All About Ultradian Rhythms
Over my 20-year career as a health journalist, I have come to consider Ultradian Rhythm Breaks (or URBs as I call them) to be the ultimate biohack.
Why? Because by helping your body and mind to re-regulate themselves, they deliver huge improvements in energy, metabolism, mood, sleep, focus, and general function.
I find them more effective than “bulletproof” drinks and tinted glasses, simpler to operate and less invasive than most biometric devices, and way more comfortable than submerging yourself in ice water. Plus, they are free, customizable, and accessible to all.
But what I love most about Ultradian Rhythm Breaks is that they don’t really “hack,” trick, or manipulate anything about your body.
They just help you get back into agreement with your body-mind’s most basic biorhythms — so that cells and central nervous system can accomplish the key repair activities on which both your right-now vitality and your longterm resilience depend.
My Ultradian Obsession
As my friends will tell you, I talk about ultradian rhythms a lot. I write about them. I podcast about them. I post my ultradian rhythm breaks on Instagram.
For more than a decade now, I’ve been invited to get up on stages all over the world and teach folks about ultradian rhythms, and incredibly, I never tire of the topic.
Why am I so obsessed with ultradian rhythms? Because ultradian rhythms matter a lot — far more than the conventional health media ever reflect, far more than most doctors know, and far more than most people will ever realize.
And when done properly, they can work miracles.
In fact, as healthy living skills go, I would say noticing and managing your ultradian rhythms likely ranks in the top five most important things you can do for your wellbeing.
That’s why I included Ultradian Rhythm Breaks as one of three key Renegade Rituals in my book, The Healthy Deviant: A Rule Breaker’s Guide to Being Healthy in an Unhealthy World (North Atlantic Books, 2020).
I even created a mini-workshop on the topic: “Ultradian Rhythm Breaks: The Ultimate Biohack”. 👇
I’ll share the reasons for my undying love affair with ultradian rhythms in just a moment, but first, the basics.
What Are Ultradian Rhythms?
Ultradian rhythms are natural, undulating cycles of energy — oscillating patterns of energy production and recovery — that occur in people (as well as in other living things) many times throughout the day.
They are a lot like circadian rhythms, but smaller: Instead of repeating in one big cycle once a day, they repeat regularly over a 24-hour period, regulating your body-mind’s operations around the clock.
Ultradian rhythms are pretty simple to understand, and if you pay attention, you’ll begin to notice how they operate in your own body.
Essentially, after 90 to 120 minutes of sustained energy output and mental focus, the body and brain need a 20-minute break. Your systems use that down time for recovery, repair, replenishment and rebalancing. After which time, they return to a high level of productivity and efficiency for another 90 to 120 minutes.
On paper, your ultradian rhythms look like this …
How We Get Worn Down
If we refuse to take a break when our body-mind is asking for one, bad things happen. The byproducts of our all our productivity (metabolic waste, cellular debris) begin to build up in our system.
Toxins accumulate. Our blood sugar and hormone levels get dysregulated. Our metabolism and mood both suffer. We feel groggy and fatigued. Bodywide inflammation rises. Immunity drops.
Meanwhile, our mental inbox starts overflowing. Our synaptic networks start bogging down and misfiring. We can’t think as straight or as fast. As we become less and less capable of connecting our own cognitive dots, our error rates rise, our creativity drops, and our productivity plummets.
But that’s not all. Our emotional reactivity increases. We’re more likely to feel peevish, snappish, anxious, or sad. We’re more likely to get in arguments with our coworkers, partners, and kids.
Our eye-hand coordination diminishes. We’re more likely to create typos, to stub toes, to slam our fingers in drawers. We’re also more likely have accidents and sustain injuries of all kinds.
In other words, we start getting significantly diminished returns and courting ever-greater risks. And the more ultradian rhythm breaks we skip, the worse those liabilities become.
As you’ve likely noticed, a lot of us experience a mid-morning and a mid-afternoon dip (or crash). Those low points are what’s known as ultradian troughs. During such times, many people reach for coffee, cigarettes, soft drinks, and “energy drinks” or they nibble on pastry, chips, candy, or other snacks high in refined carbohydrates.
