Daily Rhythms

Abstract

Most life processes show daily rhythms. Within each cell of your body there are daily rhythms. Cells of a like-kind make up tissues so we have rhythms at the tissue level. Tissues make up organs so each organ of the body has many rhythms. Man is essentially a collection of organs so he is, in a sense, really made up of a multitude of daily rhythms. These rhythms all peak and decline at different times in the 24- hour cycle of sleep and wakefulness, so daily rhythms become a very complex phenomenon. Some of these rhythms are shown in Figure 1, to illustrate this point. In a normal healthy adult all the rhythms show stable phase relationships with each other. If one's internal environment is perturbed so that the stable phase-relationship between the different rhythms is lost, the body may be more susceptible to disease.