Many people associate the rhythm with a waltz. 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 repeating processes in living matter. Have they always been? Who invented them? How are they related and what can they influence? Why do they need nature at all? Maybe the rhythms of life only interfere, creating unnecessary frames and preventing them from developing freely? Let's try to figure it out.
Where did biorhythms come from?
This question is in tune with the question of how our world came about. The answer may be this: nature itself created biorhythms. Think about it: in it all natural processes, regardless of their scale, are cyclical. Some stars are born periodically and others die, activity on the Sun rises and falls, year after year, one season gives way to another, morning follows day, then evening, night, and then again morning. These are all known to us rhythms of life, commensurate with which there is life on Earth, and the Earth itself too. Submitting to the biorhythms created by nature, people, animals, birds, plants, amoeba and ciliates-shoes live, even the cells of which we all consist. Engaged in the study of the conditions of occurrence, the nature and importance of biorhythms for all living things on the planet is a very interesting science of biorhythmology. It is a separate branch of another science - chronobiology, which studies not only the rhythmic processes in living organisms, but also their relationship with the rhythms of the Sun, Moon, and other planets.
Why are biorhythms needed?
The essence of biorhythms is the stability of the occurrence of phenomena or processes. Stability, in turn, helps adapt living organisms in the environment, develop their own life programs that allow them to give healthy 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 colors to open at certain hours. Based on this phenomenon, Karl Linney even created the world's first floral watch without hands and dial. Flowers showed time in them. As it turned out, this feature is associated with pollination.
Each flower that opens by the hour has its own specific pollinator, and it is for him that it releases nectar at the appointed hour. The insect seems to know (thanks to the biorhythms prevailing in its body) when and where it needs to go for food. As a result, the flower does not spend energy on producing nectar when there is no consumer for it, and the insect on unnecessary searches for the right food.
What other examples of biorhythm utility are there? Seasonal migrations of birds, fish migrations for spawning, the search for a sexual partner in a certain period in order to be able to give birth to and raise offspring.
The importance of biorhythms for humans
There are dozens of examples of wise laws between biorhythms and the existence of living organisms. So, the correct rhythm of a person’s life obeys the unloved by many daily routines. Some of us hate to eat or go to bed during strictly defined hours, but our bodies are much better if we keep cycling. For example, the stomach, accustomed to the food intake schedule, will be producing 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 to slow down the work of many systems during such hours and restore the expended forces. Knocking the body off the schedule, you can provoke unpleasant conditions and earn serious illnesses, from a bad mood to a headache, from a nervous breakdown to heart failure. The simplest example of this is the feeling of weakness in the whole 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 - physiological rhythms of life of organisms and ecological. The physiological ones include cyclic reactions in the cells that make up the organs, heartbeat (pulse), and the breathing process. The length of physiological biorhythms is very small, only up to several minutes, and there are those that last only a fraction of a second. For each individual, they are their own, regardless of whether they belong to a population or from kinship. That is, even with twins they can be different. A characteristic feature of physiological biorhythms is their high dependence on a number of factors. Environmental phenomena, the emotional and psychological state of the individual, disease, any little thing can cause the failure of one or several physiological biorhythms.
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! Environmental biorhythms exist on their own and depend only on very large-scale phenomena. For example, it is believed that once the day was shorter because the Earth rotated faster. The stability of ecological biorhythms (day lengths, seasons of the year, associated with this illumination, temperature, humidity and other environmental parameters) in the process of evolution is fixed in the genes of all living organisms, including humans. If we artificially create a new rhythm of life, for example, interchanging places day and night, organisms are not reconstructed immediately. This is confirmed by experiments with flowers, which for a long time were placed in pitch darkness. 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 pathologically affects life functions. For example, many people with a clock change to summer and winter time have problems with pressure, nerves, and heart.
Another classification
The German doctor and physiologist J. Aschoff proposed to separate the rhythms of life, focusing on the following criteria:
- temporal characteristics, for example periods;
- biological structures (in living organisms this is a population);
- rhythm functions, such as ovulation;
- a kind of process that generates a specific rhythm.
