Many people report that their aches and pains intensify when they’re trying to sleep, but new research into the circadian clock helps explain this mystery.
a mystery why one of the most basic human experiences—feeling physical pain—fluctuates in intensity throughout the day. Since the early days of medicine, doctors and patients have noticed that many types of pain tend to get worse at night. Most research so far has tried to link mounting nighttime pain to sleep deprivation or disrupted sleep, but with limited success.
Even people who can’t dance have internal rhythms thrumming through every system in their body. Known as circadian rhythms, these biological processes tune their activity to rise and fall at precise times across the day, driven by the body’s internal clock. They influence pretty much every bodily system, exerting control over “almost all aspects of our physiology and behavior,” says Lance Kriegsfeld, a circadian biologist at the University of California, Berkeley.
The work by Gronfier and his team revealed the influence of these rhythms on pain by showing that a short, painful heat stimulus was perceived to be most painful around 3 am and least painful at approximately 3 pm. “It’s very exciting,” says Nader Ghasemlou, a pain scientist at Queens University in Kingston, Canada, who wasn’t involved in the research. “It is one of these studies that is answering questions that we’ve had for a long time.
Uncertainties have persisted for so long because proving that anything is driven by the body’s internal clock is difficult and requires a grueling study design. Researchers must put participants in a controlled laboratory setting where they can rule out any environmental or behavioral factors that could also cause a rhythmic fluctuation.
To uncover pain’s rhythmic nature, Gronfier’s team found 12 healthy young men who agreed to undergo the protocol for 34 hours. Every two hours, the team tested their pain sensitivity using a device placed on the forearm that slowly increased in temperature by one degree Celsius until they reported pain. Participants usually stopped the device before it reached around 46 degrees Celsius .
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