk, we could feel that the work efficiency was gradually exhausted with the short daylight remaining in the afternoon.
For a small number of people with Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), the situation will get worse-winter depression can make people feel weak. These patients show lethargy, low mood, and omnipresent senselessness in the cold winter. Even if it is not seasonal depression, the reporting rates of depression and suicide will increase widely in the winter, and the company’s work efficiency will decrease significantly in January and February.
Of course, we can summarize all of this into a winter drowsiness, but there may be a more scientific explanation behind these frustrated emotions. If daily biological clocks have been misaligned between getting up and working, shouldn’t we adjust our office hours to improve our negative emotions?
“If our body tells us to get up at nine o’clock because the night is still out of the window, and we try to get up at seven o’clock-so we missed a sleep cycle completely.” Professor Greg Murray said. 2. time-based biologyResearch in the field of biology, which studies how the body regulates sleep and wakefulness, supports the notion that our sleep needs and preferences are adjusted accordingly in winter. The limitations of contemporary work and life are particularly prominent in the winter months.
So, what are we talking about when we are talking about the biological clock? The circadian clock is a concept used by scientists to measure our sense of time inside. This is a 24-hour timer that determines when we are going to schedule what activities of the day-and more importantly, when we want to get up and when we fall asleep. “Our bodies prefer to do things synchronously with the circadian clock, and this switch of our body and behavior is based on daylight,” Murray explained.
When it comes to the regulation of our biological clock, a large number of hormones and chemicals, as well as a series of external factors, are related to this. In addition, the sun, an object hanging in the sky, plays an extremely important role. Behind our eyes is a photoreceptor called ipRGC, which is very sensitive to blue light and therefore can help to calibrate the biological clock. Evidence suggests that these cells play a vital role in helping regulate our sleep.
This biological mechanism embodied in the value of evolution promotes changes in our physiological functions, biochemical reactions, and behaviors according to the time of day. “This is the prediction function of the so-called circadian clock, and all living things have this function,” said Anna Wirz-Justice, a professor at the Center for Temporal Biology at the University of Basel in Switzerland. As the sun changes continuously throughout the year, it also prepares organisms for seasonal changes, such as breeding or hibernation.
Although there is not a lot of research to test whether our body responds well to more sleep and different wake-up times in winter, there is evidence that this hypothesis is not groundless. “Theoretically, a decrease in the amount of natural light in the early morning in winter would trigger what we call a phase delay,” Murray said. “Biologically, there are good reasons to believe that this may indeed have happened to some extent.” The delayed phase of sleep means that our biological clock is indeed pushed back a bit in winter, which also explains why you get up in winter The urge to sleep for a while will become more and more difficult to resist.
The idea of sleep phase delay initially seemed to indicate that we also want to go to sleep later in the winter, but Murray’s hypothesis would suggest that this change is likely to be offset by the general coma in winter. Studies show that people need (or at least desire) more sleep during the winter. One for three pre-industrial societies in South America and Africa (that is, those without alarm clocks, smartphones, and nine-to-five workdays)Research has found that people in these communities generally sleep about an hour longer in winter. Given that these places are near the equator, this influence should be more pronounced in the colder and darker Northern Hemisphere in winter.
This drowsy winter pattern is partly regulated by melanin-one of the most important influencing factors in our biological clock. This endogenous hormone is controlled by the circadian rhythm, which in turn affects it. Melatonin is a sleeping pill, which means that its secretion starts to increase rapidly before we fall asleep. Temporal biologist Till Roenneberg said: “For humans, the secretion of melatonin is much more extensive in winter than in summer, which is the biochemical basis for why the biological clock can respond differently to two different seasons.” / p>
But what does it mean if our internal biological clock changes in response to school or work schedule requirements? “The difference between your biological clock’s needs and your work-life clock’s needs is what we call social jet lag,” Roenneberg said. “The social jet lag in winter is stronger than the summer jet.” Social jet lag is a bit similar to the jet lag we are more familiar with everyday. But compared to flying around the world, this is a time mismatch caused by our social needs (referring to work or school), making our lives very uncomfortable.
