We live in a world full of mood cycles, body cycles, and external cycles turning around us. No wonder we are all wound up. Circadian Rhythms are a important part of all these cycles as our night and day cycle. This cycle play a huge role in our bodies systems and effect on our moods. Taking the time to fully understand how our circadian rhythms work and how they affect us can help us to control the swing of our moods before they start.
Circadian Rhythms, as I already stated, control our night and day cycles or when we sleep and when we don't. To explain in a simple way, our eyes are linked to a part of our brain which monitors when the sun is up and when the sun goes down. When the sun goes down, our brain sends out a larger amount of melatonin to make us sleepy. Sunlight coming through the windows does the opposite by decreasing the amount of melatonin released. The tricky part of this area of our brain is that our cycles of waking up and going to sleep are stored by memory. This is the cause of events such as jet lag, where it takes a couple of days to regain a night and day cycle.
Other areas of our life regulate our circadian rhythms as well. Exercise, work, school, regular mealtimes, and socializing all help to set our biological clock as well. Our Circadian Rhythms control more than just our sleep cycle, but also our hormone production, cell cycling, brain wave activity, temperature regulation, and more. Once you mess with your sleep cycle, you begin messing with basic and crucial biological process as well.
Now, our sleep cycles are about 24hours long. About because our clocks run a little slow by staying up a little later and getting up a little later. Most people adjust their clocks by the sun, alarm clocks, hungry children, and other areas of our life. Being bipolar, we are natural night owls ("phase delayed") causing more problems with our sleep cycles. Once you mess with your sleep cycles leading to your biological processes, you are cooking up a great recipe for a manic episode.
Now that we understand how important our sleep cycle is, we can avoid the problems of mania with strict bedtimes and waking up times. These strict bedtimes don't have to be a typical in bed by 9 or 10 and up by 6 or 7, unless your schedule calls for it. It isn't when, but just going to bed and getting up regularity or at about the same time. Also creating a daily routine will help in your quest of fighting off the next episode by helping you to set other daily activities linked to our biological clock.
