When you go to a friend's for dinner and you get talking, or you go out on the land on a boat, or go outside anywhere on a walk and you just kind of relaxing and chilling out, and then you get back into the house.
And look at a clock. You're like, oh god, it was like five hours late.
And then I thought it was because the sun did not go down, and I did not realize because my brain didn't tell me that that wasn't normal.
When most of us say on top of the world, we usually mean it metaphorically, as in being in a good mood or in a good place. But for Addie Scott, top of the world is a very real location that she calls home.
You think of like Canada and North America on a map and go as far north as you can and west without getting into Alaska, and you find Anyuvik.
Addie is a coordinator for Community Greenhouse in Innovook, Canada, a city located in the Arctic Circle. Because of its extreme north location and the tilt of our planet's axis, people who live there experience fifty six days of continuous sunlight every summer and about thirty days of polar night in the winter.
So in the summer, I usually just like make sure that I try not to.
Go outside past like eleven PM.
And if I do, I get very confused and my brain's like, Kate, it's time to go to work.
Now it's the morning.
But it's great for waking up in the morning because it's just bright all the time, and in the winter mad it's hot to care a bit.
In most inhabited places on the planet, we can rely on signals from the sun to let us know when it's time to go about certain parts of our day. So for Addie, who moved to Nuvik from Yorkshire, United Kingdom, the endless days and continuous nights were something she had to get used to.
It's honestly, like I mean, it sounds like a cliche. It's nothing I've ever experienced before, and it's nothing I could have imagined before.
It's a very unique thing that few humans will ever witness in their lives, and while whole populations have learned to thrive in this environment, it still comes with its own set of challenges. I also sat down with doctor Stephen Lockley, a neuroscientist an Associate professor of medicine at Harvard University to talk about what these unique and extreme day and night periods due to our minds, our bodies, and of course are sleep.
We've not evolved as humans to live in constant darkness or constant light. We can override it with the use of electric light or light avoidance in the summer, but clearly there are still some anger effects of the light environment. It's not exactly the same as living further south, and so yes, we do find the further north you go there is a bigger risk to health.
Despite the risk, people have figured out how to adapt, with evidence showing that humans may have first migrated deep into the northern hemisphere as far back as thirty thousand years ago. Today, we're going to look at what sleep is like in the Arctic Circle, a place with light and dark cycles that seem alien to the rest of the world and where the adaptability of its residents is a testament to the ingenuity of the human race. On
this episode of Chasing Sleep, when the Sun doesn't sleep. Hi, I'm Anahad O'Connor, and this is Chasing Sleep and iHeartRadio production and partnership with Mattress Firm located two thousand miles north of Seattle, and with only one road connecting it to the rest of the globe. Nuvik, Canada is one of the most remote yet interesting places on Earth. Most of the Arctic Circle is so extreme that, despite some modern settlements, a lot of the land remains completely untouched.
The wildlife found here is some of the most unique. The forests are dense and lush, the waters are clear and blue, the day lasts an entire season, and the nights are illuminated by the amazing northern lights.
It's basically like real life Nannia is the best way to describe it.
So after I.
Finished my masts, I didn't know where to go, so I threw a dot at a map and this was the closest place it landed.
So here I am doing the things.
Wow, So you really did that and decided, Okay, that's where I'm headed, And how did you figure out how you were going to get there and prepare for it and make a life there.
I actually just kind of zoomed in on Google Maps and was like, wow, there's like really nothing there, and then kind of zoomed in a little bit closer and then found the names of the towns like surrounding it, and then just looked for like volunteering and job opportunities to travel and then found a place working with sled dogs and working with them and email called them was like.
Hey, do you guys have sled dog training jobs? Is that a thing?
And they said yeah, And I worked for them for like eight months, left on a road trip, and then got a job at the Greenhouse.
So while it must be pretty amazing to be surrounded by so much beauty, how do you handle the unique times of total light and dark that come with living in Annivik.
It's kind of amazing really, Like in the summer, it happens so fast that you go from darkness to like twenty four hour daylight basically. So I know, officially it's twenty four hour daylight for one month, but the sun, even though it sets a little bit, is still light for like three months either side of that.
It's really really cool.
And I don't know, you have no idea what time it is any time of day, and if you're really bad at wearing a watchhalk keeping your phone on you like I am, you're just like Beth but wondering the whole time. You have no idea what time is going for a walk with the dog. I'll hanging out with some friends and you'll look outside and be like it's still light. Maybe it's ten pm. Maybe I'll go to bed it's like five am, and uh, they're like, oh, it's the next day.
Oops.
So that's constant daylight and then the opposite happens in the winter.