Social jet lag is a well-documented phenomenon that can have serious consequences for the happiness and health of our lives. If it is indeed the winter that caused the jet lag, and we want to discern what the impact may be, we can set our sights on people who experience this phenomenon on a larger scale.
A very memorable group of people living in the westernmost part of the global time zone. Because the time zone is extremely broad, people living on the eastern edge of the time zone see the sunrise 1-1.5 hours earlier than those living on the western edge. Nevertheless, all residents there must abide by the same working hours, which means that many people are forced to get up before sunrise. This means that people in parts of the time zone will be out of sync with their biological clock for a long time. This may not seem like a big deal, but it has many serious consequences. People living on the western edge of the time zone have a higher chance of developing breast cancer, obesity, diabetes, and heart disease-researchers believe this is mainly due to having to wake up in the dark, which causes chronic damage to the circadian rhythm.
Spain is another extreme manifestation of jet lag. Although the longitude is consistent with the United Kingdom, Spain still belongs to Central European Time. This means that Spanish time as a whole has moved forward by an hour, so the Spaniards must follow social schedules that are inconsistent with their biological clock arrangements. Because of this, the entire country of Spain has been suffering from lack of sleep, with an average of one hour less sleep than the rest of Europe. This level of lack of sleep is related to the lack of work and reading among locals.High seat rates, stress, poor performance, and associations with work accidents.
Another group of people who may show similar symptoms under the influence of winter are teenagers who naturally tend to fall out during the day and night. Under normal circumstances, the circadian rhythm of adolescents is four hours later than that of adults, which means that the biological clock of adolescents naturally forces them to go to bed later and then wake up later. Nevertheless, they have been forced to go to school on time at 7 am for years.
Although these are extreme examples, if the work schedule is not adjusted properly, will a winter’s pain bring similar but relatively minor effects? A theory of how seasonal depression develops causes it to some extent. Although many judgments on the biochemical basis of this symptom remain in the hypothetical stage, many researchers believe that seasonal depression is caused by a severe reaction to the body’s biological clock that is not synchronized with natural daylight and sleep cycles— — This is the hypothesis called sleep phase delay.
Scientists now tend to understand seasonal depression as a symptom of a degree rather than a dichotomy with or without. In Sweden and other countries in the northern hemisphere, it is estimated that up to 20% of the population is more or less plagued by this winter mood. In theory, mild winter depression should affect the entire population to some extent, but some people may only feel physically weak. “Some people have poor emotional resilience to biological clock asynchrony,” Murray said.
As of now, the idea of reducing workload and delaying working hours in winter has not yet been implemented. Even in the most gloomy countries of the entire Northern Hemisphere, such as Sweden, Finland, and Iceland, people continue to work in night-like conditions throughout the winter. But if winter working hours can be closer to our biological clock, this may make us work better.
Some U.S. schools have adopted more evening classes in line with adolescent biological clocks. These schools have successfully shown that students’ sleep has increased and their daily energy has also improved significantly. A school in the UK changed students’ class hours from 08:50 to 10:00, and they later found that absenteeism due to illness had dropped significantly and their academic performance had improved.
Evidence suggests that late work / school late in winter is significantly increased compared to absenteeism in other seasons. Interestingly, however, a study published in the Journal of Biological Rhythms found that this absence may be more closely related to the photoperiod (that is, the number of hours of sunshine) than other factors such as weather. Just allowing people to check in later in the winter is likely to help offset these effects.
A better understanding of the impact of our circadian clock relative to the seasonal cycle is one of the things that we can all benefit fromStudies. “Bosses should say,‘ I do n’t care when you come to work, you come back to work when your sleep clock is over, it ’s a win-win situation, ’” Roenneberg said. “You will have the best performance, and you will feel better at work, because you can feel that you are efficient.”
But then again, January and February were already our two least productive months of the year. No matter how you adjust, the situation will not get worse, right?
Translator: yanyan