Dr. Panda is a leading expert in the field of circadian rhythm research. He is Associate Professor at the Regulatory Lab at the Salk Institute, a Pew Scholar, and a recipient of the Dana Foundation Award in Brain and Immune System Imaging. His book, The Circadian Code: Lose Weight, Supercharge You Energy, and Transform Your Health from Morning to Midnight, is helping people around the world to align their lifestyles with these daily cycles, having a dramatic effect on their health.

Satchin-Panda.jpg

Satchin Panda

<h4>
 DR. SATCHIN PANDA
 is a leading expert in the field of circadian rhythm research. He is
 Associate Professor in the Regulatory Lab at the Salk Institute, a Pew
 Scholar, and a recipient of the Dana Foundation Award in Brain and Immune
 System Imaging. His book, The Circadian Code, has helped many
 people to regain energy, sleep well and lose weight. In part 2 of his
 discussion with
 UDAY KUMAR, he
 speaks about how he developed his ideas, and what inspired his
 research.
</h4>

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<h2 class="has-text-align-center">
 The Biology of Time – Part 2
</h2>

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 Q: Regarding the point you mentioned about sleep and sleep
 discipline, I
 have an Android phone and although I never knew anything about the blue
 light filter somehow I would turn it on and it would feel softer on my eyes.
 Then I came across your research. What triggered this whole curiosity and
 life changing discovery?



 DP: For a very
 long time, animals and humans have reset their brain clocks in response to
 light. Then there are many blind people who cannot see, cannot even see the
 headline of the New York Times, but when they travel from one place to another
 place, they can readjust their clock to the new time zone, just like normal
 people. But then there are other types of blind people who have lost both
 their eyes because of surgery or an accident, and they cannot reset their
 clock. That means there must be a light sensor in the eye, which is not for
 seeing, but may be essential for sensing.



 So, that clue was there for almost 50 years, and everybody was trying to
 figure out where this light sensor is. Then, after the human genome project,
 it became easier to look for it because we had the information. That’s how we
 stumbled on the melanopsin photoreceptor. If you remove the melanopsin gene in
 a mouse, it cannot sense light accurately, and cannot reset its clock. It
 takes a very long time to reset at scale.



 Then we figured out that it’s a blue light sensing protein – it senses blue
 light. That makes sense because during the daytime we have a lot of blue light
 in sunlight. So, we are designed to sense that blue light and become a lot
 more alert during the day. At night-time we don’t need blue light because it
 keeps us alert. Candlelight and firelight don’t have too much blue light. So,
 we are designed to see more blue light in the daytime and less blue light at
 night.



 Unfortunately, nowadays, what has happened is that opticians want us to have a
 blue light coating, which is actually not the right thing to do. You need blue
 light during the daytime, whereas you don’t need blue light at night. So, it’s
 better to have two pairs of glasses. If you don’t get enough blue light during
 the daytime, you can become depressed. Cell phone tracking data show that we
 spend more than 87% of our time indoors, and most of our indoor lighting is
 not good. In my living room, I might have 250 to 300 lux of light, whereas on
 a cloudy day in New Jersey, outside there will be 10,000 lux. Right now, where
 you’re sitting, since you’re away from your window, you may be sitting in 200
 lux. Out of that, blue light is a small fraction. If you filter out the blue
 light, then of course you may not get so much eye strain from looking at the
 screen, but you will not get the upliftment that you get from going outside.



 The second aspect is that most opticians are selling blue light filtering
 glasses. But is it filtering enough that is biologically significant? The
 answer is no. Most blue light blocking glasses that people are buying filter
 out maybe 5 to 10%. It is like you’re standing outside, and you feel it’s too
 much sun, and you get a transparent umbrella and hold it. So, in most cases
 it’s 5%. The glasses that really filter out blue light will look orange. Only
 orange and other spectra will go through, since blue is filtered out, so we
 see them as orange or even red. The real blue light filtering glasses are
 orange, yellow or red.



 Some people who get migraines will benefit from filtering out blue light when
 they go out, but they’ll also benefit just from wearing sunglasses, because
 that will filter out a lot of light, including daylight. At night-time, for
 people who cannot sleep easily, and cannot control the lighting, the real blue
 light filtering glasses do help. For example, somebody working in a grocery
 store, whose shift ends at 10 p.m. or midnight, who comes home completely
 jazzed up because of the light and cannot asleep, will benefit if they wear
 the blue light filter glasses for one or two hours before the shift ends. That
 will help. So, there are specific cases where they’re more effective, while
 there are many cases where people are just paying for nothing because there is
 no benefit that is significant.



