BiotiQuest® Gut Health & Probiotics Blog with Martha Carlin

What Flying Halfway Around the World Taught Me About Sleep

Martha Carlin | Sep 15, 2026 |
What Flying Halfway Around the World Taught Me About Sleep

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This month, I’m focusing on sleep and the circadian clock, in part because I’ve just done a major number on my own.

At the end of August, I flew from Kentucky to Australia for three weeks. By the time I arrived in Canberra, I had crossed the International Date Line, lost an entire day, and completely flipped my normal schedule.

I did what I could to prepare. I fasted before the flight, took my Simple Slumber and another herbal sleep supplement, and managed to get some sleep on the overnight flight. Even so, I arrived expecting my body to have absolutely no idea what time it was.

What surprised me was how quickly it began to figure it out.

That first evening, I made it until about 7:30 before going to bed and woke around 4:30 the next morning. That became my pattern for much of the first week. By the second week, bedtime had gradually moved closer to 8:30 or 9:00, and I was sleeping until 5:00 or 5:30.

Without really overthinking it, I also started organizing my days around the light. I watched the sun come up in the morning. I spent time outside and walked during the day. In the evening, I watched the sun go down.

I continued my regular Sugar Shift in the morning and Perfect Peace in the evening, too. I can’t tell you exactly what contributed most, but considering how far I had traveled, I was surprised by how little jet lag I experienced once I was there.

And it made me think about something incredibly basic that we’ve made surprisingly complicated: our bodies need to know what time it is.

For most of human history, there were very clear signals. Sunrise. Daylight. Meals. Movement. Sunset. Darkness. Sleep.

Today, those signals are much easier to blur. We spend our days indoors under artificial light, eat at all hours, and stare into illuminated screens long after the sun has gone down. Then we wonder why sleep becomes difficult. And the more I study the microbiome, the more interesting this becomes.

Our gut microbes follow daily rhythms, too. They respond to when we eat, when we sleep, our metabolism, and the light-dark cycle that helps organize the rest of our biology. The gut and the circadian clock aren't separate systems, they are constantly communicating.

That means disrupted sleep can affect the gut, and a disrupted gut may become one more thing making healthy sleep harder to restore.

I’ve also been digging more deeply into the aromatic amino acids and what happens when their production is disrupted by glyphosate. These amino acids feed into important pathways involved in mood, stress, and sleep. I’ve written more about that over on my Substack for those of you who want the geekier science.

But my trip to Australia reminded me that sometimes the most powerful signals are also the simplest ones. Go outside in the morning. See the sun. Move your body during the day. Notice when evening comes. Let darkness actually be dark. Our biology has been responding to those cues for a very long time.

So throughout September, we’re going to spend some time talking about sleep: the microbiome, circadian rhythms, light, amino acids, and practical ways to help re-establish a healthier sleep cycle. You can read my last post here, the night shift: how your gut and brain connect during sleep.

After flying halfway around the world and scrambling my own clock, I’ll be paying attention right along with you.

With gratitude,

Martha Carlin photo Martha Carlin, is a “Citizen Scientist”, systems thinker, wife of Parkinson’s warrior, John Carlin, and founder of The BioCollective , a microbiome company expanding the reach of science and BiotiQuest, the first of it’s kind probiotic line. Since John’s diagnosis in 2002, Martha began learning the science of agriculture, nutrition, environment, infectious disease, Parkinson’s pathology and much more. In 2014, when the first research was published showing a connection between the gut bacteria and the two phenotypes of Parkinson’s, Martha quit her former career as a business turnaround expert and founded The BioCollective to accelerate the discovery of the impact of gut health on all human disease. Martha was a speaker at the White House 2016 Microbiome Initiative launch, challenging the scientific community to “think in a broader context”. Her systems thinking background and experience has led to collaborations across the scientific spectrum from neuroscience to engineering to infectious disease. She is a respected out of the box problem solver in the microbiome field and brings a unique perspective to helping others understand the connections from the soil to the food to our guts and our brains.

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