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Analysis: Listening to our inner clocks

MUNICH, Germany, July 17 (UPI) -- Night owls, rest easy: There could be a reason why those early mornings require such monumental effort. It's social jetlag, a researched phenomenon in which our body's internal clock is out of step with fast-paced lifestyles.

In the Western world's perpetually wired society, many people are waking earlier, throwing off their sleep-and-wake rhythm. However, disrupting that rhythm could have dire health outcomes, such as heart disease and cancer, European researchers said Monday at a Euroscience Open Forum news conference.

"Pushing our physiology outside its normal range and forcing the body to work outside its internal time has real consequences," said Russell Foster of the Imperial College School of Medicine in London. "A significant number of people are playing with their clocks rather dangerously."

Every life form, from spores to humans, has a circadian rhythm -- a clock programmed in our genes that dictates when we wake and sleep. This pattern is so forceful that a person living in a cave would still experience the same tug-and-pull of this cycle.

Some people fit into extreme chronotypes of sleep behavior -- there's the lark, or early bird, who sleeps from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m.; and the owl, who sleeps 4 a.m. to noon. Although the majority of us are somewhere in between, we're still forced to wake up much earlier than our bodies tell us.

Till Roenneberg at Ludwig Maximilians Universitat in Munich, a coiner of the term "social jetlag" and a leading researcher in the area, published an article in March 2006 in the journal Chronobiology International on some of consequences of disobeying the internal clock.

In 500 people throughout central Europe, Roenneberg found evidence of a positive association between smoking rates and increased social jetlag. For instance, for study participants with two hours of social jetlag -- for example, waking up at 7 a.m. instead of 9 a.m. -- 30 percent smoked. Those without social jetlag had smoking rates of about 10 percent. However, smoking is not necessarily a cause of such a lifestyle; instead it may be a stressor or a risk factor.

Disrupting circadian rhythm may also affect chronic diseases, Foster said. One study on night-shift workers showed higher rates of coronary heart disease compared to day workers in the same position. Other studies have suggested certain cancers are more prevalent in people who work at night.

Foster is also currently studying schizophrenics, whose seriously delayed sleep cycles often lead to a 4 a.m. bedtime and afternoon wake time. Although the biological basis for this occurrence is unknown, Foster suggested that therapy targeting the circadian timing system might be effective in reducing psychotic symptoms and improving quality of life for schizophrenics. It may also relieve the social isolation many of the patients feel.

The public as a whole has massive ignorance when it comes to understanding circadian rhythm, Foster said. The 24-hour, around-the-clock emphasis of Western business and culture, as well as certain drugs that purport to put off the need for sleep, is also of concern, he said.

"It's extraordinary how sleep is considered an illness in our society we need to cure," he said.

Roenneberg said people tend to think they "hover over biology" -- that they have ultimate control of what happens to them.

"We say, 'Oh, we can just go to bed earlier' ... but that is not complying with the biology within us."

In fact, it's the two temporal worlds most of us live in -- our internal clock and societal clock -- that are out of sync.

Roenneberg uses the metaphor of a person living in Munich and working for a company in Moscow, where the time zone is two hours ahead, as an example of social jetlag that many of us face.

"This is what 50 percent of people do -- they live in Munich but work in Moscow, and their social jetlag is never relieved because they don't travel to Moscow," he said.

So how can we reconcile our two temporal worlds?

For one thing, schools should not open before 9 a.m., since children cannot learn efficiently any earlier, said Martha Merrow of Rijksuniversiteit Groningen in the Netherlands. In a utopian society, people who are larks -- early risers -- would take earlier jobs, and the owls would join the later workforce.

Until then, Roenneberg suggests people spend more time in the natural sunlight. For most of history, humans have worked out of doors, but in Western societies today, most of the population does not spend more than 10 to 15 minutes outside on a given day. Spending more time exposed to natural light also increases work performance, Roenneberg told United Press International.

Likewise, if bosses allowed their employees to come in to work when they naturally woke up, they would be dealing with a much happier, more productive individual.

If that's not possible, find a job that lets you sleep later, Merrow said.

Wouldn't that be a dream come true.