 Q: Here are my $20 glasses from Amazon! [chuckles]



 DP: Maybe you’ll
 get some placebo effect.



 Q: Exactly! It’s placebo and now I totally know it!



 DP: Just look at
 the glasses, do they actually look slightly yellow or orange? If so, then you
 know.


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 <a href="Q:">Q:</a> I think a lot of families will find this
 advice helpful
 because, with homeschooling, designing an ergonomic workspace for kids has
 become more important than for grownups. There’s just so much that they have
 to do with this new change.



 The other aspect of your research, which I have started
 implementing, is time
 restricted eating. Is it the same as intermittent fasting, or is it
 different? I like time restricted eating better.



 DP: In the
 scientific literature, intermittent fasting is a broad term, because it just
 means doing something intermittently. It goes back to the research on calorie
 restriction: When caloric intake in mice is reduced by 20 to 40% then the mice
 live longer. That led to the idea that we should restrict calories, but then
 it is not easy to restrict calories every day, so they came up with the idea
 that we should eat every other day: There is a diet called the “Every Other
 Day Diet.” And then it was discovered that people who didn’t eat for two days
 out of seven might get similar benefits, and that people who eat less than
 1000 kilocalories for five days in a row every two months also get some
 benefit.


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<h5 class="has-text-align-center">
 Some people who get migraines will benefit from filtering
 out blue
 light when they go out, but they’ll also benefit just from wearing
 sunglasses, because that will filter out a lot of light, including
 daylight.
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 So, all of these are intermittent not continuous. That’s why they lump them
 together as intermittent fasting. But the word “fasting” repels people who
 would benefit, like people who have diabetes. They are told by their
 physicians that they should not fast, because they may become hypoglycemic. In
 our clinical study, we tell them that they can simply choose their 10 hours,
 and they can eat whatever they’re currently eating, then they say, “Yes we can
 do it.” If we tell them that “You have to fast for 14 or 16 hours,” then
 psychologically it becomes difficult.



 Q: Again, the positive reinforcement that you spoke about
 earlier: What is
 the message that helps a person take a positive step forward? I love the
 idea of time restricted eating. What you also showed is that it’s not about
 how much or what, but it’s the time you eat, the discipline, that makes a
 lot of difference.



 It was a Japanese scientist who received the Nobel Prize for
 autophagy and
 there was a lot of conversation about the positive benefits of fasting and
 how it helps with autophagy. So, in the Indian context, there is the idea of
 Ekadashi. I think our ancients knew the benefits of fasting.



 DP: In the Indian
 culture there is weekly fasting, which is similar to intermittent fasting. Two
 days in a week you fast, and that gives similar benefits. Reducing calories
 for several hours over a couple of days does give a lot of benefit.



 Q: Is there any research on the benefits of fasting on emotional
 stability?
 I was reading some yogic literature where a person who was irritable was
 told by his teacher to eat less in the evenings, that it would help him. So,
 I’m just wondering if scientific research also shows any correlation between
 emotional poise and restricted eating.



 DP: Yes, we
 anecdotally hear that people who have anxiety benefit from this and can avoid
 a panic attack. And I think in the book I describe how there is a hormone that
 is passively broken down in the gut that causes panic attacks. So when that
 hormone is managed, it may no longer cause anxiety.



 But what is interesting is the history of fasting, I don’t remember where I
 saw it, perhaps in a documentary, where Dr. Valter Longo talks about fasting.
 Another interesting thing was done by Russian scientists who were doing some
 experiments to try to figure out how to improve the health of
 institutionalized patients with depression and bipolar syndrome. There was a
 very difficult patient who was bipolar, and one day he said, “I’m not going to
 eat.” The warden gave up and said, “Okay, if you’re not going to eat, don’t
 eat. I’m not going to force feed you.” They used to force feed the patients,
 but instead he decided, “Okay, until he begs for food, we’re not giving it.”
 So, the patient went without food and just had water for six days or even
 longer.



 After that, he came back completely cured and said, “Well, I feel much better!
 I’m ready to leave as I’m completely normal.” The physician warden, who was a
 little curious, wondered, “Was it the fasting or did something else happen?”
 So he tried this experiment on many other patients with emotional problems,
 and found that fasting actually helped a lot of them, not all. So, in Russia,
 a lot of the experiments on fasting and health started from emotional health.