Following this classification, biorhythms are distinguished:
- infraradian (lasting more than a day, for example, winter hibernation of some animals, menstrual cycle);
- lunar (phases of the moon, very affecting 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 (lasting about a day). As it turned out, the period of circadian rhythms is not associated with external conditions and is genetically embedded in living organisms, that is, it is congenital. Circadian rhythms include the daily content of plasma, glucose or potassium in the blood of living creatures, the activity of growth hormones, the functions of hundreds of substances in tissues (in humans and animals - in urine, in saliva, in sweat, in plants - in leaves, stems, flowers) . It is on the basis of circadian rhythms that herbalists are advised to harvest a particular plant at strictly defined hours. We humans have identified more than 500 processes with circadian dynamics.
Chronomedicine
This is the name of the new field in medicine, which pays close attention to circadian biorhythms. There are already dozens of discoveries in chronomedicine. It is established that many pathological conditions of a person are in a strictly defined rhythm. For example, strokes and heart attacks occur more often in the morning, from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m., and from 9 p.m. to 12 p.m. their occurrence is minimal, the pain is more annoying from 3 a.m. to 8 a.m., hepatic colic more actively cause suffering at about one in the morning, and hypertensive the crisis is stronger at midnight.
On the basis of discoveries in chronomedicine, chronotherapy arose that was developing drug regimens during periods of their maximum effect on the diseased organ. For example, the duration 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 emerged towards the division of people according to their chronotypes into owls, larks and pigeons. Owls with a constant rhythm of life, not artificially changed, as a rule, they themselves wake up at around 11 a.m. Their activity begins to appear from 2 in the afternoon, at night they can easily stay awake almost until the morning.
Larks easily get up without a wake at 6 in the morning. However, they feel great. Their activity is noticeable somewhere until one in the afternoon, then larks need rest, after which they again are able to do business until about 6-7 pm. Forced wakefulness after 9-10 o’clock in the evening, these people suffer with difficulty.
Pigeons are an intermediate chronotype. They easily wake up a little later than the larks and a little earlier than owls, they can actively do business all day, but by about 11 in the evening they should go to bed.
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 company will suffer losses due to the poor working ability of such workers. Therefore, many managers try to set work schedules according to biorhythms of workers.
We and modernity
Our great-great-grandfathers lived more measuredly. For hours they served as sunrise and sunset, the calendar - seasonal natural processes. The modern rhythm of life dictates to us completely different conditions, regardless of our chronotype. Technical progress, as you know, not standing still, constantly changes many processes to which our body barely manages to adapt. Hundreds of drugs are also being created that significantly affect the biorhythms of living organisms, for example, the timing of fruit ripening, and the number of individuals in populations. Moreover, we are trying to correct the biorhythms of the Earth itself and even other planets, conducting experiments with magnetic fields, changing the climate as we like. This leads to chaos in our biorhythms that has formed over the years. Science is still looking for answers, how all this will affect the future of mankind.
Raging rhythm of life
If the effect of changes in biorhythms in general on civilization is still being studied, then the effect of these changes on a specific person is already more or less clear. Today's life is such that dozens of things must be done in order to be successful and to realize your projects.
The modern man is not even dependent, but in the bondage of his daily plans and responsibilities, especially women. They need to be able to allocate time for family, home, work, study, for their health and self-improvement, and so on, although they have the same 24 hours a day. Many of us live in fear that if they do not have time, others will take their place, and they will be left overboard. So they set themselves a frantic pace of life, when you have to do a lot on the go, fly, run. This does not lead to success, but to depression, nervous breakdowns, stress, diseases of the internal organs. In the frantic pace of life, many simply do not feel pleasure from it, do not receive joy.
In some countries, an alternative to the crazy race for happiness is the new Slow Life movement, whose supporters try to get joy not from an endless string of affairs and events, but from living with each of them with maximum pleasure. For example, they like to just walk along the street, just look at flowers or listen to birdsong. They are sure that the fast pace of life is in no way connected with happiness, despite the fact that it helps to get more material wealth and to climb higher through the ranks.
Biorhythm Pseudotheories
Such an important phenomenon as biorhythms have long been interested in predictors and oracles. Creating their theories and systems, they try to connect the life of every person and his future with numerology, planetary movements, various signs. At the end of the last century, the theory of "three rhythms" soared into popularity. For every person, the trigger is supposedly a moment of birth. In this case, 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. Supporters of the theory drew three sinusoids of these rhythms superimposed on one grid of coordinates. Moreover, the days on which the intersection of two or three sinusoids occurred, the so-called zero zones, were considered very unfavorable. Experimental studies have completely refuted this theory, proving that in people periods of biorhythms of their activity can be very different.