Yeah, the winter is twenty four to seven darkness. But it's kind of amazing because you get the northern lights the whole time, Like in the middle of the day, you'll be like walking to work to do this.
Is amazing lights in the sky. Wow.
So I think I in terms of like sleeping, the winter is so much easier just because it's dark all the time.
It's kind of nice. But in the summer, we play Operation Nighttime in my house.
Because you guys have to like just close all the windows, all the cuts, put like copboard onto block out the light. At like ten pm, just run around the house play Operation Nighttime so you can sell my God.
So I'm guessing Operation Nighttime is a technique for adapting to the constant light. So can you walk us through exactly what that looks like.
Yeah, So when it hits ten pm. I have a little alarm on my phone to remind me to do it. Otherwise I just yeah, I have no idea that it's that time.
And then go around and we have like blackoutlines on all.
Of the windows, So me and my housemates we go around and like cover room each We just go and pull them all down. And the most important one I always forget is to close my bedroom cuts.
So when I go into my bedroom, it's dark.
But yeah, it's just remembering to do it, sitting a long and pulling those blackout clients down, making a night time.
It sounds like a great way to recreate night and also a pretty interesting reminder of just how important the darkness is to signaling sleep mechanisms in our brains. But prepping the house is one thing. What's it like to work in this environment?
I mean, gardening is very seasonal anyway, but it's more extreme here. So the gardening season now starts in May when it gets warm.
Enough because we just get the light back then.
And then in September is when we start to get what you call the average day with like a normal sunset sunrise kind of thing. But that's when it starts to get really cold here through the summer. It's amazing. I'm working in the greenhouse. The plants love the twenty four hour daylight really crazy.
So I'm curious how the plants respond over there to these periods of extended sunlight and darkness.
Veggies especially.
You'll look on the back of a seed packet radish does normally be like one to two months to get a fully grown radish for the good old salad.
Here it's like three weeks. Wow, everything grows crazy.
Fast, incredible. So the plants love the summer, But what does life look like for the people here with such dramatic shifts and seasons.
Honestly, you really recognize the shift in people's like behavioral.
Patterns, which I find really interesting.
Really.
Yeah, So in the summer, people are like active, going for a walk. You spend like so much time on the land and like you're out as much as you possibly candy, And we're in a delta here too, so there's so much water and lakes and rivers, so people are often at like in canoes on a boat, and you just spend as much time outside as you can all like, yeah, it's amazing. And then as you like shift into getting colder and then in the so everyone basically just hibernates and.
Does crafts, does crafts.
Yeah, keep yourself busy during the like the winter months. That's a traditional thing as well, Like crafts and making things is a very big winter tradition, especially for the women appear too, because there's just less hunting and less gathering you can do on the land. That's true of people's like natural rhythms too. When it gets really cold outside, you're like, okay, conserve the energy.
So what about holidays or celebrations. Is there a way that everyone ushers in these huge seasonal changes.
So as soon as the sun rises for the first time in a month January sixth this year, and we have a massive sunrise festival, so everyone comes out. Only rises for like maybe thirty seconds, so it's still really dark, but everyone comes out and celebrates and we have like fireworks and everyone makes food and we hang out and yeah, because the population is very small, so it's like three thousand people, and the same thing in the summer, we
have like winter markets with the town. So there's always like a really big celebration in the winter and the summer just of like hey, this is the longest day of the whole year technically, and this is the first.
Sunrise of the year.
Let's celebrate these things because it's amazing that we get light back all like the light then goes away.
And what about the people there who've lived there for decades or centuries. Have there been any ways that they've been affected by this kind of living?
Yeah, I mean, I know, maybe not even just Canada, but across the entire like circumpolar and circum Arctic globe that does a thing called midnight summer craziness.
So people people do.
Go a little bit lupylo and in the summer just because you just don't sleep as much. But I know that in the past, and this is speaking just from general knowledge that people generally who were indigenous and lived on the land were really good at just following the animals and living with their families and kids are just playing out at like five am, like two am because it doesn't really matter. So people have more of like a nap culture and kind of just sleep whenever.
They want to.
So do you feel like you've adapted to this, like your circadian rhythm, for example, has adapted to this, or is it something that's still jarring for you after several years.
Of living in this Actually I kind of like it. Yeah, I think you've got used to it for sure.
And what about your sleep quality? Do you notice the difference in your sleep when it's extended periods of sunlight versus extended periods of darkness?
Definitely.
At the beginning, Yeah, Like in my first maybe six months here, it was pretty difficult. But then I learned about operation Nighttime in the house. I've like really taken that to heart and employed that thoroughly.