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 <img width="600" alt="the-biology-of-time-part2-3" class="lazyload has-img-center"
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<h5 class="has-text-align-center">
 When we fast, the brain and the rest of our nervous system
 go through
 changes because they’re exposed to ketones as an energy source. For
 mice with certain neurological diseases, like Huntington’s Disease,
 time restricted eating helps them to sleep better, and their activities
 are much better. At the same time, for depression and other conditions,
 bright daylight is still the best antidepressant and it’s plentiful and
 free.
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 When we fast, the brain and the rest of our nervous system go through changes
 because they’re exposed to ketones as an energy source. For mice with certain
 neurological diseases, like Huntington’s Disease, time restricted eating helps
 them to sleep better, and their activities are much better. At the same time,
 for depression and other conditions, bright daylight is still the best
 antidepressant and it’s plentiful and free. A lot of people don’t go outside
 enough. Because I wear my light sensing watch I see how much light I am
 exposed to, and if I don’t make an effort, even in San Diego, California, I
 don’t get as much as I should. If you think about it, most of the time we are
 indoors, we have curtains or blinds on the windows, and we are not always
 sitting next to a window. Then, as soon as we go out of the house, we put on
 sunglasses and get into the car.



 So, we are never actually exposed to much daylight. Daylight is very useful in
 reducing depression and people in Nordic countries know this, so they even pay
 to sit in a brightly lit room, with 10,000 lux of light, as an antidepressant.
 At Geneva airport, also, there are light rooms where you can pay to sit.


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<h5 class="has-text-align-center">
 The foundations of day-to-day physical health are also
 three factors:
 sleep, nutrition, and physical activity.
</h5>

<hr />

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 Q: I remember when I first came to the USA, I was in Virginia in
 the
 winter. Inside the house, with incandescent light, I would feel almost
 claustrophobic by evening. I had to step out, take a walk, and sit in the
 sun. It took me a good two to three years to acclimatize myself to the
 change in lighting. When we bought our current house we added extra windows.
 I didn’t realize it when I had it, but when I didn’t have it I knew
 immediately.



 Any parting words that you want to share with our readers,
 especially
 during Covid times?



 DP: Sanitation
 and social distancing will help prevent the virus from getting into our
 bodies, but to improve resilience we need a good circadian rhythm. Then, even
 if we get the virus we may not become too sick. For example, among NFL and NBA
 team players, there is no death for those who tested positive. All these elite
 athletes have a very strict regimen – how much sleep they get, their exercise
 regime, and they’re always outside practicing. That’s a clear example of a
 cohort of nearly 1000 people who had the same rate of infection as the general
 public, but no one went to hospital.



 Paying attention to sleep activity, nutrition, and being outside builds up
 resilience, so that even if you test positive you may not die.



 This is a direct effect, and there’s also another indirect effect. People with
 diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure often have a more severe form
 of Covid, but we also know that time restricted eating can help reduce the
 severity of these chronic diseases, so indirectly a circadian lifestyle will
 also reduce the risk of suffering from the virus.



 Q: Sir, thank you so much for all the great work you are
 doing.



 DP: Thank you.
 Have a nice day.



 Q: You too! Bye.


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<h4 class="has-text-align-center">Interview by UDAY KUMAR</h4>

<hr />

Does light affects our moods?