While such stop-gap solutions might help you limp through an ultradian trough (sugar and caffeine force the system into a momentary energy spike; cigarettes blunt emotional stress), they mostly just drain your backup reserves and give your systems more stress and inflammatory damage to deal with.
None of these approaches supply the physiological rest, recovery, and repair opportunity the body and brain so desperately need. They don’t help return the body and brain to a state of optimal function.
For that, you need an Ultradian Rhythm Break, or what I affectionately call a “URB.”
How To Take an Ultradian Rhythm Break
So, how does one take a proper ultradian rest and recovery break? According the research (much of which has been done by the U.S. Department of Defense), the best way is to lie down, preferably in a dark, quiet room, and take a mini nap.
But you don’t have to actually sleep (or even lie down) to have it count. Reclining, sitting, leaning or moving calmly (e.g., walking, doing yoga, or tai chi) are all good options. The main thing is to free your system from stress, to let your body relax, move, or shift positions, and to let your mind either wander freely or be still and quiet.
This might also be a good time to rehydrate and refuel your body in healthy ways. Just keep in mind that the goal is to nourish your body and support its repair and detoxification effort, not to jolt it into forced action.
When it comes to respecting your ultradian rhythms, any mental and physical break — or even a shift of focus to something less demanding —is better than nothing. Any time you can stop the relentless flow of inputs and outputs is an opportunity your body and mind have to process and recover.
Here are some great ways to take a URB (feel free to mix and match for a total of 20 minutes, or for however long you can manage):
- Close your eyes and meditate or do some deep breathing
- Hit the restroom (even if you don’t think you have to go)
- Get a drink of water or cup of tea
- Grab a healthy snack (go for whole foods; avoid refined carbs and sugars)
- Get outside and walk calmly
- Stare out into space or up at the sky
- Sit on a curb or bench and let your mind wander for a while
- Stroll around the building or walk up and down some stairs
- Visit with a colleague or friend
- Listen to a guided visualization or piece of calming music
- Do a little restorative yoga (shivasana is highly recommended)
- Do a mindless task, like refilling your stapler or cleaning out your purse
- Run a simple errand or tidy up around the house
- Call a loved one just to say hi or to tell them you love them
- Visualize how you want the rest of your day or evening to go
- Make a quick list of things you are grateful for
What you don’t want to do is more of whatever you’ve been doing for the past couple hours, especially if that’s looking at some kind of screen. This is not the time to scroll social media, read the news, or shop online.
To take a proper Ultradian Rhythm Break, you need a shift of gears, a reboot, a change of scene.
Go Deeper on Ultradian Rhythms
Want to dig deeper into how ultradian rhythms work, and why they matter so much to your health, happiness, performance, and whole-person wellbeing?
Consider taking my mini-workshop on ultradian rhythms (“Ultradian Rhythm Breaks: The Ultimate Biohack”), where I explain all of that and more — AND give you some handy tools to begin integrating Ultradian Rhythm Breaks into your life.
You might also want to read my book, The Healthy Deviant: A Rule Breaker’s Guide to Being Healthy in an Unhealthy World, where I devote a whole chapter to ultradian rhythms while also giving you a little toolkit for integrating them into your life.
In my book, I also help you sort out how you can prioritize breaks and other forms of preemptive self-repair in a world that often seems dead set on breaking us down.
Dallas Hartwig and I did a fun episode of our The Living Experiment podcast on ultradian rhythms, too. The show notes for that episode include highlights and additional resources.
Finally, if you want to dig deeper into the science on this topic, I strongly recommend Ernest Lawrence Rossi, PhD’s book, The 20 Minute Break. Rossi is one of the world’s leading experts on ultradian rhythms (he has written or contributed to a slew of other research books on the subject), and while this book dates from the early 1990s, it remains one of the best topical resources aimed at a lay audience.
See for Yourself …
Excited about embracing your body’s ultradian rhythms? Keen on taking an ultradian rhythm break right now? Here are some great ways to get started:
- Ultradian Rhythm Break Guided Meditation, where I walk you a super-relaxing, 20-minute ultradian repair experience in real time.
- “Ultradian Rhythm Breaks: The Ultimate Biohack,” my fun, self-paced mini-workshop with video, audio, workbook materials, trackers, and other downloadable tools.
