Hi
Your hormones have a schedule, but is yours in harmony with theirs?
Can you draw your energy rhythm across the day? It turns out that most of us don't need deep reflection to make a reasonable estimate. Most finches, which is most of us, draw something resembling this.
Would yours look similar?
The more specific energy types – cognitive, social, physical, etc – have rhythms that diverge from the simple peak, trough and rebound. The Body-clock Workbook explores this.
These more detailed rhythms are interesting and practical in how they can benefit the design of our days. Proactively, once we understand our energy highs and lows, we can schedule accordingly. And remedially, our elevated hunger today is probably due to last night's disrupted sleep, for example
The practical application, the mix of the rhythms of your day, is important, but you may be interested in going deeper into the composition. If the body-clock is the conductor or metronome, and the energy rhythms are the overall mix, what are the separate instruments that make up the music? They are the hormones. If you're raiding the fridge at 11 PM, it's not character failure; it's just ghrelin drunk-texting your willpower.
I made so many notes about hormones that I wondered if there was a whole workbook about them, but instead, I wrote an obscenely detailed blog about them – which came in at 15,000 words – so I edited it down, a lot. I did the overthinking, so you don't have to.
You don't need to read the whole thing; you can dive into the hormones you're interested in. I wish I were academically up to the task of writing about this with any rigour, but unfortunately, I'm not. All of this was pulled from research, and the references are included.
If you crave detail, the blog is deep enough to need a snorkel (and there is vast depth and detail beyond it). If you're just here for the punchlines, read on – and the TLDR is below.
- Cortisol: Wakes you up, wires you up, then scarpers faster than your morning motivation
- Melatonin: Turns the lights out in your brain long before you've finished scrolling
- Growth Hormone: Pulls the night shift so you don't wake up looking like a bag of spanners
- Leptin & Ghrelin: Together, they're the angel and devil on your shoulder at midnight snack time. Spoiler: the devil always wins if you didn't sleep
- Testosterone: Gives you swagger before breakfast and takes a nap by tea time
- Prolactin: Mainly running the dairy, but also influencing post-coital refactoring (TMI?)
- Thyroid: Runs your metabolism like a passive-aggressive office manager, quietly deciding whether you're chilly or lazy
- Insulin: Your pancreas on standby: one moment it's your best mate, next it's gossiping with your muffin top
TLDR
Just as you can draw your energy rhythm across the day without weeks of detailed analysis, you probably know the overarching story from the detail in the blog.
- If you want your body and brain to be on speaking terms, give them a rhythm, regular meals, sleep, daylight and a routine that doesn't resemble a mad board.
- If you've lost your rhythm, go back to maintenance – a good sleep pattern, food, daylight, exercise etc. Your hormones will forgive you. Eventually.
- Your hormones are basically running the show, and they are a powerful undercurrent in the elephant. Ignore them, and you'll end up with brain fog, snack attacks, and existential angst at 3 AM.
Full detail is a click away if you want to know exactly why your bowels are more punctual than you are.
Yours,
Bruce
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