Hacking Eyesight: Interventions With Dave Mark Bell | 895 | Dave Asprey

Today is a intervention with Mark Bell. Mark came up to my place quite a while ago and was on the show. He is a world record breaking power lifter. He owns Super Training Gym, the strongest gym in the west, invented the slingshot, which is a thing you put around your arms, help lifters lift more without getting injured. And, well, he also runs runs Mark Bell's Power Project podcast. He did all this because, well, a bully was mean to him after punting his New York jets football into the woods and said, I'm going to be so strong that I can actually punt the bully into the woods. And apparently he can do it. 1,080 pound squat, 854 pound bench press and 766 pound deadlift. And when he was here up at my house, I bench pressed him just to show him his boss. Okay, maybe that didn't happen, but it was really fun to see you on some of the gear from Upgrade labs because I mean, you were pushing some numbers that didn't make any sense. You know, like it's like a video game where the numbers wrap around or an odometer, they wrap around back to back to zero. So you kind of do that with power. So what's going on with you, man? What are we going to hack today?

I didn't know this was an intervention, man. I'm out of here. Sounds pretty intimidating. You know, just, I think a lot of people have experienced this, especially in their 40s when all of a sudden doesn't work the same way as it used to. So for me, it's my eyeballs and I just, I don't really recall seeing anything like out of focus at any particular point. I don't remember being like, oh, I think my eyes are going. I just woke up one day and it seemed like they were gone and they progressively gotten a little bit worse. Probably because of the interventions that I'm currently using because they're probably not, probably not great, you know, like wearing readers and things like that probably are making the problem a little bit worse. So, yeah, I've had some issues with my eyes. I've tried to do some stuff like, you know, look at the. Not look at the sun necessarily, but view the sunrise in the morning. And some things like that that I heard could potentially help. I also took some like vitamin blend that's supposed to kind of help your vision, but didn't notice much from that. Maybe I haven't been taking it long enough or something like that. But yeah, so I would like to be able to see the way that I Used to be able to see.

I see. So I did there. Dad, joke time. You have, you have something that's really common, right. You're becoming nearsighted or, sorry, farsighted as you age. I said it backwards, of course. And you can hack this pretty effectively. There's some things going on. One of them, are you ready for this muscle weakness? Now those are words you're not used to hearing, right?

Right.

So there are muscles in your eye that control this. And as you know, as a powerlifter. Can you put your ankles behind your head? Nope, nope. Can you touch your toes?

I can, yeah.

Is it hard?

It's not easy, yeah.

Okay, there you go. So you're very strong, but you might not have as much flexibility as say a yoga teacher, right?

Absolutely.

Okay. And these are like the two sides of a coin. There's strength and there's flexibility. And as you age your eyes, the muscles lose strength, the tissues lose flexibility. And this has to do with collagen types and cross linking of collagen. You actually see yellowing of parts of the lens in your eye. And then there's also a neurological thing where the brain may not actually be connecting. And you've probably seen this in some of your lifts. Right. There's some kind of a connection between the thought and then actually doing it. And it, there's a willpower in manifesting and all that kind of stuff. You know, the, the spiritual side of sports. But there's also a neurological side where the body doesn't fully tell the muscle to turn on because the muscle is afraid of being injured in the body believe the muscle. Right. So there could be some of that neurological stuff where the signal's not getting through. And that can be a wiring problem or it can be a problem in the, the eye itself, saying, I don't want to do that. I don't think that's usually the problem in eyes. But honestly, I don't have any data on that last point. But I do know that tissue stiffening and activation and training of the muscles, so you have fine grain control are really important. And you're right at the age where this happens to a lot of people. And I'm going to, I'm going to humble brag for a minute here. Not to, not to tell you, hey, everybody, look at me. But just as an example of what's possible, I was about 20, geez, I don't know. Way back in 1997, I had Lasik, which was a bad idea. It did get me to 2015 for a while, and I was pretty bad before that. I don't know, I got glasses in seventh grade kind of thing. And you could say, yeah, but Dave, you're nearsighted, you, you could always see small print. But I'm going to get to that with you in a minute. And after, oh geez, I get 13, 14 years after the surgery, I wasn't 2015 anymore. I was more like 2060 or 2080. And I developed astigmatism and I went in and I did heavy duty vision training exercises once a week. The same stuff you would do in your strongest gym in the west super training gym. But I did it for my eyes. Okay. It was actually harder than going to the gym because your brain doesn't want to do it. Some of the exercises were for fine grained, nearsighted control. Some of the exercises were for distance focus. So you can see an athlete, say a gymnast, how do they walk on a, what it calls a balance beam. Right. They're doing all this stuff. Well, it's fine grained neurological control. In fact, it's the same thing that lets women walk in 19 inch heels or whatever they do. I don't know how they don't fall over, but it's because they practiced. Right. So have you learned to walk in heels yet?