When I talked about the challenges that Addie faces with doctor Stephen Lockley, he reiterated the extremely important role that our eyes play and what the perception of brightness or darkness does in our brains.
So the first thing to think about is what's happening at the eye as opposed to what's happened in the environment. It's the eye that detects the light to tell the brain whether it's day or night, which then in turn resets our circadian clock or twenty four hour clock, which then in turn tells the brain when to sleep, when to be awake, when to eat, and so on and so forth. The environment doesn't always match what happens at
the eye. If you're in constant light, when you close your eyes, you create a light dark cycle at the eye. So the brain doesn't see constant light because you close your eyes.
To go to sleep.
So in that situation, closing your eyes then helps to reset our Cicadian clock.
We'll be right back after a brief message from our partners at Mattress Firm, and now back to chasing sleep. Light or lack thereof, obviously plays an important role in not just the quality of our sleep, but the timing of it as well. We see effects on sleep from the sun and the lights in our homes, even the light from our cell phones. Addie has to black out
her entire home every night when it's constant daylight. So what about the opposite of that, What sort of challenges would we see in our sleep living in constant darkness.
Modern day? Obviously we have electric light, we have man made light. In the past, there may have been firelight or gas light, and so it would be unusual to be in complete darkness for that entire time. And again, if you create a light dark cycle through whatever source of light, you're providing a time queue to the brain
to tell the brain when it's day or night. Now, there are scenarios that are similar to what you've just described, and for a lot of my career I've studied the impact of blindness on Cicadian rhythms and sleep.
Interesting.
So if you don't have eyes, or if you have an eye disorder which completely stops any light perception, then your brain is essentially in constant darkness. And in that situation, individuals have a disorder because they can't in train, they can't synchronize their daily clocks to a light dark cycle, and they in fact run on their own internal time, and that causes problems when you're trying to live in
a twenty four hour world. So there are scenarios where people do live in complete darkness, but we always have to keep in mind what the environment is and then what the retina and what the eye is receiving. And so most of us still live in a light dark cycle, even if we're at those extreme northern latitudes.
Got it, And I'm curious what role does melotonin play in all of this. It seems like melatonin, from what I understand, your body produces it based at least in part in light signals to the brain.
With internal melatonin. Your natural melatonin doesn't need light or dark to be released. It's released automatically by the circadian clock, and so the clock sends a signal to the pineal gland, which is where melatonin is released from, and that will happen on a twenty four hour pattern even though there's no light dark cycle. So in the blind people I was talking about earlier, they still have a daily signal or a daily pattern of melotonin. It just can't be
synchronized to the light dark cycle. But if you have eyes, if you can detect light, then melatonin cycles so that it's maximum at night and minimum in the daytime. It isn't a sleep hormone, which sometimes people often think it is. It's a darkness hormone, and so it tells the brain it's night now. In humans, that means go to sleep, and so melatonin means go to sleep. In humans, dark
and sleep go together. And so what that melatonin signal does it helps the brain tell the difference between night and day. Now, if you shine a light at your eyes at night, then your melatonin will be stopped. So when the brain sees light, it thinks daytime. It suppresses your melatonin. It makes you more alert, it increases your heart rate, it increases your temperature because naturally the only
time you would see light is in the daytime. So when we expose ourselves to light at night, we're confusing the body clock, we're confusing the brain because light means day.
Another thing I wanted to ask you, which I find really fascinating, is there's been some literature more and more in recent years, looking into this phenomenon of bi phasic sleeping, where you know, before the dawn of electricity, people went to bed very early, as soon as the sun set. In many cases, you know, they may have woken up in the middle of the night to do all sorts of things by candlelight, or to do some agricultural work, and then would go back to sleep until the sun
came up. Do you have any thoughts on this phenomenon.
It's very interesting observation and whether we've you know, what we've done to change our behavior in modern times. And first of all, we have to think again about light sources. You just said people got up to do things by candle light, Well, that wouldn't have a very big impact on your Cicadan rhythms.
Or sleep.
Ah, that's a good point. So even in a bi phasic sleeping cycle, you would still need a source of light for any period or being awake. It's not like this would be effective to get up in the middle of the night, say, and try to be productive in complete darkness.
