Why Understanding Your Daily Rhythms Is Important

Understanding the concept of Circadian Rhythms – your body's natural rhythms of sleep, energy, and performance, can help you better decipher how your actions impact how you'll feel for the rest of the day, and to build stability into your daily life.

Why are Circadian Rhythms Important?

We all want to feel better. Less tired, more productive, more focused. If you’re here, you’ve likely identified sleep as a key part of your life to improve. But you often run into an issue: sleep looks “ok”, or is improving, but you still feel tired. In order to help you feel better all day long, we need to look at more than your nights - we need a picture of how you feel 24 hours a day.

What is feeling energetic, anyways? Energy. Alertness. Motivation. Liveliness. Get-up-and-go. Whatever you call it, it's a key component of our lived experience, and greatly impacts quality of life. But what does it mean from a scientific standpoint?

Many of the physiological underpinnings of an individual’s experience of energy are correlated. That is, they change together throughout the day. These outputs include the central phase of the master circadian clock or SCN, cortisol, dopamine, blood glucose and triglycerides (literal energy sources!).

In particular, keep track of your zeitgebers, powerful cues that influence biological timing, impact circadian (daily) and ultradian (within the day) rhythms in the systems that contribute to subjective experience of energy.

You might want to plan workouts, intense meetings, and the start of deep work for energy peaks. Conversely, you might want to plan meals, naps, and light work for energy valleys.

We encourage you to track these four types of events:

1) movement (e.g., exercise)

2) sleep

3) food

4) light

What do I WANT my energy to look like today?

Our bodies did not evolve to operate at 100% all day and all night long. No matter who you are - a short sleeper, a super-athlete, a CEO, an artist, a student - your body needs to trade off between periods of activity and periods of rest. Everyone needs sleep and wake: a very low energy period of unconsciousness (preferably during the night), and a higher energy period of activity and refueling during the day.

Beyond that, there is a great deal of flexibility in how energy can look throughout the day. There is no single “optimal” energy curve for the population, and even one person’s optimal energy curve will change based on what they need to do during a given day, season, or time of life.

For example, different people are predisposed to different numbers and timing of energy peaks and valleys throughout the day. You might have an energy peak in the late morning and early evening, whereas a friend might have two energy peaks in the morning, and two more in the afternoon. These differences depend on many factors, including sex, age, fertility, culture and meal habits, exercise, and disposition.

The better you understand your current timing and number of energy peaks and valleys, as well as how high your highs are (bouncing off the walls? Grogging through the day?) and how low your lows are (calm and focused? Falling asleep at your desk?), the more effectively you can collaborate with your coach to bring your experience into better alignment with your goals.

We suggest that you start by getting a sense of where you are right now, and how you’ve been feeling lately. Then, start to think about how you would design an energy curve to best meet the needs of your day. Want to feel alert when it’s time for dinner with the kids? Put a peak there. Want to schedule in a daily nap? Put a low point there. Want to make sure you’re ready for that 7am workout coming up in a couple days?

Now’s the time to draw out your curve and adjust your routine so that when it’s time for you to be “on” (or “off”!), your body is ready.