Page 45 - Biblical Counseling II

4. Sleep experts recommend treating insomnia with an occasional sleeping pill.
5. Some people dream every night; others seldom dream.

All of these statements are FALSE! If we were in class, we would discuss why. On your own, you may research
them to find out the answers if there are statements you believe are true!

How do your biological rhythms influence our daily functioning and our sleep and dreams?
Like the ocean, life has its rhythmic tides. Over time periods, our bodies change, and with them, our minds.
Let’s look more closely at two of those biological rhythms – our 24-hr biological clock and our 90-minute
sleep cycle (Myers, 2012).

Circadian Rhythm
The rhythm of the day parallels
the rhythm of life – from our
waking at a new day’s birth to
our nightly return to sleep. Our
bodies roughly synchronize
with the 24-hour cycle of day
and night through a biological
clock called the circadian
rhythm. Body temperature
rises as morning approaches,
peaks during the day, dips for a
time in early afternoon (when
many people take rests), and
then begins to drop again
before we go to sleep. Thinking
is sharpest and memory most accurate when we are at our daily peak in circadian arousal. Pulling an all-
nighter, we may feel most unclear about 4:00 A.M., and then we get a second wind after our normal wake-up
time arrives (Myers, 2012).

Bright light in the morning tweaks the circadian clock by activating light-sensitive retinal proteins. These
proteins control the circadian clock by triggering signals to the brain’s suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) – a pair
of grain-of-rice-sized, 20,000-cell clusters in the hypothalamus. The SCN does its job in part by causing the
brain’s pineal gland to decrease its production of the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin in the morning or
increase it in the evening (Myers, 2012.

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