Social jet lag (the mismatch paradigm)

Social Jet Lag (the mismatch paradigm)

Unable to sleep at night in all this heat? Feeling sluggish at the office, and skulking around in a disoriented daze? According to new research unveiled by the best German sleep physicians, you might well be suffering from an ailment called social jet lag.

Social jet lag is said to arise when our body clocks falls out of sync with the demands of our environment, thus putting us at risk of chronic fatigue and an increased susceptibility to disease.

According to a hefty social survey produced by researchers in Munich, there is a mismatch of at least two hours between most of our biological clocks and the demands of our jobs. Up to half the population is in a permanent state of jet lag, they say, a condition exacerbated by poor office lighting and the tendency of office workers to spend their lunchtimes eating flaccid sandwiches while sitting at their desks.

The solution, they say, is to match our natural sleep rhythms more harmoniously to our daily routine; the average person, according to them, prefers to sleep between half past midnight and 8.30 in the morning.

Whatever else it claims to be, social jet lag sounds like a great excuse for arriving at work late. It is, however, only the quirkiest prong of an intriguing new train of scientific thinking that investigates ways in which the human body no longer fits into its surroundings.

In their forthcoming book Mismatch: Why Our World No Longer Fits Our Bodies, for example, two scientists named Peter Gluckman and Mark Hanson will argue that we have created an artificial world that is increasingly out of tune with the bodies that are our genetic inheritance.

The idea that many of us would spend vast quantities of time shaking our limbs in gymnasiums would, a century ago, have provoked the ridicule of manual workers whose physically demanding jobs meant they were hardly in need of a workout. In the same way, as Gluckman and Hanson point out, there is a mismatch between the demands of the female biological clock - which prefers to get pregnant at a young age - and the cultural preference of many woman to start families later in life.

The "mismatch paradigm", they claim, happens anywhere where biology and environment begin to push in different directions. Humans are ingenious at adapting to a huge variety of different environments, note the authors, but a constant need to adapt is a source of stress which may be harmful. "The greater the degree of match between an organism's constitution and its environment, the more likely the organism is to thrive," say the authors. "The greater the degree of mismatch, the more the organism has to adapt or cope."

The relationship between our genes and our environment is a complex business, but the good news is that we are quite capable of making a difference to both. Given the strides we have already made in building a human environment, there is nothing to stop us from changing it around a bit more to give our bodies a better fit.

We could modify our genes, too, but the gene therapies that will help us to do so won't be up and running for a while. In the meantime, we need cleverer fixes. We could install artificial sunlight in buses, trains and offices, for example, or glass roofs to give us more natural sunlight. We could invent more efficient ways of topping up the nutrients our bodies need, or more interesting and useful ways of exercising those bodies than wasting valuable time in the gym.

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