Depression: An Intense and Long Term Illness

A rhythm is something that is regularly repeated. All living organisms experience rhythmic changes which tend to coincide with seasonal or daily environmental changes. Most organisms have an internal biological clock called endogenous pacemakers, which are influences by external environmental factors called exogenous zeitgebers, these control periodic changes. The sleep wake cycle is a circadian rhythm that repeats itself every 24 hours. However these can become desynchronised, resulting in a disruption of your biological rhythm. It can be disrupted by many factors, including Jet lag and shift work.

Depression is a common mental disorder, characterized by sadness, loss of interest or pleasure, feelings of guilt or low self-worth, disturbed sleep or appetite, feelings of tiredness, and poor concentration. Depression can be long-lasting or recurrent, substantially impairing an individual’s ability to function at work or school or cope with daily

Circadian rhythms occur every 24 hours; an example of a circadian rhythm is the sleep-waking cycle. We are diurnal animals who are active during the daytime and asleep at night, other animals are nocturnal they are active at night but asleep during the day. The circadian rhythm depends on the interaction of physiological and psychological processes to be tuned into the sleep-waking cycle so energy is provided when needed. As diurnal humans we have a fairly stable sleep pattern with the time we go to sleep and the time we wake up, this consistency suggests an internal mechanism controls sleep, endogenous pacemaker. However, this can be overridden by external factors, exogenous zeitgebers.

I generally tend to go to sleep between 11 pm and 12 am, waking up around 8-9 on my own. When I have to be to work early in the morning, I sometimes rely on an alarm but sometimes my body wakes up on its own and usually go to bed around 10 or 11 pm. I wake up a few times throughout the night normally unless I am extremely tired. According to Myers and Dewall, age and experience can alter the circadian rhythm (2016). I have noticed over the last year my sleeping habits have changed quite a bit. I have started to feel tired later at night and go to sleep later as well. I used to go to sleep around 10 pm but now it’s an hour later than before. My house is normally quiet by 10 pm because my family has gone to sleep. Around that time I go to my

Regimented sleep schedule: By sticking with a regimented or strict sleep schedule, your circadian rhythm should adapt. Those with variable sleep schedules may have a circadian rhythm that isn’t aligned with their sleep schedule, thus resulting in all types of physiological chaos. Decreasing this physiological chaos with a good sleep schedule may also reduce the

McMahon , et al, 2014). Another factor that can play into S.A.D. is melatonin, which helps with sleep and wake cycles. Rosenthal, et al, notes how the pineal gland, the gland that produces melatonin, will react to dark surroundings with drowsiness that can lead people to being lethargic (as cited in Melrose, 2015). When melatonin increases and serotonin decreases, the offset of the proteins can cause circadian rhythms to be disrupted, which is the bodies “24 hour” clock. Researcher Melrose writes that “…circadian rhythms respond to the rhythmic light-dark changes that occur daily and throughout each of the seasons.” (2015). People with S.A.D. disorder normally find that their circadian rhythms are off beat and timed differently with day lengths, for example feeling tired in the middle of the day while being wide awake or feeling wide awake when it would normally be time to sleep.

Circadian rhythm is another sleep disorder that has to do with our body functions. In this case, our body clocks are off, due an internal change or external factors like a change in time zones or regions where a midnight sun occurs during a 24-hour period. Bright lights in a room have a similar effect on sleep.

Circadian rhythm disorder is related with people's biological clock. It means you people find difficulty falling asleep or often keep awake at the sleep time. Actually, you have some problems about sleep disorder.

Circadian rhythms are the bodies' biological internal clocks encoded within us during a 24 hour cycle interval that accommodates to our body’s natural fluctuations in a physical, mental, behavioral, and physiological form and is prominently influenced and modified in accordance to marginal potencies and stimuli reflective of probable and irrepressible variables in our natural world that can be used as the determinant for an individual’s specific developmental, communicative, and interactive compositions.

Circadian rhythm is our very own biological clock that has regular bodily rhythms that occur on a 24-hour cycle. This “clock” is what controls our sleep cycle, along with body temperature and wakefulness. The bodily clock does a good job, but sleep isn’t perfect. There are many sleep disorders that can turn out peaceful night of sleep into a nightmare, and not like a dream kind of nightmare. The most prevalent one of these is insomnia, or the persistent problems in falling or staying asleep, with 1 in 10 adults having some sort of the disorder. There is also narcolepsy, or sudden attacks of overwhelming sleepiness, sleep apnea, or the sudden lack of breathing during sleeping, causing the victims to awaken, and night terrors, or a sleep disorder characterized by high arousal and an appearance of being terrified (Myers,

Circadian rhythm refers to the twenty-four-hour cycle that results in physical, mental and behavioral changes in living things. Animals and plants respond differently to the lightness and darkness depending on the circadian rhythm or the internal biological clock. The body clock works responsibly in making sure that the pattern of mental alertness of a person is enhanced. A DNA molecule is transmitted to pass the message for opening up of the RNA, and the mRNA is transformed into a protein which takes some time for the DNA to be turned into a molecule. The time of conversion is determined and kept by the body’s biological clock (Alice, 2012). If the clock fails to work the level of alertness can be affected, and this can make a person to cause traffic accidents or even cause injuries at the place of work. Also, some people can suffer from chronic diseases if the biological clock is altered with.

Introduction: In order to stay healthy and to function efficiently, living things must coordinate their internal processes with the external world. The most obvious feature of our environment that most creatures have to respond to is the daily cycle of light and dark. Biological processes that follow this 24-hour cycle, such as our sleep-wake cycle, are said to follow a circadian rhythm. One of the best-known circadian rhythms in humans is the daily change in body temperature. We tend to be at our coolest in the early morning and at our warmest in the late afternoon and early evening. Other circadian rhythms include hormone levels, alertness, muscle strength, and heart rate. The controlling regulator for these cyclic processes within the body is thought to be the hypothalamus, which is in the brain.

Aside from noticing night and day and clocks our body has its own system to tell us when to sleep and when to wake, our circadian rhythm. The human body naturally runs on a twenty five hour clock, so living on a twenty four hour schedule is often hard on the body because it loses an hour each day. On top of this natural loss most people do not get the right amount of sleep each night which can cause a whole host of problems. This is part of

 Jet Lag: internal biological clocks collide with external clocks as a result of moving across several time zones.

Light influences the internal clock through specialis ed "light sensitive" cells in the retina of the eyes. These cells, which occupy the same space as the rods and cones that make vision possible, gives signals to the brain to tell whether if it is daytime or night time, and sleeping patterns are set accordingly (CBS News, 2015). Exposure to light stimulates a nerve pathway from the eye to parts of the brain that control hormones (shown in figure 2), body temperature and other functions that play a role in making us feel