<h4>DR. SATCHIN PANDA is a leading expert in the field of circadian rhythm research. He is Associate Professor in the Regulatory Lab at the Salk Institute, a Pew Scholar, and a recipient of the Dana Foundation Award in Brain and Immune System Imaging. His book, The Circadian Code, has helped many people to regain their energy, sleep well and lose weight. Here he is interviewed by UDAY KUMAR on how he developed the ideas in his book, and what inspired his research.</h4><hr>Q: Good morning, sir. It’s very nice to see you. Thank you so much for taking the time. I believe in karmic coincidences, and one day I was thinking that there should be something around the circadian code, not a complex research paper but something simpler for the common person to read and understand, beyond superstition and ritual, which really explains the science. Then I discovered your book, and I was very happy.SP: Thank you.Q: The more I read it, the more I can feel your sincerity in putting the contents across.SP: Yes, it is difficult because being a scientist it’s always hard to simplify and at the same time not to lose the facts.Q: Yes, it’s a very fine line.I wanted to talk to you about your circadian clock app. I’ve personally been using it and it’s a very comprehensive app! It covers a lot of things.But first, can you talk a little more about your childhood, especially time with your grandparents?SP: It’s pretty well described in the book, and as an idea it’s immense. Only in retrospect, after studying <a href="https://heartfulness.org/magazine/the-science-behind-creating-a-daily-meditation-practice" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">circadian rhythms</a>, could I understand the difference between the way my paternal and maternal grandparents lived their lives. My maternal grandfather was working for the Indian Railways in a small town in Odisha so at times he had to do the night shift. He had access to relatively good health care. My paternal grandfather was a farmer, who lived on a farm and didn’t have access to health care because it was a small village in the middle of nowhere. The end stages of their lives were very different. My maternal grandfather, who ate better food and had better access to health care, succumbed to a neurodegenerative disease. He died earlier than my paternal grandfather, who lived in sync with Nature. He didn’t have electricity, he slept well, and he ate a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables. I guess the only thing he bought from the market was salt. I can’t remember anything else, not even jaggery.In retrospect it was interesting to see how these two lives played out. I think that also gave me some early insight into the seasonality of plants and flowers, and it brought some curiosity. Most of science talks about how x affects y, but it doesn’t talk about timing. So, I realized that maybe the biology of time would be the next frontier in science. That’s why I decided to work on the biology of time.Q: Beautiful! I love the phrase “biology of time.” I also noticed the way the time with your grandparents nurtured a natural curiosity in you. You talk about this even in your TED talk, for example, your sister telling you that the frog comes up at a certain time. I thought that was just fascinating.SP: Back then, we didn’t have the time displayed everywhere. In those days, perhaps we had one watch in the house. It is interesting that animals and plants keep track of time to fifteen minutes accuracy, or even five minutes accuracy, irrespective of what time they go to bed and wake up in the morning.Q: There is something to be said about the world today. I work in the technology sector and ten years ago I was also involved in some BPO activity and went to India to visit one company. At 2 a.m. all these young people were working like it was like broad daylight, and I was worried for them. I’m more worried now knowing the science. What are they doing to their biological clocks? Can it be reversed? Can we heal? What does science say?<hr><hr>Animals and plants keep track of time&nbsp; to fifteen minutes accuracy, or even&nbsp; five minutes accuracy, irrespective of&nbsp; what time they go to bed and&nbsp; wake up in the morning.<hr><hr>So, we are saying that some of it can be reversed. One can live a healthier life. It’s not irreversible damage. Even if you take the case of a car. I may not have taken good care of my car, but if I start taking good care of it, it will not continue to degrade at the same rate. If I reduce the rate of degradation I will get a few more years out of the car. The same thing happens when taking care of your health. If you think about the modern healthcare system, where we find medication and surgery, underlying all that is one universal principle which stems from the germ theory of disease. Sanitation, vaccination, and antibiotics are the foundation of the modern healthcare system. For example, there is no way a person can successfully go through surgery without sanitation and antibiotics. Similarly, the foundations of day-to-day physical health are also three factors: sleep, nutrition, and physical activity. Whether a person is healthy or sick, if they don’t pay attention to these three things, their system will break down. Conversely, no matter how sick they are, if they pay attention to these three, then the chance of recovery is much better.<hr><img src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/biology_of_time2_694b8e7342.jpg?updated_at=2023-04-06T06:16:24.129Z" alt="Biology of time"><hr>Q: I think that’s where the whole notion of prevention and cure comes into play. Money put into prevention probably goes much further than trying to fix the system.SP: Yes, but we should not make the distinction between prevention and cure because people who are already sick feel that they have missed the train. For example, when somebody gets diabetes, it may never be cured. They learn to manage it. Giving them hope that they can manage it and stay healthier is a very powerful message, because most people will pay attention to their lifestyle only after they get the disease. We should not tell them, “Hey you missed the train because your condition cannot be reversed.” Instead, everything we are talking about actually helps them live life to their full potential, irrespective of what condition they may have.