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Travelling-induced jet lag isn’t the only thing that causes untimely fatigue. Ignoring your biological rhythms can lead to chronic exhaustion, too, something that feels so much like jet lag that Till Roenneberg and his team, at Ludwig-Maximilian University, in Munich, Germany, coined the term “social jet lag” in 2006. It occurs when there’s a mismatch between your biological clock and your social life. And not only does it make you tired, it may be to blame for many of today’s ailments. In 2012, Roenneberg and colleagues studied the sleep-wake patterns of more than 65,000 people. They found that 80 percent of those who had jobs also used an alarm clock. The problem with

that, chronobiologists say, is that our own bodies’ clocks are far better for telling us when to wake up.

Unlike the rigid global clock, whose time zones are an artifice of our connected world, our internal clocks vary from person to person, and even within individuals as they move from childhood into puberty, adolescence, and adulthood. The discrepancy between our internal, biological clocks and our external, social clocks peaks around age 20. But the ongoing tug-of-war between external and internal time can affect everyone from school-aged children—whose schedules are dictated by their school districts—to those of retirement age and beyond. People stay up late, or sometimes not; use alarms to wake up early, or snooze it to sleep in; and then spend weekend mornings trying to make up for the sleep they missed, or they don’t. The result? A massive sleep debt and an off-kilter internal clock.

Each of us has a circadian clock that uses a roughly 24-hour rhythm that coordinates with the Earth’s light-dark cycle. Light-sensitive cells in the eye’s retina send information to the brain’s master clock, which readjusts daily. The master clock regulates systemic cues like body temperature, eating patterns, and even fluctuating hormone levels, which are then used by distant, peripheral cellular clocks throughout the body to fine-tune their respective molecular pathways so as to be in synchrony with the master clock phase. The resulting, cyclical patterns can be seen in everything from our behavior to our blood-sugar levels. And when the coordination persistently goes awry, the phase difference between the master and peripheral clocks can manifest as chronic, degenerative diseases. 

Initially, scientists thought these broken circadian clocks were most concerning in night-shift workers, flight attendants, and frequent flyers—people whose jobs resulted in large and regular disruptions to their sleep-wake timing. But research seems to be revealing that, to some degree, all of us are being affected.

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