James' World 2

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Welcome to The Twilight Zone. Not some ­science fiction fantasy, but a real place where up to 90 percent of us spend the majority of our waking lives.

We have built a world that hides us from daylight in dimly-lit offices, and then illuminates the night. We talk of burning the candle at both ends. The midnight oil. There not being enough hours in the day. We depend on night shift workers to mend our roads and staff our hospitals.

Small wonder, then, that a third of us are ­struggling to sleep. Finally, though, the degree to which we’ve been playing a dangerous game with our biology is being understood. 

Until recently, sleep science was ­often synonymous with circadian science, but the latter is now emerging out of the shadows. The 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to three scientists in the field of circadian rhythm. As a result of theirs and others’ breakthroughs, we’re waking up to the power of the body’s internal biological clock. 

Like plants and animals, we too are preprogrammed to do certain activities at specific times of the day. Our ­circadian rhythms are controlled by circadian clocks, present in every organ and every cell, and these clocks tell our brain when to sleep, tell our gut when to digest our food optimally, tell our heart to pump more blood, and when to slow down.

The health risks associated with a disrupted circadian rhythm

Ignore them at your peril. In the short term, you may feel lethargic, ­suffer insomnia, and weight gain. One report showed that 57 percent of junior doctors have had a crash, or near miss, on the way back from a night shift. 

And the long-term effects? Chronic disease, such as type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and cancer, have been linked to disruption of our circadian rhythm. The impact of disrupting our circadian sleep rhythm is such that night-shift workers have a higher mortality rate. The 24-hour society comes with a high price tag.

For Dr Satchin Panda, one of the scientists at the forefront of the circadian science revolution, the challenge for humanity is to rethink the world which we have built over the past 100 years. 

“It’s an asbestos moment,” he says. “We figured out asbestos was harmful in the Seventies, and we’re still removing it now. We’re going through that moment with circadian disruption, but it will take a generation to implement change.”

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