Your mother gave you your circadian rhythm

Newborn vs adult rhythms, the circadian programming of disease, and hope for a brighter future for all ages.

Did you know your circadian rhythm is first set by your mother? If your mother and grandmother lived in a healthy light environment, great!

If they had a poor light environment, and if you haven't done the work to reset your rhythm, chances are, you may be carrying those unhealthy patterns today.

We are learning more and more about health is shared in family lineages. For example, the egg that eventually became YOU was created inside your mother while she was still in the womb.

Early life (from conception through 2 or 3 years), is when our circadian patterns are first set¹.

At birth, we don't have the ability to synthesize significant amounts of the circadian hormone melatonin on our own. Instead, babies get melatonin from breastmilk—particularly from nighttime feeds because melatonin content in breastmilk peaks in the wee hours of the night². They also get melatonin’s daytime counterpart, cortisol through breastmilk.

This means formula-fed infants are missing out on the melatonin/cortisol oscillation for the beginning of life. (At present, melatonin is not added to infant formula.) With widespread use of artificial light at night, many of today’s mamas are also deficient in melatonin³, leading to melatonin-deficient breastmilk and an overabundance of cortisol—essentially, circadian disruption from the very beginning of life.

Chronodisruption during pregnancy programs the fetus, and then these patterns tend to carry on into childhood and adulthood—unless a person learns and begins to live differently.

Circadian entropy during pregnancy and early childhood is associated with lifelong mental and physical health outcomes⁴,⁵. Countless people today suffer from illnesses that may have their roots in early circadian programming.

Signs your mother may have been experiencing disruption include her having had adverse birth outcomes, insomnia or other sleep disorders, and/or hormone-driven cancer.

The good news is if these conditions have their roots in the circadian rhythm, the rhythm can be healed.

To me, this information has huge implications for today's families. What if we could get ahead of all these health troubles for our children? Wouldn't we do whatever it took?

As care providers, there are specific steps we can encourage families to take in order to set their course for circadian resilience.

How to set baby’s circadian rhythms after birth:

Spending all day inside of a closed house under artificial light makes it take longer for newborn rhythms to emerge.

1. Daily, consistent solar exposure in safe doses (be mindful when the UV index is higher than 3 and there is a possiblity of sunburn). The app Dminder can be useful for tracking this.

   1. Sunlight is the primary driver of wakefulness. Increasing a newborn’s daytime wakefulness is the most direct means to entrainment⁶. There is no risk of sunburn at sunrise or sunset.

2. Breastfeed, or pump. If pumping, label and give day milk in the day and night milk at night.

   1. Breastmilk contains hormones that fluctuate across the day. It gives cortisol and wakefulness during the day, and sleepy melatonin at night. Getting the right milk at the right time of day ensures baby’s hormonal signals from the milk match the other cues.

3. Minimize artificial light at night (zero with a blue spike—halogen, fluorescent, “white” LEDs).

   1. Artificial light contains unbalanced frequencies that disrupt maternal rhythms, and when mama’s rhythms are disrupted, so will baby’s be.

4. Have a consistent family routine.

   1. Newborns rely more on social cues for timing than adults and older children. This may be because they don’t yet have their own daily melatonin pattern to drives their sleep-wake habits.

Interesting facts about optimizing newborn circadian rhythms:

Newborn circadian rhythms are slightly different than adult rhythms, largely due to the fact that they cannot synthesize significant amounts of melatonin on their own.

1. If possible, parents should start strengthening their circadian rhythms before even trying to conceive, but starting late is better than not at all.

2. High circulating melatonin during labor is associated with stronger contractions but less pain.

3. Measurable melatonin production is zero at birth. It begins appearing in saliva at 6 weeks (at the earliest) and peaks in early childhood. After puberty, melatonin declines across the rest of the lifespan.

4. At present, infant formula does not contain any melatonin and donor milk isn’t labeled as coming from daytime or nighttime. Therefore, only babies that are breastfed receive the positive effects of properly timed melatonin in the early weeks of life.

Getting everything right circadian-wise used to be a given. Before electric lighting, we naturally had to rise and fall with the sun. When we augmented the natural light, it was with flame, which doesn't suppress the rhythm very much. Nowadays, getting outside and nurturing a longer night takes thought and attention. The research clearly shows we have massive gains to make if we take care of the night in a circadian fashion. Each individual, each home, and each community has the chance to bring rhythmicity back.

