As the number of remote workers increases due to the Korona-ka, the number of people who get sick due to physical and mental stress continues to increase. Professor Hideyuki Negoro, who conducts cutting-edge medical research and applies the knowledge gained there to medical examinations and treatments, says that "awareness" at the pre-illness stage is important.
What is the best way to improve your condition by changing your daily behavior before you get into a serious mental health problem? This is a partial excerpt and reconstruction from "Harvard & Sorbonne University Dr. Negoro's Teaching His Stress His Reset Breathing Technique".
■ Physical and mental stress accumulates due to changes in the work environment The
establishment of remote work has significantly changed the work environment and behavior, such as the reduction of contact with people in real life.
People who come to my outpatient department also said, "I always feel like I'm being chased by something, rather than making it easier to manage my time because I don't have to commute to work." On the other hand, people who said that they were rather irregular, such as skipping breakfast, increasing snacks, and having different meal times, and even "the time spent facing digital devices has increased significantly, and sleep time is getting behind. There are an increasing number of cases in which people are being accused of "being slipped in."
Each one seems to be trivial, but the accumulation of this small disturbance of life rhythm causes more damage than you can imagine. Even though he thinks he is adapting to the new environment, he is not physically and mentally aware.
Moreover, even if there are some problems, it cannot be said to be "ill", and in most cases, it is left unattended because there are no particular abnormalities in the medical examination.
"Social jet lag" is a particularly increasing cause of the malfunction. This is caused by the difference between the "timetable in the body" that is engraved at the genetic level by the biological clock and the actual behavior.
■ "Clock gene" that determines the optimal timetable
It is often said that regular life is the best for health, including early sleep and early wake-up, but this "regular timetable" is used for work and social reasons. It is not a social rule, but a "gene".
The human body is made up of about 60 trillion cells, and their cell nuclei contain 22 pairs of autosomal chromosomes and 2 sex chromosomes.
There are about 22,000 genes on the chromosome, and the "clock gene" among them determines the optimal timetable. There are more than 20 types of clock genes in human genes, and each clock gene is programmed to continue working inside the cell from birth to death and ticking the time in the body.
What's more, a study by a colleague and friend of Harvard Medical School, Professor Charles Sizingler, found that a person's biological clock keeps a rhythm of 24 hours and 11 minutes a day. There is a gap of 11 minutes in the first place.
The fact that every cell has a clock gene and determines the timetable means that the meaning of the timetable is so important to the human body. All activities in life such as "meal", "sleep", "exercise", and "work" have different effects, efficiency, and meaning depending on the time of day.
Also, when you want to eat a snack, if you eat it at 15:00 and at 21:00, even if you eat the same thing, it will be different whether you are likely to get body fat or not. A difference of only 6 hours makes a difference.
Of course, if it's only one day, it doesn't make much difference. When it becomes a habit and accumulates on a daily basis, problems arise. In this way, there is an optimal timetable for every action/activity.
Jet lag is a typical example of malfunctions caused by deviations in biological rhythms.
When jet lag occurs, I'm tired and want to sleep, but I can't sleep. Symptoms such as tiredness and heavy headache appear during the day. If you don't reset it well, many people may have trouble because the malfunctions will continue forever.
Jet lag does not only occur when moving to a country with a time difference, but it is similar to the behavior that ignores the rhythm of the body clock, such as unnecessary night owls and sleeping until noon on weekends. Symptoms will occur. This is "social jet lag."
It has been found that if chronic jet lag, which is out of rhythm in daily life, is left unattended, it affects cognitive function, stress hormones, genes, etc. which causes various diseases. Also, like the actual jet lag, once it becomes a social jet lag, it is not easy to restore it, and once the rhythm is disturbed, it is about the earliest to correct the one-hour disturbance. It is believed to take a day.
That is why, first of all, do not disturb the biological rhythm significantly.
It is important to frequently reset the disturbance of the biological clock while the deviation is small.
■ The most important time to reset
the body clock is the 11-minute shift in the morning and the shift in the body clock is due to lifestyle habits. The most effective timing for this reset is "morning".
The ideal sleep time is 7 hours, but if you apply it to a typical life pace, the best pattern is to go to bed from 11 to 12 o'clock in the evening and wake up from 6 to 7 o'clock.
Moreover, if the reset point is missed, the body clock will shift backward, so life will become more and more night-type, and the time to wake up will be delayed accordingly. It is natural to think of the physiological functions of humans and the mechanism of the biological clock that it is easy to keep early hours and it is difficult to get up early.
Even if you try to set a time and practice sleep and suddenly think "OK, let's go to bed early today", if you have the habit of staying up late, you will not be able to sleep so easily.
Even if you think "let's sleep", people cannot sleep only of their will.
In that case, even if you run out of sleep for about one night, try "getting up early" first. Getting up early for an hour or two more than usual is a quick way to correct the rhythm of your body clock.
It is impossible to sleep on your own initiative, but it is possible to wake up forcibly by waking up. If you get up and work anyway, it should be easier to go to bed early that night. For good health, it is often said that "early to bed and early to rise", but "early to bed and early to bed" is more correct. This is because it is easier to achieve the same purpose simply by starting from "wake up" instead of starting from "sleeping".
■ Take a long breath and refresh yourself with fresh morning air
Open the curtain and soak up the sun, then raise your hands and stretch out to take a deep breath slowly. In the morning, the whole muscle is stiff, but especially the large back muscles (latissimus dorsi and trapezius) tend to be stiff.
You can't open your chest wide as it is, so you can't breathe deeply. It is a simple act of taking a deep breath while stretching, but that alone stimulates the muscles moderately, increases blood flow, and makes it easier to breathe.
For deep breathing, inhale through your nose while inflating your abdomen, and exhale through your nose while inflating your abdomen. Inhale at 4 counts and exhale at 8 counts, which is twice the length of your inhaled breath.
By moving the diaphragm firmly from the morning, the production of serotonin, a neurotransmitter that stabilizes the mind, is promoted, the autonomic nerves are balanced, and the day can be started comfortably.
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