24 Hour Society

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We live in what is fast becoming a 24 hour society, where everything is open all hours. We can buy our groceries at midnight, book our holiday on the Internet at 3 am, and do business online at the crack of dawn. We no longer belong to a society of nine-to-fivers. However, before you join the 24-hour revolution, take a minute to listen to what your body is trying to tell you – that a round-the-clock lifestyle is not what nature intended.

In an area of our brains called the hypothalamus, we have a ‘body clock’ that controls our body’s natural rhythms. It tells us when it is the right time to eat, sleep, work and play. It plays an important part in our physical and psychological well-being. It is, in fact, what makes us tick and it controls many things including our hormones, temperature, immune functions and alertness. If we try to ignore our body clocks, or even to switch them off for a while, we not only deprive ourselves of much needed rest but we also run the risk of seriously damaging our health.

Lack of sleep is one of the major difficulties people face in our busy modern world and it has serious consequences as the sleep-deprived are not only bad-tempered but they lose their ability to think creatively, and their use of language becomes restricted to clichés. Besides in repetitive jobs like working in a factory, there is an increase of number of defective products produced at 3 am, and there can also be much more serious results such as various accidents, for instance.

Ignoring our body clock and changing our body’s natural rhythms can not only make us depressed, anxious and accident prone, it can lead to much more serious health problems. For example, heart disease, fatigue, ulcers, muscular pain, and frequent viral infections can all result from trying to outsmart our body clocks. Altering our patterns of sleeping and waking dramatically affects our immune system. While we sleep the body’s repairing mechanisms are at...