Here’s a situation you’ve probably experienced at least once in your life:
You have a late night and decide to sleep in the next day. This is understandable, because you’re tired. Perhaps you think, “my body needs X hours of sleep, so I’ll sleep for X hours.”
The next thing you know, that one day of sleeping in cascades into a week or more where you’re off your schedule.
Two Types of Time
In life, we are beholden to two different types of time: cyclical time and clock time.
Cyclical Time
Cyclical time is the natural progression of time. It’s the time of seasons, cycles, and rhythm. This form of time is what governs the cadence of sunrises and sunsets, the lunar cycle, the ebb and flow of the tides, and the seasons of the year.
Cyclical time also governs our circadian and ultradian rhythms, which control the functions of the organs and systems in our bodies.
Clock Time
Clock time is the man-made time that gives us more linear structures and schedules. It’s how we schedule meetings, start times, flights, and trains.
Clock time gets us on the same page when we’re trying to meet up with friends, coordinate a call between participants in different parts of the world, or provide clarity on the beginning or ending of an activity.
Clock time is a map: you can orient to time the way you orient to physical space.
Even events that happen on cyclical time can be mapped to clock time. We know precisely when planets will enter signs of the zodiac or meet up with other planets. We can chart the exact time of the peak tides. We know what time the sun rises and sets each day, and when each phase of the moon occurs.
Read: 7 Ways to Think About Time
We Get Out of Rhythm When We Forget Cyclical Time
We need both types of time to function in world.
The problem is that in a culture of clock time we often forget about cyclical time — especially when it comes to the body.
Your body doesn’t know what time it is. It knows the cycles of days and months: light and darkness, monthly flows and hormonal shifts.
When we focus on clock time over cyclical time, we lose our rhythm.
This is why that one day of sleeping in can spiral into getting out of rhythm.
Going back to the example of sleeping in. When you do this, you disrupt your body’s cyclical time. That one day of sleeping in can throw your circadian and ultradian rhythms off for several days.
Sometimes getting out of rhythm is unavoidable. When that happens, we want to restore our rhythm as quickly as possible.
We’ll cover that in part 2.
[…] It’s the nature of life that we inevitably fall out of rhythm. […]