11/5/2023 0 Comments Camping to reset clock quoteIndeed, many animals adjust their circadian clocks in the winter so they can spend more time sleeping as the nights grow longer. “That finding shows we are similar to other animals,” Wright said. When the campers returned home, the authors found that the winter camping group’s biological night was longer than that of the group that went camping for a week in the summer back in 2013. In another experiment, the authors sent five brave volunteers on a six-day winter camping trip to determine whether the human circadian clock is affected by seasonal changes in day length. “Those people stayed up later and slept in more, like lots of us do on the weekend, and that pushed their clocks later too,” he said. The authors also found that the circadian clocks of the group that stayed home shifted even later over the course of the weekend. “This tells us we can reset our clocks fast,” Wright said. 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 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 than in the days before they left on the trip. At the end of the weekend, the authors monitored the volunteers’ melatonin levels to see if there had been any shift in the timing of their biological night. Nine went on a weekend camping trip, while the other five stayed home. To answer the first question, the researchers recruited 14 physically active volunteers in their 20s and 30s. In the new work, published Thursday in Current Biology, Wright’s team set out to determine if our circadian clocks can be reset by a shorter jaunt in nature, and if these biological clocks respond to seasonal influences.
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