The Power of When

INTRODUCTION

Timing Is Everything

Do you want a simple, straightforward life hack that requires little effort and gets you closer to happiness and success? Of course you do! This might sound like a promise waiting to be broken. It's not.

You've probably already seen a lot of tricks and tips about the "what" and "how" of success.

"What" and "how" are excellent and necessary questions. But there is another crucial question that must be addressed in order to make fast, dramatic, lasting improvements in the quality of your life across the board.

That question is "when."

"When" is the ultimate life hack.

It's the foundation of success, the key that unlocks a faster, smarter, better, and stronger you.

Knowing "when" enables you to perform "what" and "how" to your maximum potential. If you didn't change a thing about what you do and how you do it, and only made micro-adjustments to when you do it, you'd be healthier, happier, and more productive, starting… right now.

"When" really is that simple, and that powerful.

Just by making small tweaks to your schedule—such as when to have the first cup of coffee, when to answer emails, when to nap—you'll nudge the rhythm of your day back in sync with the rhythm of your biology, and then everything will start to feel easier and flow naturally.

What do I mean by the "rhythm of your biology"?

Contrary to what you might have heard, there is a perfect time to do just about anything. Good timing isn't something you choose, guess, or have to figure out. It's already happening inside you, in your DNA, from the minute you wake up to the minute you fall asleep, and every minute in between. An inner clock embedded inside your brain has been ticking away, keeping perfect time, since you were three months old.

This precisely engineered timekeeper is called your circadian pacemaker, or biological clock. Specifically, it's a group of nerves called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), in the hypothalamus, right above the pituitary gland.

In the morning, sunlight comes into your eyeballs, travels along the optic nerve, and activates the SCN to begin each day's circadian (Latin for "around a day") rhythm. The SCN is the master clock that controls dozens of other clocks throughout your body. Over the course of the day, your core temperature, blood pressure, cognition, hormonal flow, alertness, energy, digestion, hunger, metabolism, creativity, sociability, and athleticism, and your ability to heal, memorize, and sleep, among many other functions, fluctuate according to and are governed by the commands of your inner clocks. Everything you can do or want to do is controlled by physiological rhythms, whether you realize it or not.

For fifty thousand years, our ancestors organized their daily schedules around their inner clocks. They ate, hunted, gathered, socialized, rose, rested, procreated, and healed on perfect bio-time, or biological time. I'm not saying life was fantastic in prehistoric, biblical, or medieval times, but as a species, we thrived by rising with the sun, spending most of the day outdoors, and sleeping in total darkness. We created civilization and societies and made incredible advances that, ironically and effectively, turned our finely tuned and evolved inner clocks against us.

This is an example of several circadian rhythms going on inside you RIGHT NOW!

The most disruptive event in the history of bio-time occurred on December 31, 1879. At his research lab in Menlo Park, New Jersey, Thomas Edison introduced the long-lasting incandescent lightbulb to the world. He famously said, "We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles." Within a decade, night, for all intents and purposes, became optional. We no longer rose at dawn and slept in total darkness. We once worked from dawn to dusk and ate our last meal in twilight. Working hours and dinnertime shifted later and later. We spent more time indoors exposed to artificial light and less time outdoors under the sun.

In an 1889 interview with Scientific American, Edison said, "I hardly ever sleep more than four hours per day, and I could keep this up for a year."¹ In 1914, on the thirty-fifth anniversary of incandescent light, Edison used the occasion to identify sleep as a "bad habit." He proposed that all Americans sleep far fewer hours per day, and predicted a future of sleeplessness. "Everything which decreases the sum total of man's sleep increases the sum total of man's capabilities," he said. "There really is no reason why men should go to bed at all, and the man of the future will spend far less time in bed."²

The second major disruption of your biological time was transportation advances. Cars and planes allowed people to travel great distances rapidly. It takes a day for the body to adjust to a one-hour time zone difference, and, on horseback or in a coach, it'd take about that long to go that far. Starting in the mid-twentieth century, in the blink of an eye, evolutionarily speaking, we could travel multiple time zones in a few hours, leaving bio-time lagging behind.

