Rhythm is often associated with the w altz. And indeed, his melody is a harmonious series of sounds set in a certain order. But the essence of rhythm is much broader than music. These are sunrises and sunsets, winters and springs, solar flares and magnetic storms - any phenomenon and any process that repeats periodically. The rhythms of life, or, as they say, biorhythms, are recurring processes in living matter. Have they always been? Who invented them? How are they related to each other and what can they influence? Why do they need nature at all? Maybe the rhythms of life only get in the way, creating unnecessary boundaries and not allowing you to develop freely? Let's try to figure it out.
Where did biorhythms come from?
This question is consonant with the question of how our world came into being. The answer may be this: biorhythms were created by nature itself. Think about it: in it all natural processes, regardless of their scale, are cyclical. Periodically, some stars are born and others die, on the Sun increases andactivity falls, year after year one season is replaced by another, morning is followed by day, then evening, night, and then morning again. These are the rhythms of life known to all of us, in proportion to which there is life on Earth, and the Earth itself too. Obeying the biorhythms created by nature, people, animals, birds, plants, amoebas and ciliates-shoes live, even the cells of which we all consist. Engaged in the study of the conditions for the emergence, nature and significance of biorhythms for all living beings of the planet, a very interesting science is biorhythmology. It is a separate branch of another science - chronobiology, which studies not only the rhythmic processes in living organisms, but also their connection with the rhythms of the Sun, Moon, and other planets.
Why do we need biorhythms?
The essence of biorhythms is in the stability of the flow of phenomena or processes. Stability, in turn, helps living organisms adapt to the environment, develop their own life programs that allow them to give he althy offspring and continue their kind. It turns out that the rhythms of life are the mechanism by which life on the planet exists and develops. An example of this is the ability of many flowers to open at certain hours. Based on this phenomenon, Carl Linnaeus even created the world's first flower clock without hands and a dial. Flowers showed time in them. As it turned out, this feature is associated with pollination.
Each flower, opening by the hour, has its own specific pollinator, and it is for him that at the appointed hour it releases nectar. The insect, as it were, knows (thanks to the prevailing and in itsbody biorhythms), when and where he needs to go for food. As a result, the flower does not waste energy on the production of nectar when there is no consumer for it, and the insect does not waste energy on unnecessary searches for the right food.
What other examples of the usefulness of biorhythms are there? Seasonal flights of birds, migration of fish for spawning, search for a sexual partner in a certain period in order to have time to give birth and raise offspring.
The importance of biorhythms for humans
There are dozens of examples of wise patterns between biorhythms and the existence of living organisms. So, the correct rhythm of a person's life is subject to the daily routine, unloved by many. Some of us hate to eat or go to bed at fixed hours, and our bodies are much better off if we follow the cycle. For example, the stomach, having got used to the schedule of food intake, will produce gastric juice by this time, which will begin to digest food, and not the walls of the stomach itself, rewarding us with an ulcer. The same applies to rest. If you do it at about the same time, the body will develop a tendency at such hours to slow down the work of many systems and restore the expended forces. Knocking down the body from the schedule, you can provoke unpleasant conditions and earn serious diseases, from bad mood to headache, from a nervous breakdown to heart failure. The simplest example of this is the feeling of weakness throughout the body that occurs after a sleepless night.
Physiological biorhythms
There are so many rhythms of life that they decided to systematize,dividing into two main categories - the physiological rhythms of the life of organisms and environmental. Physiological include cyclic reactions in the cells that make up organs, the heartbeat (pulse), and the process of breathing. The length of physiological biorhythms is very small, only up to a few minutes, and there are those that last only a fraction of a second. For each individual, they are their own, regardless of belonging to a population or family ties. That is, even twins can be different. A characteristic feature of physiological biorhythms is their high dependence on a number of factors. Phenomena in the environment, the emotional and psychological state of the individual, diseases, any little thing can cause a failure of one or several physiological biorhythms at once.
Ecological biorhythms
This category includes rhythms that have the duration of natural cyclic processes, so they can be both short and long. For example, a day lasts 24 hours, and the period of solar activity is extended by 11 years! Ecological biorhythms exist on their own and depend only on very large-scale phenomena. For example, there is an opinion that once the day was shorter because the Earth rotated faster. The stability of ecological biorhythms (the length of the day, the seasons of the year, associated illumination, temperature, humidity and other environmental parameters) in the process of evolution was fixed in the genes of all living organisms, including humans. If you artificially create a new rhythm of life, for example, swapday and night, organisms are rebuilt far from immediately. This is confirmed by experiments with flowers that were placed in pitch darkness for a long time. For some time they, not seeing the light, continued to open in the morning and close in the evening. It has been experimentally proved that the change of biorhythms has a pathological effect on vital functions. For example, many people with daylight saving time have problems with pressure, nerves, heart.
Another classification
German doctor and physiologist J. Aschoff proposed to divide the rhythms of life, focusing on the following criteria:
- time characteristics, for example periods;
- biological structures (in living organisms this is a population);
- rhythm functions, such as ovulation;
- kind of process that generates a specific rhythm.
