The circadian system is synchronized to the outside world through exposure to light; it controls sleep timing, hormone release and mood, said Zeitzer, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences.
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Or they do nothing and suffer the exhausting consequences; the body eventually adjusts at a slow pace of about one hour a day, taking up to three days to catch up.
Incidentally, according to Dr. Zeitzer, the flashing lights treatment, though meant primarily for jet lag, could be used for many other people and not just tired travelers.
“The circadian clock is the central conductor of the many clocks that are found in almost all tissues of your body”, Zeitzer said.
Humans typically adjust their biological clocks at the rate of one hour per day when traveling far. A new study, published Monday in The Journal of Clinical Investigation, shows that flashing lights on your eyes during the night before you travel could help your internal clock to adjust against the natural circadian rhythm.
Researchers found that two millisecond long bursts of light set off at 10-second intervals delayed the onset of sleepiness the next day by almost two hours.
Subsequent measurements of melatonin in the saliva showed that the flashes adjusted the participants’ body clocks two hours forward, on average.
Along with preventing jet lag, this technique might help treat people with other kinds of sleep cycle disruptions, such as medical residents and truck drivers with varying work/sleep schedules, or night-shift workers who want to be awake during the day, the researchers said.
Now, University of Stanford researchers believe that jet lag is avoidable and can be treated without medications or adjusting sleep.
That’s about an hour and a half longer than those exposed to continuous light.
The researchers concluded that using flashes of light can be more effective in developing countermeasures to jet lag as compared to continuous light, which is being used today in some light therapy treatment, notes CNN. Meanwhile, jet lag, which occurs because your body’s clock is still synced to your original time zone, can cause fatigue, lack of alertness, a general feeling of malaise and sometimes gastrointestinal problems.
Then there are the Re-Timer glasses, which employ light therapy to get your circadian rhythms back on track. For participants exposed to continuous light, the delay was only 36 minutes.
Flashing light is said to work better than continuous light partly because the gaps of darkness between flashes allow pigments in the eye that respond to light to be re-activated. So don’t go flashing yourself with your iPhone light all night – you’re likely to get a punch in the teeth from the person you’re sharing the bed with. If you normally wake up at 8am, you set the flashing light to go off at 5am.
The research was supported by grants from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (grant 1RO1HL108441) and the Department of Veterans Affairs Sierra Pacific Mental Illness Research, Education and Clinical Center.
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But a team of scientists from Stanford University led by Jamie Zeitzer, a neurobiologist, might have figured out a clever way to trick our brain into thinking that we are in the same time zone.
