Supercharge Your Back Pain Relief In Truro – it’s all about your circadian rhythm

That’s right - your body being out of sync is hampering your recovery from low back pain or sciatica.

But it can be fixed and I will show you how I approach back pain relief in Truro with my patients as a physio at Tide Physiotherapy and Health.

Let me explain what your circadian rhythm is and why it matters for your recovery from back pain.

The circadian rhythm is the 24-hour cycle that the body goes through each day and revolves around the earth’s natural day-night light cycle, also called a diurnal rhythm.

Early morning sunlight and light throughout the day activates certain genes as the light particles are picked up by cells in the eyes which relay these signals to the master clock in the brain, known as the suprachiasmatic nucleus (Roennberg et al., 2016).

This clock influences all the different systems and functions in the body from our immune system, hormones, nervous system, liver, kidneys, gut etc (Roennberg et al., 2016).

The master clock (SCN) then communicates with peripheral clocks in our different organs, like our muscles, liver, kidney and heart – the peripheral clocks can run at a different time to the master clock as their zeitgebers are feeding (Roennberg et al., 2016) although in a balances system, the master and peripheral clocks sync to the same rhythm.

Education: Zeitgebers are natural environmental cycles / rhythms that the body learns to set its pace to. Natural light is the main one and most has been the most consistent one over the course of our evolutionary history. But feeding bheaviour is also one that entrains the peripheral clocks, and to a lesser extent, movement and activity behaviour.

Our circadian clocks support fitness and health in a rhythmic environment, which is only possible if they synchronise relative to the rhythmic environment.

This phase of entrainment can show variations, which are often referred to as “chronotypes,” within a species where people can be early risers (‘Larks’) or late workers (‘Owls’).

But before you go, ‘oh but I have always gone to bed late because I am a night owl and that’s how my genetics are…’ camping studies, which involve the elimination of phones and artificial light at night and early morning sunlight, show a consistent return to near-normal of the late chronotype (Roenneberg et al., 2022).

This suggests people who are ‘owls’ have chronic circadian dysregulation as opposed to genetic variation.

How modern life screws our circadian rhythm.

Modern life seems to have lost its rhythmicity.

Food and light are now available 24-hours-a-day. You wake up in the middle of the night needing a wee? The light goes on at a flick of the switch.

Hungry after the 10pm news? The fridge is only a 2 metre walk from the sofa… There is not natural fasting periods from food anymore, nor any complete darkness once dusk has been and gone. Our bodies did not evolve to deal with this constant access to natures’ zeitgebers.

The advent of regular shift work has begun to shed light on the widespread health effects of circadian disruption on human health.

More recently there have been attempts to define circadian health, suggesting it is “the condition in which circadian clocks are allowed to stably entrain to zeitgebers and thereby establish an appropriate, stable phase relationship to its cyclic environment” (Roenneberg et al., 2022). In many ways good circadian health, us synonymous with good general health – given the two are inextricably entwined.

Considering the above, it is likely that many of us are choosing convenience in light, food and indoor activities at the expense of our circadian health.

If you have low back pain, this is making your pain worse, hampering your recovery and makes future pain episodes more likely.

Book you physio assessment now and let me help you find your rhythm and recover from low back pain.

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References

Roenneberg, T., & Merrow, M. (2016). The circadian clock and human health. Current biology, 26(10), R432-R443.

Roenneberg, T., Foster, R. G., & Klerman, E. B. (2022). The circadian system, sleep, and the health/disease balance: a conceptual review. Journal of sleep research, 31(4), e13621.