Post recap:

The circadian system develops in relation to maternal environmental factors across the first 2-3 years of life.

Our circadian rhythms are first set in the womb, and solidified across the first few years of our lives. Newborns have unique circadian needs because they don't produce melatonin on their own. Without the ability to make melatonin, they rely even more on social cues than grown-ups. This lack of internal melatonin also makes them less susceptible to darkness. Instead, they need more exposure to daytime light to stimulate daytime wakefulness. Additionally, newborns eat around the clock, which would disrupt an adult digestive rhythm. Eating at night doesn't hurt a newborn's rhythm because drinking nighttime breastmilk is exactly how they are meant to get their daily dose of melatonin. Thus, it is important for the mother to have a strong rhythm so she has high melatonin levels in her milk. After all, she is:

1. Supplying the daily melatonin (and other circadian hormones) for herself and her baby

2. Providing her baby's main social cues

3. And represents the most likely opportunity for her baby to get natural light in the day

Yet, the circadian system remains malleable and receptive to entrainment across the lifespan. So, if you have missed this first window for your baby, you can still entrain an older child. And if you are the one suffering from disruption, you can always adjust your lifestyle to entrain your own rhythms to the sun. Just keep in mind that for adults and older children, things are a little different than for newborns. Yes, daytime sunshine will still be the primary force for good. But, for a person with a developed circadian system:

1. Artificial light at night (ALAN) is the primary disrupter of adult circadian rhythms.

2. Eating at night is the second most powerful disrupter of adult circadian rhythms.

There may also be some interesting applications to this growing understanding of how melatonin rhythmicity changes across the lifespan for older folks⁷. See the graph below to understand how melatonin production changes across the lifespan.

Babies don’t produce much melatonin. It turns out, older adults also stop producing melatonin. In old age, the jury is still out as to how much this is a natural process and how much is due to lifestyle factors such as artificial light exposure, mistimed eating, and evening-type (rather than morning-type) social cues.

In the golden years there are some people (maybe even most in today’s brightly lit world) who no longer produce significant levels of internal melatonin at all. So, in circadian rhythm function we find another way that, as they say, we become again like babies toward the end of life.

The inability to synthesize significant amounts of melatonin is shared by the very old and the very young.

Like for babyhood, this research also has implications in how to support people towards end of life. There is a ton of research you can find about circadian rhythms and neurodegenerative diseases if that is something that interests you. And to get you started, I gave a brief overview of the topic of circadian disruption and mental health here:

A New Paradigm for Mental Disorders

1. Wong, S., Wright, K., Spencer, R. et al (2022). Development of the circadian system in early life: maternal and environmental factors. Journal of Physiological Anthropology, 41:22. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40101-022-00294-0

2. Qin, Y., Shi, W., Zhuang, J., Liu, Y., Tang, L., Bu, J., Sun, J., & Bei, F. (2019). Variations in melatonin levels in preterm and term human breast milk during the first month after delivery. Scientific reports, 9(1), 17984. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-54530-2

3. Bagci, S., Wieduwilt, A., Alsat, E.A., et al. (2022). Biodynamic lighting conditions preserve nocturnal melatonin production in pregnant women during hospitalization: A randomized prospective pilot study

4. Alachkar, A., Lee, J., Asthana, K., et al. (2022). The hidden link between circadian entropy and mental health disorders. Translational Psychiatry, 12:281.

5. Hsu, C. and Tain, Y. (2020). Light and Circadian Signaling Pathway in Pregnancy: Programming of Adult Health and Disease. International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 21, 2232. doi:10.3390/ijms21062232

6. McGraw, K., Hoffmann, R., Harker, C., et al. (1999). The Development of Circadian Rhythms in a Human Infant. SLEEP, Vol. 22, No. 3.

7. Minich, D. M., Henning, M., Darley, C., Fahoum, M., Schuler, C. B., & Frame, J. (2022). Is Melatonin the "Next Vitamin D"?: A Review of Emerging Science, Clinical Uses, Safety, and Dietary Supplements. Nutrients, 14(19), 3934. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu14193934