When the Sun Doesn’t Sleep

Feeling Things with Amy & Kat

Nashville Podcast Network

Relationships, Education, Society & Culture, Self-improvement, Health & Fitness, Fashion & Beauty, Arts

4.9 • 5.3K Ratings

🗓️ 18 November 2022

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Most of us take sunset as the cue to start winding down our day, but what if the sun never sets? The remote city of Inuvik, Canada, is so far north that it experiences non-stop sunlight in the summer, followed by round-the-clock darkness in the winter. Inuvik resident Adi Scott details what it was like to move to this unique part of the planet, and the unique ways she keeps a sleep schedule when it isn’t possible to rely on the regular day-night cycle of the sun. Joined by neuroscientist and sleep specialist Dr Steven Lockley, learn about the powerful impact of light and dark on the brain, and how that triggers the complex internal mechanisms influencing our sleep.

Transcript

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0:00.0	When you go to a friend's bedinner and you get talking, or you go out on the land,
0:16.0	on a boat or go outside anywhere on the walk, then you just kind of relax and chilling
0:21.3	out and then you get back into the house and look at a clock, you're like, oh god, it
0:27.4	was like five hours late and I thought it was because the sun did not go down and I did not
0:32.3	realize because my brain didn't tell me that that wasn't normal. When most of us say on top of the
0:40.3	world, we usually mean it metaphorically as in being in a good mood or in a good place, but for Adi
0:47.4	Scott, top of the world is a very real location that she calls home. You think of like Canada and
0:54.5	North America on a map and go as far north as you can and west without getting into Alaska
1:02.4	and you find any evic. Adi is a coordinator for a community greenhouse in Innova Canada,
1:08.8	a city located in the Arctic Circle. Because of its extreme north location and the tilt of our
1:14.7	planet's axis, people who live their experience 56 days of continuous sunlight every summer and
1:22.0	about 30 days of polar night in the winter. So in the summer, I usually just like make sure that
1:29.6	I try not to go outside past like 11 p.m. and if I do, I get very confused. My brain's like,
1:36.2	Kate's time to go to work now it's the morning. Wow. But it's great for waking up in the morning
1:41.7	because it's just bright all the time and in the winter, the mat, it's hard to go a bit.
1:46.2	In most inhabited places on the planet, we can rely on signals from the sun to let us know when
1:53.7	it's time to go about certain parts of our day. So for Adi, who moved to Inuvik from Yorkshire
1:59.7	in the United Kingdom, the endless days and continuous nights were something she had to get used to.
2:05.6	It's honestly like, I mean, it sounds like a cliche. It's nothing I've ever experienced before
2:11.5	and it's nothing I could have imagined before. It's a very unique thing that few humans will
2:17.7	ever witness in their lives. And while whole populations have learned to thrive in this environment,
2:23.3	it still comes with its own set of challenges. I also sat down with Dr. Stephen Lockley, a neuroscientist
	...

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