to schedule some sort of a “date night” once a week, although the kids and their general lack of energy and enthusiasm often undermined that plan. Struggling to meet everyday demands, Kim and her husband didn’t connect deeply with each other much. Their sex life was mediocre, mostly because neither of them felt particularly energetic in the evening once the kids had finally settled into bed, and because they were essentially in survival mode much of the time.
Their relationship with the kids, like their relationship with each other, was not terrible, but not great, either. They faithfully attended parent-teacher conferences and looked after their kids’ academic needs and social lives, but they weren’t truly connecting. Case in point: Kim and her husband made it a priority to eat dinner most nights together as a family, but found it was such a battle to get the kids off their electronic devices that they eventually abandoned their no devices at dinner policy altogether. It just wasn’t worth the arguments and stress it caused everyone.
Physically, Kim wasn’t in terrible shape, but she’d lost the healthy, glowing “athlete’s body” she had maintained earlier in life. As she told me, she suffered from “the usual” back and knee aches, tension headaches, and her main concern, crashing energy levels. She felt physically and emotionally “fragile,” she said, and believed the answer (and her reason for seeking my advice) was to go to the gym three times per week and start exercising. She imagined doing some cardio on the bike and treadmill. When I inquired as to when she might fit this in, she said she thought she could do it over the winter months, after 8:30 p.m., once the kids were settled in bed. Kim was looking for help, but her perceptions about where to begin shifting were mismatched to what was actually causing her deteriorating physical and mental health. She was confused and discouraged but still trying to make things better, hence her consultation with me.
Does Kim’s story sound familiar? It should. Although “Kim” isn’t a real person, her story echoes hundreds of others I’ve heard throughout my years of coaching. Like her, most of us feel less healthy than we’d like—tired, overwhelmed, distracted, “fragile,” mired in uninspiring relationships. We want to fix things, so we try diets and exercise regimens and meditation, but nothing seems to work—or at least, not for very long, and not in the comprehensive way that we were hoping for.
Kim’s is the all-too-common story of the daily grind of modern life—where every day of the year, for years on end, is virtually the same. Modern life, in modern consumer cultures at least, has flattened out, averaged, or disregarded many of the oscillations, rhythms, and cycles of the natural world (and our evolutionary past). Sunrise might vary by three or more hours between summer and winter solstices, but your alarm still goes off at 5:15 every morning as regularly as clockwork. Seasonal temperature variations have been replaced with climate control systems in our homes, cars, and workplaces. No matter where you are, or what season you are in, it is always 65 to 72°F (18 to 22°C). If you fancy mangoes in the midst of winter, no problem. Pre-ripened picking, packing, and global shipping can bring you any tropical fruit your sweet tastes desire, even when it is literally freezing outside. And you can go to your gym and run on the treadmill under fluorescent lights at nearly any time of the day or night.
It feels great to have the food we like continuously available and to not experience temperature extremes, but this modern “flattening” also has a serious downside. As with Kim, it’s left us “stuck” in a mix of incongruent health behavior, like maintaining hectic summer-style schedules in the depths of winter. The good news is, our natural rhythms haven’t been lost. They’re still there, temporarily buried but surprisingly accessible, waiting to be rediscovered and to direct you toward a more natural and effortless way of being in the world.
Our Bodies, Our Rhythms
Let’s say I plucked you and a group of your closest friends and loved ones out of our standardized, modern existence and dropped you all on a Jurassic Park–style island (we’ll say sans dinosaurs for now). You have no access to any of life’s modern conveniences, and in particular, no access to clocks, watches, calendars, or any other modern way of marking time. How would you keep track of the passing days?
Chances are, within a very short period of time—quite literally, hours—you would hook back into one of life’s many natural rhythms. In the absence of bright lights, Netflix, smartphones, and so on, you and your island clan would likely head to bed not long after sundown, with nothing to wind you up except for the occasional brightness of a full moon. You would quickly learn to mark the progression of the days via the sun’s rising and setting. You might track the progression of the year by following the sun’s arc in the sky—low in winter, high in summer. In this way, you would soon be able to mark the solstices—the point at which the sun changes its trajectory and the days become shorter or longer, cooler or warmer. Approximately halfway between the solstices, you’d have an equinox, where day and night are roughly equal in length. You would also track the months and progression of the year via the repeating phases of the moon—the lunar cycles. You might notice changes in plant life, flowers and fruit, weather patterns, and animal behaviors as indications of changes in the seasons. The longer you remained isolated from modernity, the more likely you would be in tune with, and live by, such rhythms.
Within yourself, in the absence of caffeine, sugar, alcohol, artificial light, and all the other common stimulants we use to get through life, you might begin to notice a certain rhythmicity to your own energy levels. You might become spontaneously active and exploratory in the early part of the day but seek a comfortable spot to take a siesta in the early afternoon. You might perk up again in the late afternoon and into the early evening but find yourself wanting to head to sleep not that long after sundown, and certainly much earlier than you would in your modern, electronic home. Spring and summer might find you and your tribe using the longer day length and warmth to explore your surroundings further, attempting to learn what was over that mountain, or beyond the horizon. Autumn and winter might see you lingering a little closer to your base camp, hunkering down on the shorter, cooler days, and making the most of the bounty of resources you had stockpiled during the warmer months. Winter would mean less exploration and activity, and more recovery and planning ahead.
Year upon year, you’d see these rhythms organically ebb and flow, expand and contract. If you experienced your particular environment long enough, you might begin to notice rhythms in longer time frames, such as climate rhythms—how every five years or so, for example, it might become particularly wet or dry. Some plant or animal might become abundant or scarce on a rhythmic basis. Perhaps within your own lifetime, or across the generations, you would accumulate a store of such environmental knowledge and wisdom, and be capable of predicting the frequency of volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and other natural occurrences. These are just a few examples of some of the many rhythms, short and long, that exist in the natural world and that our ancestors (and thus our own genetic, social, and cultural heritage) would have had exposure to for countless generations. This accumulated wisdom depends on intergenerational respect and the recognition of the value of elders as guardians of invaluable information that cannot be neatly packaged into Wikipedia articles or tweets.
But of course, we don’t live in Jurassic Park—and we don’t need to in order to sense our natural patterns. Even in the pressure cooker of modern life, they peek through from time to time. When we get restful sleep at night, wake up energized, get into a groove sometime midmorning, and tap into our best productivity, we notice it. We might also notice energy fluctuations throughout the year. Some months we might have boundless energy, while in others we might feel quieter and more contemplative.
Taking such observations seriously and studying our bodily patterns, we find that we aren’t just peripherally bound to the ebb and flow of the natural world. Rather, those oscillations are inscribed into our very physiology. We can think of a biological rhythm as any cyclical change in the body’s chemistry and/or function. That broad definition includes everything from our daily sleep cycles, to the regulation of our body temperature, to the menstrual cycle. To use the technical lingo, these rhythms are endogenous—controlled
