Sleep Timing and Time Tangles

Thoughts about TIME,
Attention Management and Focus

by Madelyn Griffith-Haynie, CTP, CMC, A.C.T, MCC, SCAC

TANGLES . . .

Piecing together all of the elements impacting our ability to live a life on purpose is a complex puzzle that is often little more than a mass of tangles.

Something as seemingly simple as SLEEP, for example, seems especially tangled when we are looking at the impact of chronorhythms (brain/body-timing, relative to earth timing cues).

Understanding is further complicated when we lack familiarity with certain words – especially scientific terminology.

We have to call objects and concepts something, of course — and each piece of the what-we-call-things puzzle has a mitigating effect on every other.

Unfortunately, new vocabulary often delays the aha! response, perhaps obfuscating recognition of relationships entirely – in other words, those times when we can’t see the forest for the leaves, never mind the trees!

The need to become familiar with the new lingo is also what I call one of those tiered tasks. It pushes short-term memory to its limit until the new terms become familiar. That, in turn, creates complexities from a myriad of “in-order-to” objectives inherent in the interrelationships of what is, after all, a distributed process.

See also: The Importance of Closing Open Loops:
Open Loops, Distractions and Attentional Dysregulation

Connections

There is something slippery in this sleep-timing interweaving I can’t quite put my finger on; something that no one else is looking at – at least no one published anyplace I have been able to find!!

Found HERE

Melatonin + corticosteroid release + light cues + core body temperature + gene expression + protein synthesis (and more!) combine to produce individual chronorhythms.

Individual chronorhythms influence not only sleep timing, but ALSO one’s internal “sense of time” — each of which further influences the effectiveness of other domains.

They do not operate in isolation — even though we usually focus on them in isolation, hoping to fully understand their individual contributions.

Here’s the kicker: prior associations

Whether we like it or not, the underlying, less conscious interpretations we associate with whatever words we use “ride along” with the denotative (dictionary) meaning of every single word.

In addition, the moment the terms become integrated into our understanding of the topic, they boundary the conversation — in other words, tethering it to old territory rather than opening new vistas. (See the linguistic portion of What’s in a Name?  for a bit about how and why).

Where we begin biases our understanding of new concepts we move on to study, which skews the inter-relationship.  Not only that, the relationship between the extent of our understanding of each piece unbalances our understanding of the whole.  Or so it seems to me.

Ask Any Mechanic

Setting automobile spark-plug firing efficiently affects engine performance which, in turn, affects a number of other things — gas mileage and tire wear among them.

I doubt that anyone has ever studied it “scientifically,” but every good mechanic has observed the effect in a number of arenas.  What we can “prove” is that the engine runs raggedly before spark-plug gapping and smoothly afterwards.

I doubt the entire inter-relationship has been quantified to metrics, so The Skeptics may still scoff at our definition of proof, even while the car-obsessed among them will take their engines to be “buffed.”

It makes me crazy!

To my mind, the overfocus on quantification has become its own problem.  Yes, co-occurance does not prove causation, but I prefer a more observational approach day to day.  At least, I do not discount it.

“Doctor, it hurts when I do this/don’t do that!“ is ignoring deeper problems, no doubt, but at least it avoids a prescription for pain medication that may well create a problem somewhere else.

But back to sleep timing and inner time sense — problematic for most of us here in Alphabet City.

Light and Dark

Found HERE

Since I am one of the 75% of the ADD community who experience sleep struggles of one type or another, I am intrigued with the plant and animal reproduction studies that have been looking at the relationship between light, some kind of “inner clock,” and fertility cycles.

I am even more intrigued by the studies that
look at the influence of the absence of light.
(more about that later)

Both are driven by economic imperatives, of course — how we can get more eggs out of the chickens, more milk from the cows, and tulips that flower outside their standard “seasons” so that more can be sold.

While I am frustrated by the pervasiveness of the beat of the economic drum, I’m grateful that sometimes it falls into some rhythms to which we can boogy.

Studies must be funded, after all, and those that promise data that might increase revenues are likely to be funded more readily. As long as cash is king, the quality of human lives is likely to remain wall-flowered, if invited to the ball at all.

The fingernails of agribusiness are as dirty as any of those
of the oft-demonized pharmaceutical industry.

But I digress . . .

Let’s not quibble over how and why and take a quick look at a WHAT.

Did you know that, for example, some scientists have demonstrated that a flash of light in total darkness seems to override what other scientists insist is the necessity of total light to entrain?

“Entrainment,” remember, is setting or modifying the phase or period of
[brain/body] circadian rhythms relative to a light/dark cycle —
for example, to adjust to days and nights here on earth.

Found HERE

What that might mean to you and me is that even turning on the light to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night might trick our brain into believing that it’s morning and time to get up.

Think about that the next time you can’t seem to get back to sleep!

It also flies in the face of the ubiquitous advice to get up and try again later if you aren’t asleep within 30 minutes.  According to these particular studies, we might do better in the long run if we remained in total darkness for as long as it took for our brain to settle back down and realize we are still sleepy!

