Lynne Peeples on How Paying Attention to Our Circadian Rhythm Can Improve Our Quality of Life

I’m excited to have on the show today Lynne Peeples to discuss her bookThe Inner Clock: Living in Sync with Our Circadian Rhythms,which came out last September 24. This book examines how the science of circadian rhythms can help us all sleep better, feel happier, and improve our overall health, and how modernization like artificial light, time zones, and eating late at night can really disrupt our internal clocks. Today we chat with science journalist Lynne Peeples — who even spent time in a Cold War-era bunker to research for this book — about what circadian rhythm is, anyway; how timing is everything, and what feeling in sync with our inner clock feels like — as well as what feeling out of sync feels like; how too little light during the day and too much light at night (think blue light) can impact us; how we can align our sleep to our inner clock rhythm and what we can do if, say, our work schedule makes that impossible; our chronotypes and why alarm clocks really contribute to us working against our internal time; social jet lag and its impact on a life; and why time-restricted eating is really beneficial. There are so many small shifts we can make in our lives by paying attention to circadian science, and they can really help improve our overall quality of life. Here to walk us through it is Lynne, a former staff reporter atThe Huffington Post whose writing has appeared inThe Guardian, Scientific American, Nature,The Atlantic, and other publications. Before she became a writer, she was a biostatistician for HIV clinical trials and environmental health studies, and she holds master’s degrees in biostatistics from the Harvard School of Public Health and in science journalism from New York University. The Inner Clock: Living in Sync with Our Circadian Rhythms by Lynne Peeples