So these are low levels of light which have minimal impact on your circadian rhythms and alertness. If you expose people to a longer night, their melatonin profile lengthens, And so what the melatonin signal does in the brain is tell the brain how long night is. In the summer, you will have a shorter scoto period, a shorter night period, and produce melatonin for a shorter time. Then in the winter, as you expand the night, your melatonin profile expands and
gets longer. So humans still have the capability to change their biology based on season through this change in melatonin. And what probably happened is if you don't have electric light to stay up, you would go to bed earlier. You could all try that yourselves, don't turn an electric light on after dusk and see if you go to bed earlier. I suspects you probably will if you've gotten nothing to do but lie in bed in the dark,
the chances are you're going to sleep for longer. And we override each and every day on natural biology by having access to light after dusk and no light after dusk is normal. We would never see substantial amounts of light after dusk with a natural light dark cycle. So all of it is changing our biology. And in fact what's happened is all of us are shifted later than
we should be. We all go to bed too late based on the natural rhythms, and we all probably sleep less than we would have done in the past, at least based on that natural cycle.
So bi phasic sleeping was likely the natural result of the day night cycle in a world with little or no human made light sources. And as we evolved and built electric light, and we began using light sources like our smartphones, we fundamentally changed our day night cycle. I guess that really shows just how incredibly impactful perceptions of
light and dark are on our brains. But I am curious, are there other aspects of our biology that can be disrupted by these types of extreme day night cycles.
Yes, so the Cicadian clock, the twenty four hour body clock, controls much more than sleep and so we know that the clock will control many hormones. We've mentioned melatonin, Cortisol is another strongly circadian hormone. But the patterns of your performance, your mood, your immune function, reproductive function, metabolism, both glucose and lipid metabolism, bone metabolism, many of these body systems are controlled by your cicadian clock in the brain and
also cicadian clocks that we have in the periphery. And so if you have disruption of the clock, mainly through a change in light dark cycles, then all the other body systems that are controlled by the clock will also be disrupted. And so if we use shift workers as an example of cicadian disruption, we find that shift workers have a much higher risk of things like heart disease, diabet eat is depression, some cancers because of these different
body systems that are interrupted. When we try and reverse our cycle, then stay awake at night and sleep in the day the many shift workers do. Now, if we're thinking of an environment where the environment is twenty four hours of light, remember again, when you go to sleep, you close your eyes and create a light dark cycle, so there won't necessarily be much in the way of
circadian disruption if you keep a stable sleep pattern. So if you are in Alaska and you go to bed at the same time every night and turn the lights off, close your eyes, put on an eyemask, and then wake up at the same time in the morning, that will provide the signal to the clock to keep your rhythms properly synchronized. The other thing that people do experience, though with twenty four hours sunlight is an activation. Light, as well as shifting the clock, can also be a stimulant.
It stimulates a brain, it makes you more alert, and so sometimes people will report in the summer where they have these very long days feeling very active, not needing much sleep, having quite a good mood. And then when we have less of that light, we may not feel as happy or have as much alertness. So there's two effects of light. If you like, light synchronizes the clock, but it also helps maintain your alertness level.
The mechanisms behind how light and darkness affects sleep are fascinating. It's the retina that sends signals to the brain to release hormones and melotonin. I wanted to get Steven's advice on how to use this knowledge to our advantage in getting the best sleep possible. So I asked him, what are some things we can do to improve our own sleep, whether we live in the Arctic Circle or in the continental the United States or anywhere else.
So I think again, the key is light, and I keep going back to light. But it's such a powerful biological impact on our sleep. Cadian rhythms, your melotonin rhythm, your natural melotonin rhythm comes up at about two to three hours before sleep. And so if that melotonin rhythm is the signal of darkness to the brain, having as much darkness as you can two to three hours before you go to bed is going to preserve that signal.
You do that every day, you'll start to shift your body clock a little bit earlier, which means you'll fall asleep a little bit quicker, you'll have better quality sleep, you'll sleep for longer. Doing something relaxing is of course very good to help calm the brain down, but it needs to be something which doesn't involve much light. If you're going to read, read a real book with a dim bedside lamp. Don't read from an iPad, don't read from a phone, don't read from a laptop, because that
light is alerting you. People find that relaxation techniques meditation, particularly yoga, can be helpful for sleep, but again they need to be in a dim environment if possible, a warm bath is helpful. Need to lose heat in order to fall asleep, and so warm bath or a shower again without much light, it would be helpful. Take that time out to have that little bit of time for yourself. Those sorts of things will help you fall asleep.
That's all for this episode. Join me again next week when we learn about the sleeping habits of the people who studies sleep itself. We want to hear from you. Leave a rating a review for our show on your podcast player of choice. You can find me on Twitter at Anahad O'Connor. Until next time, Hoping you're living your best while sleeping your best. Chasing Sleep is a production of iHeartRadio in partnership with Mattress Firm. Our executive producer
is Molly Sosha. Our EP of post is James Foster. Our supervising producer is Keia Swinton. Our producer is Sierra Kaiser. This show is hosted by me Anahad O'Connor.