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Good morning body! Time for another day. Your alarm goes off, you hit the snooze button
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and lay there for few minutes between the land of wake and sleep known as the hypnopompic
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state. When you do finally get up, you’re groggy and disoriented thanks to sleep inertia.
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Most of it is shed in 10 minutes, but can sometimes linger for a few hours. During this
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time your body temperature is still low, but your blood pressure is sharply rising. There’s
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a 50% increase in the stress hormone, cortisol, pumping through your bloodstream, in preparation
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for the stresses of your day!
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Time for a shower! It’s also the best time to shave as clot forming platelets are most
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abundant right now, making your blood more sticky. Meaning less bleeding from cuts! But
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it’s also the time of day when heart attacks most often occur.
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7:30am swings around and it is time for coffee and breakfast. Enjoy the smell before sipping!
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75% of how we enjoy flavour is not through the tongue, but through smell! The vapours
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pass through your mouth, around the soft palate, into the nasal cavity and to the olfactory
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bulb. Mmm that’s good!
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Settling in at work, and your mental activity is actually at a peak in late morning. Most
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of us are sharpest 2 and a half to 4 hours after waking. But your memory is impacted
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as the day moves on. In the morning we forget an average of 5 facts, but by afternoon we
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forget around 14. Not if you’re a young adult though. In fact the reverse is true,
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with young people becoming more mentally alive in the afternoon and evening. But, at night
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our biological clock seems to turn off the proteins involved in forming long term memories,
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which is why it’s best not to cram for a test all night.
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It’s noon and it’s time for lunch! Your stomach is able to expand as much as two and
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half pints to receive a meal. Here it stays for a few hours before it’s sent to your
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small intestine. We digest meals without even thinking about it - in fact, there is a brain
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of sorts in your belly called the enteric nervous system which performs everything from
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sensing nutrients, measuring acids, and coordinating the immune system to defend your gut.
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Around 2:30pm and lunch has left us a wave of fogginess and fatigue. After a meal your
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body has a short boost in energy from the glucose, but is then followed by a wave of
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insulin, the hormone that transports sugar to your cells. Scientists believe that insulin
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might pull too much from your blood, causing an energy nosedive. However, this phenomenon
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occurs even if you don’t have lunch, which has led to much research on the power of naps,
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which increase productivity and safety.
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4:30pm and it’s time to hit the gym. Though many try to work out in the morning, studies
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suggest that you may gain 20% more muscle strength by working out in the afternoon.
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Your airways are more open, your heart works more efficiently and your reaction time is
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at its peak. Much of this has to do with your core body temperature peaking later in the
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day. Even most sports records are achieved between 3pm and 8pm.
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Now you start off the evening by joining some friends for drinks. During cocktail hour you're
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actually more tolerant to the effects of alcohol. In one study, those drinking vodka at 9am
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had significantly worse reaction time and psychological functioning than those who had
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the same dose at 6pm.
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It’s around 8:30pm now and you catch someone’s eye in the bar. Most of our mammalian ancestors
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have ways of advertising their fertility. It turns out that human women also give cues
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when they’re ovulating. In fact, when looking at pictures of women, studies show men find
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women in the fertile phase to be more attractive.
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You ask each other to dance - which brings you close enough to get a wiff - after all,
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your sebaceous and apocrine glands release scents through the armpit which potential
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partners may find attractive. And because humans walk upright, the armpit is the ideal
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body part to disperse scent.
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It’s 11pm now, which is the most popular time for sexual activity. Which has little
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to do with our bodies and more to do with societal schedules. In fact, levels of testosterone
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are much lower in the evening and peak at 8AM. While semen quality is best in the afternoon
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with 35 x106 more spermatozoa per ejaculation. As such, couples hoping to conceive have better
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chances with midday sex than during the midnight hour.
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As you go to sleep and finally begin to drift off, melatonin is secreted by the pineal gland
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which begins the sleep cycle, which happens multiple times through the night. A change
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from alpha wave drowsiness to lower frequency theta brain waves signify early sleep. And
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as your sleep deepens, your brain moves to longer delta waves. For children, sleep is
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the time in which 90% of bone growth occurs.
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Finally, as you move into REM sleep, your brain is as busy as it was during the day,
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firing theta waves with burst of alpha and beta. Though dreams occur in all stages of
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sleep, it is during REM that our dreams are most vivid and intense. Recent brain scans
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have shown that neurotransmitters like serotonin, histamine and noradrenaline are shut off at
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this point, turning off reason and logical sense of time - which explains some weird
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dreams! We dream for an hour and half to two hours each night, meaning you spend about
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6 years vividly dreaming over your lifetime!
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In the middle of the night, your body actually wakes up periodically, in something called
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microarousals. These can last only seconds, but occur between 200-1000 times per night.
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Though most of us in the western world sleep all in one go, many past cultures sleep was
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broken up into two periods with social activity in between. Some studies have even shown that
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we have two distinct 4 hour natural sleep periods, which in the past would last between
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8pm-12am, and then again from 2am-6am.
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By 4:30am, your body temperature is at its lowest and your sleep continues to move through
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the cycle. In a few hours, it’ll be good morning body! Time for another day :)