I've been working on it.

See, I can actually say things like that to, to, you know, the world's strongest power lifter because you're not in the same room with me and you won't fold me into a pretzel. So I, you know, I'm kind of baiting a bull who can't charge me. So I, I, I'm just messing with you. But you know what I mean? Like, how do you, how could you possibly dance in heels or be elegant? Well, it's a learnable skill is my point. Okay, so we want your eyeballs, more specifically the muscles in your eyes and the connection between the brain and the muscles to be able to walk in high heels or walk on a balance beam or do something that's nimble and flexible and highly, highly precise. And it's that precision training. That's cool, right? I mean, you grab a dumbbell and you're gonna like just bring it up or do you bring it up really slowly without a wobble? Like they're just different skills. Right? That's a part of this. So let's address first what happened with my training in that I'll tell you some of the exercises I did and then we're going to address supporting the Tissue stiffening and the energetics of it. And then we'll talk about some hacks after that that might possibly work for you. Sound like a deal?

Sounds great.

Okay. And I want to call out here. I'm not a doctor. I have no license. I'm an unlicensed biohacker. And this isn't a medical call, as you've probably already heard. This is a training call, just like you're not a medical doctor, but you help people get stronger and recover from whatever is going on with their shoulder. Right? So definitely not. Not a. A doctor sort of thing. If I talk about medical stuff, it's go see the right doctor who can help you out with this. So I did three months, an hour, a week of just crazy, annoying, exhausting eye exercises that are also kind of like brain training. At the end of this, I went from that 2060 with astigmatism back to 2015 in both eyes and the ability to read the very finest print a teenager can read. And I still have that today. Okay. What the heck. Okay, I am, let's see, 48. It's a little bit older than you. The last time I went in was probably three years ago, pre pandemic, maybe four to one of those crazy eye specialist types. A little bit of a functional vibe. And she looked and she said, I've never seen anything like this. You haven't lost any flexibility in your eyes the way you're supposed to. As you age, and you're still 2015, you can read the finest print. Keep doing what you're doing. I haven't seen this before, but I think it's a combination of your glasses, that is the truedark glasses and the supplements you take and the things you eat. So I have those data points that I am able to read the finest, finest, finest print. And it's a question of lots of lifestyle things. I'm going to walk you through everything I did, but the first thing, let's get through the training side of things. There are people, including eye doctors, who may hear this and be offended, who have learned you cannot train the eye. It's not possible. In fact, if you go to Wikipedia, which is pretty much owned at this point by Snopes, not that it's a nonprofit foundation, it's not actually owned by them, but there's a very strong antifunctional medicine vibe amongst the 2000 or so people who run the content on Wikipedia. It is not a democracy at all. It is pretty much influenced by big pharma at this point. So they tell you lots of stuff aren't possible on Wikipedia, and they're just not even truthful at this point. So I don't consider them to be a good source of information on this. When you look at the history of eye training, there's a guy named Bates who figured this out. And if you look up Bates eye training, you'll find all kinds of stuff online about it. And I first became aware this was possible, Mark, because Meyer Schneier, who wrote a book called Yoga for your Eyes, which I want you to buy and read, I actually had the honor of hosting him at the nonprofit anti aging group that I used to run in Palo Alto. And he came and gave a talk. This is a guy who had 200 surgeries on his eyes before he was some very young age. He should be legally blind because his cornea is like a shattered mirror. Yet he reprogrammed his brain. He has a driver's license. He can see just fine. So what's going on here is the brain can change what comes in through the eyes so you can still see it. And he has a set of exercises in the book that are incredibly annoying because they're more like yoga exercises. And so part of this is rest periods for your eyes. You. When you lift really heavy one day, do you take the next day off?

Sometimes, yeah.

Okay, sometimes. I mean, at your level, you probably don't have to take the next day off because you've gotten tissues that are used to doing that. But most people who lift heavy at your gym, if they lift heavy every single day for a week, they don't make the progress they would if they skipped every other day.

Absolutely. You need days off.

Okay, there you go. When's the last time your eyes had a day off?

Good point.

Okay, so there are little muscles and things like that. And one of the things that Meyer Schneier and the BASE method use is something you can actually do right now. And you put your hands together and you rub them until they get hot. And that's 20, 30 seconds. I'm doing it right now up against the microphone so all you ASMR people can enjoy it. And then you cup them over your eyes, which means you don't push on the eyeball. You're creating like a hollow space. Now, anyone who does Qigong or Dr. Barry Morgolan's energy for Success exercises or. Or negong or any of the other.

Are my eyes open or closed right now?

