Reset Your Bio Clock — Go Camping

On this morning's show, I made mention that I was going camping this weekend. The announcement was met with some good natured derision on the part of my morning partner, George Ferris. For some reason George, and a lof of other people I know, have a problem picturing me doing anything like camp, but actually I'm a camper from way back.

To tell you the truth, I'm an Eagle Scout and camping was a big part in earning that rank. At one point, when I was a kid, I was pretty good at all the camping skills. I could cook on an open fire and I even cut my own firewood. I knew how to pitch just about any kind of tent and I could tell at a glance whether a snake was friendly or not. Yep, I was a pretty decent camper,

Well, having said all that, today I found an article on-line about how if you have trouble sleeping, you should just go camping for a bit and you'll get your circadian rhythms reset. According to the article:

The researchers report that in just two days, the campers’ circadian clocks shifted so that their melatonin levels began to rise more than an hour earlier then they did in the days before they left on the trip. Overall, the difference was equivalent to 69% of the effect that the researchers observed when campers went on a six-day trip in 2013.

The resetting of your internal clock also has a great deal to do with light. During the camping experiment, participants were exposed to 13 times more light than usual. Additionally, campers were not allowed to bring any kind of flashlights or electronic devices. As a result of that, when it got dark, the test subject had no stimulus and began to adapt to being in rhythm with nature.

So, since there was basically nothing to do, people more or less started to adapt to the situation and their rhythm to the amount of light. As a result, even so called "night people" were turning in shortly afternoon.

The cool thing about this experiment is that, scientist think that re setting your bio clock.may also help with depression. The studies will go on. How nice would it be if you could take care of insomnia and take the edge off depression at the same time?

If you'd like to check out the original story from The New York Times