<hr><img src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/biology_of_time3_60b9ffd713.jpg?updated_at=2023-04-06T06:20:33.982Z" alt="biology of time"><hr><hr>The foundations of day-to-day physical health are also three factors: sleep, nutrition, and physical activity. Whether a person is healthy or sick, if they don’t pay attention to these three things, their system will break down. Conversely, no matter how sick they are, if they pay attention to these three, then the chance of recovery is much better.<hr><hr>Q: I love that. It’s a very ennobling message. There’s always an opportunity to get on the train and start from wherever you are, which is what you say a lot in the book – it’s never too late. And to your point about observation, especially when observing plants, there is a line in your book – it was like watching a Broadway show sitting in the front row – and you also describe vanilla farmers. Can you talk a little bit about observing plants and how that triggered your curiosity further as you went along?SP: The plants and animals on the planet have circadian rhythms. That’s how they adapt to cold, warmth, and everything else. For example, if you plant seeds, you’ll notice that the seedlings spread their leaves during the daytime to capture the sun, but at night they close their leaves as if they’re shivering from cold, because they want to reduce the heat loss.Similarly, depending on what time of day pollinators are present, most flowers open their petals at a specific time. When I was working with vanilla, I discovered that it flowers very early in the morning before sunrise, and that’s why the farmers wake up around one or two a.m. and go to the vanilla field to hand-pollinate the flowers before sunrise. Being in tune with the circadian rhythm of the vanilla flowers was breaking the workers’ circadian clocks because they had to wake up early! I observed that a lot of the farmers in the vanilla fields slowly developed an allergic reaction to vanilla. I don’t know whether it’s genetic, because of exposure to a lot of pollen, or due to a combination of their circadian rhythm being broken, being sleep deprived, and exposure to the allergen. That’s why the chance of getting allergies might have increased.It is an interesting observation, but I guess these days we don’t have time for these observations because instead we observe what is trending on Twitter and Facebook. What is interesting is that if you mine the Twitter data, there are very nice circadian, weekly, and annual rhythms. In Google Analytics you can look for these patterns in the searches that people make. You’ll clearly see that the things people think about, worry about, or are curious about have circadian rhythms. As you might imagine, searches for pain medication increase at night. People search for coffee more often in the morning and late afternoon. Studying these data, you start to know the predictive value of rhythms to help us anticipate events as opposed to just being responsive. Anticipation versus response actually increases efficiency by 10% to 20%.Q: Wow!SP: For example, if you are opening a shop in a market and you know that people only come to the market by 9 or 10 a.m., after finishing their morning activities at home, what is the point of opening the shop at 6 a.m.? Also, it’ll be useless to open at 12 noon because you have missed the morning customers. So, rhythms are played out in commerce. Plants turn their photosynthetic mechanism on one or two hours before sunrise. They are opening shop one hour before sunrise so that they can get the first rays of the sun and convert them into energy.Having that circadian clock gives them the advantage of getting maybe 10% to 15% extra photosynthesis. The circadian clock helps the plant kingdom fix 10% more carbon. And imagine, if they didn’t fix that additional 10% we would be dead by now. Then, at the end of the day, photosynthesis winds down one hour before sunset, so they don’t waste any unnecessary energy to keep the photosynthetic system goingQ: Brilliant!SP: It’s all about prediction.<hr><img src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/biology_of_time4_3544274e3e.jpg?updated_at=2023-04-06T06:28:04.522Z" alt="biology-of-time4"><hr>Q: As you rightly said, one of the key things is that rhythm is universal, and if we flow with it, it supports us, whereas if we go against it, there is friction. In Heartfulness, it is recommended that we meditate early in the morning, before dawn, and do the detox cleaning practice in the evening, and a prayer before sleep at night. The timings are based on the circadian importance of getting better returns at certain times of the day for certain activities. Is this also the case with other aspects of lifestyle? For example, is there research on recommended times for students to study? A lot of kids nowadays burn the midnight oil.SP: Sometimes this can be taken out of context. For example, we know that there are better times to exercise, but that’s for elite athletes who want that extra one second advantage. If we say that late afternoon is the best time for exercise, then people who need to exercise may say, “Well, morning may not be the best time to exercise.” So, in the pursuit of perfection, we should not give up what is good now. For sleep, it’s very clear that we should sleep at night. We have excellent sleep when we go to bed at 9 or 10 p.m., whereas we cannot sleep for six to seven hours, even when we try, during the daytime. But that’s very different from exercise, or studying for an exam, because when there is an exam, we have to study. We cannot say, “No, I’m just waiting for my best time!”<hr><img src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/biology_of_time5_401eab8ad4.jpg?updated_at=2023-04-06T06:30:14.655Z" alt="biology-of-time5"><hr>Q: I’ve used that excuse a few times, but it didn’t work out very well. I like what you are saying, and it is the same with meditation. Even though there is a best time of the day to meditate, it is still better to do it now than wait for that ideal time.<hr>To be continued.<hr><hr><h4>Interview by UDAY KUMAR</h4><hr>