Computer technology brought us to where we are now, in a 24/7 smartphone culture of perpetual dusk where we work, play, and eat around the clock.

It took only 125 years to undo 50,000 years of perfect bio-timekeeping. Saying that our physiology hasn't evolved as quickly as our technology is the understatement of the millennium. As a result, our "when" is way, way off.

Being out of sync with bio-time is devastating to one's physical, mental, and emotional well-being. The phenomenon is called chrono-misalignment ("chrono" means time). In the last fifteen years, scientists have been connecting the so-called diseases of civilization (mood disorders, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and obesity) with chrono-misalignment. Symptoms include insomnia and sleep deprivation, which lead to depression, anxiety, and accidents, to say nothing of what feeling overwhelmed and exhausted does to relationships, careers, and health. Unless you turn off every screen and light at 6:00 p.m., you are likely to deal with chrono-misalignment in one way or another, whether it's morning fogginess, extra weight, feeling stressed out, or not performing to your potential. (It's unrealistic to power down at dusk, of course. But you can turn off screens a bit earlier than usual, and dim the lights as the night goes on.)

A sparrow doesn't rush to work by 9:00 a.m. on a coffee buzz while fighting traffic. A salmon doesn't attend a midnight concert. A deer doesn't binge-watch House of Cards all weekend. Imagine a house cat napping, playing, and cleaning on a societal schedule. It would never happen. Animals heed their inner clocks. Humans, with our big, superior brains, willfully ignore ours, cramming our circadian rhythms into a "social rhythm," often in direct opposition to what our bodies are supposed to be doing at that time.

HOW I DISCOVERED THE POWER OF WHEN

I became board-certified in clinical sleep medicine fifteen years ago, around the same time that chronobiology (the study of circadian rhythms) became the hot topic in my field. The study of circadian rhythms in humans was virtually nonexistent before the 1970s and is still unknown to the general public. Why? For starters, most primary care doctors haven't heard of chronobiology, either. It isn't taught in medical school, except when it comes to a few rare sleep disorders. There's no official drug to prescribe for being out of sync with your inner clock (unless you count caffeine, the most abused substance on the planet!), but there are many drugs and nutraceuticals—foods that have a medicinal value—that have a detrimental effect on your bio-time. (For a list of such drugs, go to here.)

When a number of my patients weren't responding to standard insomnia therapy, I became interested in, and then fascinated with, chronobiology. I had to branch out and find new ways to help them, and I started using chronotherapy techniques—exposure to light boxes at certain times of the day, replacing lightbulbs in the bedroom with "sleep-friendly models" (check out Lighting Science, www.lighting.science) and recommending the "sleep hormone" melatonin at specific times within the circadian cycle—with some measure of success.

But then I wondered if my patients would get even better results if they adjusted their daily schedules to inch closer to their natural bio-time. I asked them to make minor changes to when they ate and exercised, spent time with friends and watched TV, and were exposed to artificial light. When they did, we started to see remarkable improvement, not only in their sleep but in their general health, mood, memory, concentration, fitness, and weight. Good timing is so powerful, I realized, that it could change anyone's life in almost every way.

I was hooked. I read everything I could find in medical journals about the profound benefits of being in sync with your bio-time. As I mentioned, the field has exploded as a research topic, so I have been very busy keeping up. Here's just a small sample of the top studies to make circadian breakthroughs in the last few years:

In the pages ahead, you'll read more about these and many other studies. They offer proof of the importance of keeping good bio-time, and demonstrate the dangers of ignoring it. The scientific fact is, if you are time-wise, your life will tick along like clockwork.

If you are out of sync with your inner timing, you're working against your own biology. When has that ever been a good idea?

I'm not an Edison hater. I'm not about to say you have to throw away your iPhone or go live in a cave. If not for science and technology, we wouldn't have the proof of just how profound bio-timing is to health and productivity. We can use the research and technology to help us keep near-perfect bio-time and still stay on a social schedule. That's the beauty of it: You don't have to overhaul your life to tap into the power of when. You only have to shift a few things around, set up some alarms on your phone, download my free app, and watch your life change for the better.