During the pandemic, many people barely leave their neighborhood, let alone their own time zone. But vaccines are available, cabin fever is rampant, and the holiday travel season is upon us. And so is definitely jet lag.
The human internal timekeeping apparatus, scientifically known as the biological clock, is a powerful force. It synchronizes functions between organs and tissues, and affects cognitive function, digestion, sleep, and even asthma. Adjusting the biological clock to a new time zone or schedule isn’t as simple as resetting a wristwatch, but current research on how to adjust it could be helpful to anyone, whether they’re traveling to his wife’s house or to Mars. .
“There’s a lot of promise to come, as we understand the molecular power of the clock, to harness the power of the clock,” said Carrie Partch, a professor of biochemistry at UC Santa Cruz who studies biological systems. strength of the watch in a nice way. She said that the more we understand the clock, the more freedom we have, because we can make it an ally rather than an enemy.
Throughout the body, cells have their own circadian clocks that regulate metabolism and other cellular functions. Those clocks coordinate between other cells in specific organs and even between organs — though how they do that is something scientists are still trying to figure out. All of these individual clocks are regulated and synchronized by the brain’s surreal nucleus, a “pacemaker” part of the hypothalamus that is very sensitive to external stimuli, especially light. light and dark. Light signals it’s time to wake up and stay awake, while darkness means it’s time to slow down.
While those signals are closely tied to sleep cycles, they have the opposite effect on a wide range of biological functions. “I think of circadian pacemakers as conducting an orchestra,” said Erin Flynn-Evans, head of NASA’s Ames Research Center’s Fatigue Countermeasures Laboratory. “It controls the entire coordination of biological functions. There are biological clocks in the liver, in the intestines, in the reproductive hormones. The primary pacemaker in the supranuclear nuclei is the kind of time synchronization of all those biological functions. “
But that internal timekeeper didn’t always keep up with human behavior. As travelers move rapidly across time zones, their biological clocks get out of sync with the outside world, an experience most people know of as jet lag. Such nonconformity may cause many symptoms including fatigue and gloom, insomnia, and even digestive problems.
For most people, it’s a relatively rare event and just an inconvenience. But for workers like pilots and flight attendants, who may have to endure these changes on a daily basis, jet lag can affect their long-term health. . Even relatively short jumps affect cognitive function. One Research 2017 published by researchers at Northwestern University have found that professional baseball players who only travel across two or three time zones for a game play worse. Similar problems exist for shift workers like nurses and those with irregular hours like long-haul truck drivers, whose schedules keep them up at night. .