These and other reproduction studies on the influence of an organisms’ inner sense of timing have developed some measurables that might help those of us in the peanut gallery — eventually.

• Unfortunately, they seem to have led to a great many more scientific scuffles over specifics – no doubt reputation-enhancing, but useful?  I’m not so sure.
  
• I’d much prefer to read about their insights that might be used by those of us who would like to solve some real-world personal problems — while we are still young enough to recall what it was we wanted to solve! (I’ve been on the hunt for over a quarter of a century, remember.)

Related Post: Science and Sensibility – the illusion of proof

Sunrise, Sunset?

Suzanne McNeil’s Zentangle – Found HERE

Even so, science is closer than ever before to understanding the inner timeclock that determines when we humans eat, drink and sleep – even when we make love (10 P.M. is the largest “bump” in that statistic, by the way!)

Addicted, as we are, to the idea of self-efficacy and “free-will,” we tend to push the boundaries of our native rhythms to the extreme.

At this time in our development as a species, it seems we push those boundaries at our peril. (Writer and broadcaster Leon Kreitzman has A LOT to say about that in his book The 24-Hour Society)

Chronobiologists: scientists who study sleep TIMING

The researchers seem fairly united in their belief that living outside endogenous (internal) circadian patterns negatively impacts many other things, including: immunity, short-term memory, reaction time, mood, cognitive efficiency and our ABILITY to pay attention and stay on task — and, in some cases, even life and death!

Still, we humans seem to prefer the manipulation of our surroundings to changing the way in which we relate to them.

• Electric lights extend “daylight” by reducing darkness: more useful time, less awareness of the rhythms of time and their impact on our beings
• Heating and cooling our living spaces has removed many of us in industrialized countries from the seasonal fluctuations of time.

Some cities in the northern climes resemble those expensive environments for hamsters that delight the children of the wealthy — temperature-regulated transparent tubes connecting place to place.

Will outerwear eventually become obsolete?

WHEN we sleep vs. how and why we sleep

Found HERE

Chronobiologists focus primarily on sleep timing. They are attempting to discover species-specific endogenous rhythms (like internal rhythms in humans, for example) — rhythms that determine how long we are awake, how long we sleep, preferred/most beneficial times and timing for either, and so on.

They are looking at and looking for recurring patterns, including what happens when an individual in any species falls “off phase.”

Related Posts about Sleep TIMING:

• Up all Night? Sleep Away the Day?
  ABOUT Chronorhythm Sleep Disorders – Part I
• When Your Sleep Clock is Broken: N-24 Awareness Day 2014
  Chronorhythm Sleep Disorders – Part II

More to come, so STAY TUNED

I’ve written quite a bit about sleep timing issues, which you can investigate by clicking on the LinkList to my articles in the Sleep Series, and I’m not nearly ready to leave the topic behind.

In upcoming articles we’ll take a closer look at what happens when we sleep, dream-state patterns, and perhaps explore more about Non-REM Sleep – four stages that range from light dozing to deep sleep — and so much MORE!

So stay tuned — there’s A LOT to know, and a lot more to come.
Get it here, while its still free for the taking!

Struggling with Sleep? If you want some personalized help with untangling some sleep-struggles and developing new habits that can make things A LOT easier, that is part of what I DO. And I’d love to do it with you. Get in touch if you want to talk about it.

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Related Articles on ADDandSoMuchMore.com

• Brain-based Coaching with Madelyn Griffith-Haynie
• Brain-based Coaching Fees & Formats
• The Group Coaching LinkList – explaining how this format works

Articles about Sleep

• JetLagged for Life (my personal experience with sleep ::sigh::)
• ABOUT ADD [EFD] and Sleep Struggles
• Sleep and Cognition
• How Long Do Things Take?
• LinkList: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Sleep

Other Comorbidities Articles

• Comorbid or Co-occuring?
• ADD Seldom Rides Alone
• ODD & Oppositional Rising
• Overfocusing: Cognitive Inflexibility and the Cingulate Gyrus

Interesting Sleep Resources ’round the ‘net

• Seasons of Life by Russell G Foster and Leon Kreitzman (The Guardian)
• Surviving in the world that never sleeps
• The Sleep Essentials Quick Guide (sleep expert Dr. William Dement’s Stanford site)
• VIDEO: Cambridge Neuroscience Lecture on Lights, Clocks & Sleep (new photoreceptors etc.) — Russell Foster — amazing info, well presented
• Sleep, Learning & Memory 
  (Harvard Medical School’s Healthy Sleep website – nice video content too)
• Sleep Study (journeythroughthecortex.blogspot.com)
• My Top 10 Tips for Healing Insomnia (watchingthedaisies.com)
• Is sleep a problem (braininjuryselfrehabilitation.com)
• Didn’t Get Your Beauty Sleep Last Night? Don’t Worry
• 7 Surprising Signs You Need to Sleep More
• Doctors Health Press Reports on Study: Boosting Sleep Quality Can Improve Memory (prweb.com)