What are biological rhythms?

Today, scientists came to the conclusion that all processes in the body proceed naturally. Human biological rhythms are tied to various processes. Depending on this, there are a huge number. Some are caused by the alternation of day and night (repetitive periods of sleep and wakefulness), others correspond to the phase of the moon or the time of the year. The cyclicity (i.e., the period of time between repetitive steps) is determined by the periodicity of the factor causing the rhythm.

The constancy of the effect of repeated changes in the external environment causes a close correlation with the physiological processes of the organism. That is why biological rhythms persist even when the initiating and stimulating exogenous factor ceases to function. This cyclic state can take a long time. Many scientists believe that adaptation can lead to change and restructuring to new repetitions. There is a special mechanism that determines the regulation of rhythm and helps a person not only to feel (feel), but also to measure time intervals. This mechanism is called a biological clock.

Today, scientists believe that biological rhythms are peculiar not only to organisms, but also to individual cells and their groups. The most interesting are the rhythms with a periodicity of about a day. They are called circadian.

Circadian rhythms are characteristic not only for humans, but also for animals, plants, fungi and even microbes. The daily periodicity is characterized not only by the sleep-wake cycle, but also by other physiological changes. At the person not only a dream, but also many other functions are subordinated to a daily rhythm. This changes the level of blood pressure, body temperature, functional activity of certain organs.

The biological rhythm in the infant is practically absent and develops only by the fifteenth week of life. This is primarily due to the fact that the development of cyclic endogenous processes is facilitated by the rhythm of the processes of the external environment.

Rebuild the frequency of recurring processes within the body can be with prolonged exposure to changes in external rhythm. However, there are certain limits to such changes. So scientists have experimentally found out that a person from the perception of the day as 24 hours, can restructure on the perception of twenty-two to twenty-seven hours as a whole day, but no big changes were achieved.

Biological rhythms with greater frequency are the most difficult to observe. These recurring periods include moon and seasonal. At present, scientists have revealed an interesting feature - it turns out that the severity of rhythmic processes can be different for different people (more or less pronounced). That is why there is an opinion that some people influence the moon phase, but others do not.

Seasonality (or rhythmicity), caused by the change of the seasons (winter-summer), is characterized by appropriate changes in the physiological state of the human body. So in the summer (it is believed that due to the increased duration of daylight hours), all physiological processes (for example, metabolism) are activated and accelerated. In the winter period of the year (due to a shortened daylight hours), all metabolic processes slow down, the activity of the organs and systems of the whole organism decreases significantly.

Thus, biological rhythms play a huge role in the daily life of a person and cause a number of periodically recurring changes. Often, such features are also taken into account by medical workers. Most actively - dietitians, who take into account changes in metabolism in the development of individual treatment programs.