Following this classification, biorhythms are distinguished:
- infradian (lasts more than a day, for example hibernation of some animals, menstrual cycle);
- lunar (moon phases that greatly affect all living things, for example, with a new moon, the number of heart attacks, crimes, car accidents increases);
- ultradian (lasts less than a day, for example, concentration of attention, drowsiness);
- circadian (about a day long). As it turned out, the period of circadian rhythms is not associated with external conditions and is genetically laid down in living organisms, that is, it is innate. Circadian rhythms include the daily content of plasma, glucose or potassium in the blood of living beings, the activity of growth hormones, the functions of hundreds of substances in tissues(in humans and animals - in urine, saliva, sweat, in plants - in leaves, stems, flowers). It is on the basis of circadian rhythms that herbalists advise harvesting a particular plant at strictly defined hours. We humans have over 500 processes with circadian dynamics identified.
Chronomedicine
This is the name of a new field in medicine that pays close attention to circadian biorhythms. There are already dozens of discoveries in chronomedicine. It has been established that many pathological conditions of a person are in a strictly defined rhythm. For example, strokes and heart attacks are more common in the morning, from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m., and from 9 p.m. to 12 a.m. their occurrence is minimal, the pain is more annoying from 3 a.m. to 8 a.m., hepatic colic more actively causes suffering at about one a.m., and hypertensive the crisis is stronger around midnight.
On the basis of discoveries in chronomedicine, chronotherapy arose, which develops schemes for taking drugs during periods of their maximum impact on a diseased organ. For example, the duration of the work of antihistamines drunk in the morning lasts almost 17 hours, and taken in the evening - only 9 hours. It is logical that diagnoses are made in a new way with the help of chronodiagnostics.
Biorhythms and chronotypes
Thanks to the efforts of chronomedics, a more serious attitude has appeared to the division of people according to their chronotypes into owls, larks and pigeons. Owls, with a constant rhythm of life that is not artificially changed, as a rule, wake up themselves around 11 am. Their activity begins to appear from2 pm, at night they can easily stay awake until almost morning.
Larks easily wake up at 6 am. At the same time, they feel great. Their activity is noticeable somewhere up to one in the afternoon, then the larks need rest, after which they are again able to do business until about 6-7 pm. Forced wakefulness after 9-10 pm is difficult for these people to endure.
Pigeons are an intermediate chronotype. They easily wake up a little later than larks and a little earlier than owls, they can be actively engaged in business all day, but they should go to bed already around 11 pm.
If owls are forced to work from dawn, and larks are identified on the night shift, these people will begin to get seriously ill, and the enterprise will suffer losses due to the poor working capacity of such workers. Therefore, many managers try to set work schedules according to the biorhythms of workers.
We and modernity
Our great-great-grandfathers lived more measuredly. Sunrise and sunset served as clocks, seasonal natural processes served as calendars. The modern rhythm of life dictates completely different conditions to us, regardless of our chronotype. Technological progress, as you know, is not standing still, constantly changing many processes to which our body barely has time to adapt. Also, hundreds of drugs are being created that significantly affect the biorhythms of living organisms, for example, the timing of fruit ripening, the number of individuals in populations. Moreover, we are trying to correct the biorhythms of the Earth itself and even other planets by experimenting withmagnetic fields, changing the climate as we please. This leads to the fact that chaos arises in our biorhythms formed over the years. Science is still looking for answers on how all this will affect the future of humanity.
Crazy pace of life
If the impact of changes in biorhythms in general on civilization is still being studied, then the impact of these changes on a particular person is already more or less clear. The current life is such that you need to manage to do dozens of things in order to be successful and implement your projects.
Modern man is not even dependent, but in bondage to his daily plans and responsibilities, especially women. They need to be able to allocate time for family, home, work, study, their he alth and self-improvement, and so on, although they still have the same 24 hours in a day. Many of us live in fear that if they fail, others will take their place and they will be left out. So they set themselves a frantic pace of life, when they have to do a lot on the go, fly, run. This does not lead to success, but to depression, nervous breakdowns, stress, diseases of internal organs. In the frantic pace of life, many simply do not feel pleasure from it, do not get joy.
In some countries, an alternative to the crazy race for happiness has become the new Slow Life movement, whose supporters try to get joy not from an endless string of deeds and events, but from living each of them with maximum pleasure. For example, they like to just walk down the street, just look at the flowers or listen to the birds singing. They are sure,the fast pace of life has nothing to do with happiness, despite the fact that it helps to get more material we alth and climb higher through the ranks.
Pseudotheories about biorhythm
Soothsayers and oracles have long been interested in such an important phenomenon as biorhythms. Creating their theories and systems, they try to connect the life of every person and his future with numerology, the movement of the planets, and various signs. At the end of the last century, the theory of "three rhythms" soared to the peak of popularity. For each person, the moment of birth is allegedly the trigger mechanism. At the same time, physiological, emotional and intellectual rhythms of life arise, which have their peaks of activity and decline. Their periods were 23, 28, and 33 days, respectively. Proponents of the theory drew three sinusoids of these rhythms superimposed on one grid of coordinates. At the same time, the days on which the intersection of two or three sinusoids fell, the so-called zero zones, were considered very unfavorable. Experimental studies completely refuted this theory, proving that people have very different periods of biorhythms of their activity.
