and lay there for few minutes between the land of wake and sleep known as the hypnopompic

state. When you do finally get up, you’re groggy and disoriented thanks to sleep inertia.

Most of it is shed in 10 minutes, but can sometimes linger for a few hours. During this

time your body temperature is still low, but your blood pressure is sharply rising. There’s

a 50% increase in the stress hormone, cortisol, pumping through your bloodstream, in preparation

for the stresses of your day!

Time for a shower! It’s also the best time to shave as clot forming platelets are most

abundant right now, making your blood more sticky. Meaning less bleeding from cuts! But

it’s also the time of day when heart attacks most often occur.

7:30am swings around and it is time for coffee and breakfast. Enjoy the smell before sipping!

75% of how we enjoy flavour is not through the tongue, but through smell! The vapours

pass through your mouth, around the soft palate, into the nasal cavity and to the olfactory

bulb. Mmm that’s good!

Settling in at work, and your mental activity is actually at a peak in late morning. Most

of us are sharpest 2 and a half to 4 hours after waking. But your memory is impacted

as the day moves on. In the morning we forget an average of 5 facts, but by afternoon we

forget around 14. Not if you’re a young adult though. In fact the reverse is true,

with young people becoming more mentally alive in the afternoon and evening. But, at night

our biological clock seems to turn off the proteins involved in forming long term memories,

which is why it’s best not to cram for a test all night.

It’s noon and it’s time for lunch! Your stomach is able to expand as much as two and

half pints to receive a meal. Here it stays for a few hours before it’s sent to your

small intestine. We digest meals without even thinking about it - in fact, there is a brain

of sorts in your belly called the enteric nervous system which performs everything from

sensing nutrients, measuring acids, and coordinating the immune system to defend your gut.

Around 2:30pm and lunch has left us a wave of fogginess and fatigue. After a meal your

body has a short boost in energy from the glucose, but is then followed by a wave of

insulin, the hormone that transports sugar to your cells. Scientists believe that insulin

might pull too much from your blood, causing an energy nosedive. However, this phenomenon

occurs even if you don’t have lunch, which has led to much research on the power of naps,

which increase productivity and safety.

4:30pm and it’s time to hit the gym. Though many try to work out in the morning, studies

suggest that you may gain 20% more muscle strength by working out in the afternoon.

Your airways are more open, your heart works more efficiently and your reaction time is

at its peak. Much of this has to do with your core body temperature peaking later in the

day. Even most sports records are achieved between 3pm and 8pm.

Now you start off the evening by joining some friends for drinks. During cocktail hour you're

actually more tolerant to the effects of alcohol. In one study, those drinking vodka at 9am

had significantly worse reaction time and psychological functioning than those who had

the same dose at 6pm.

It’s around 8:30pm now and you catch someone’s eye in the bar. Most of our mammalian ancestors

have ways of advertising their fertility. It turns out that human women also give cues

when they’re ovulating. In fact, when looking at pictures of women, studies show men find

women in the fertile phase to be more attractive.

You ask each other to dance - which brings you close enough to get a wiff - after all,

your sebaceous and apocrine glands release scents through the armpit which potential

partners may find attractive. And because humans walk upright, the armpit is the ideal

body part to disperse scent.

It’s 11pm now, which is the most popular time for sexual activity. Which has little

to do with our bodies and more to do with societal schedules. In fact, levels of testosterone

are much lower in the evening and peak at 8AM. While semen quality is best in the afternoon

with 35 x106 more spermatozoa per ejaculation. As such, couples hoping to conceive have better

chances with midday sex than during the midnight hour.

As you go to sleep and finally begin to drift off, melatonin is secreted by the pineal gland

which begins the sleep cycle, which happens multiple times through the night. A change

from alpha wave drowsiness to lower frequency theta brain waves signify early sleep. And

as your sleep deepens, your brain moves to longer delta waves. For children, sleep is

the time in which 90% of bone growth occurs.

Finally, as you move into REM sleep, your brain is as busy as it was during the day,

firing theta waves with burst of alpha and beta. Though dreams occur in all stages of

sleep, it is during REM that our dreams are most vivid and intense. Recent brain scans

have shown that neurotransmitters like serotonin, histamine and noradrenaline are shut off at

this point, turning off reason and logical sense of time - which explains some weird

dreams! We dream for an hour and half to two hours each night, meaning you spend about

6 years vividly dreaming over your lifetime!

In the middle of the night, your body actually wakes up periodically, in something called

microarousals. These can last only seconds, but occur between 200-1000 times per night.

Though most of us in the western world sleep all in one go, many past cultures sleep was

broken up into two periods with social activity in between. Some studies have even shown that

we have two distinct 4 hour natural sleep periods, which in the past would last between

8pm-12am, and then again from 2am-6am.

By 4:30am, your body temperature is at its lowest and your sleep continues to move through

the cycle. In a few hours, it’ll be good morning body! Time for another day :)