You can do either one. Whatever. Whatever is more comfortable for you. Right. And what I would be doing in person is sticking googly eyes on your hands. So you looked really funny now. And you do that for about 20, 30 seconds, and you breathe deeply and just kind of just relax. And what's going on is there is a bunch of stress in your eyes. That is unconscious stress. It's there. And your eyes are not really individual organs from one perspective. They're actually an extension of your brain. They're plugged right into it. And there's a lot of neurological tissue in there. So they're called specialized parts of the brain, if you want to think of it that way. So when the eyes chill, the brain chills. And I say this with great knowledge because I happen to own a glasses company and a neuroscience company, and I've done studies on that that were in the process of publishing. So take another couple deep breaths, and then open your eyes, and let's see if you feel different now. How's your brain feel when you do that? How do your eyes feel? Is there any difference?

It took a second for my eyes to kind of recalibrate to the room.

Yep.

Yeah, it felt good.

Okay. And what I did when I was recovering from whatever had happened to my kind of drifting off the path after that surgery I had many years ago. And by the way, have you had any vision correction surgery? That's an important question.

No, I have not.

Okay, good for you. Because that severs nerves in the eyes and causes dry eyes and all sorts of stuff people don't know about. So that's a part of it. And I would do this every hour for like a year, is the end of a meeting or something, you know, before I started the next one, I would just take a minute to do that. The other thing that I learned to do, I remember I was working when I was doing this, I was working at. At Trinity Ventures, a venture capital firm on Sandhill Road. And they put all the entrepreneur and residents guys like me into this little fishbowl. Horrible room on the inside with no windows and bad LED lighting. And then I bought my first Mac. I finally switched from windows, and they have very bright lights in the back of them. And so I was like, man, I'm feeling so tired. And it's because my entire visual field was four feet away from me. The walls of this little room where me and a couple other guys were, and then I look at a super bright light, and then bad lighting, bright light, bad lighting. So what I learned from my vision training exercises was I'd go outside whenever I could, and I would just Stare as far away as I could. And there's a reason right now where I'm sitting, I am looking at you. I have one screen that's about three feet away from me, which is my max screen. It's as far away as is reasonable for me to still be able to see it. And one screen that's 5ft away from me, like 5 FE. It's a 55 inch HDTV. Because what I'm doing when I'm communicating all day long is I'm looking far away, not just up close, which you're doing at a laptop usually. So this is important. I'm changing my visual depth of field throughout the day. I also have, and this is for a different reason, have a mirror that's about 18 inches from my face right here, right. That way I can tell whether my Instagram filter or not. Instagram filter, zoom, filtered version of my healthy face, which I'm not using right now because we're not even using zoom, but whether that's real or the thing here. So I'm like looking here, I'm looking here, I'm looking here. And then I turn to my right and I look two miles away. Okay. So variable depth of field. Okay. Now, you know gyms, you know exercise, right? So range of motion, this is, this is like your thing. So if you only did half of a bench press, you're probably not very successful. Right. You gotta have strength throughout the whole range. You've limited your eyes to a relatively narrow range. And while you're at it, you fed them junk light, which is pretty much junk food. So I know I sent you a pair of TrueDark glasses, probably that was it. The daytime ones. I sent you the yellow ones, right?

Yep.

Okay.

I have a pair of red ones too.

You got the red ones. Good. The red ones are really powerful at night. And there's actually a study somewhere of using the. And the red ones are. They're a patented lens. It's not just red lenses where it's filtering out four different colors and some other variables of light that make things hard to do. What I would suggest in the study I found was reading under a red light or probably wearing red lenses increased eye strength and helped specifically with the problem you have. And I don't have the name of the study, but I can tell you that there's a reason that True true is probably a true light product. True light, True dark makes little things like this little reading light, like a red rechargeable thing. And I don't even know what Its name is off the top of my head, but I use that kind of stuff, right. And so at night my lights are red and very dim. And this is part of fixing the problem. They're just getting overstimulated. I am predicting a huge wave of macular generation looking at bright and LED lights from our ceiling and LED lights at our screens without depth of field like it's a, it's a disaster. So when I look at screens, they're either dimmed and I'm running the night mode so it's all as dark as I can make it. So it's. We're meant to see stars on a black sky. We're not meant to see black dots on a bright white sky. Our eyes don't do that. It's very stressful for us. And so I change my screen that way and then I put on the, the evening mode even when it's not evening. So there's a yellow tinge and I turn the brightness down as much as I can. And this reduces the load on the eyes a lot, which is going to make them last longer. Especially around this problem with stiffening of tissues. So stiffening of tissues is going to be affected by your collagen intake. You need to have enough collagen so you can rebuild things. It's gonna be affected by blood sugar levels. A lot of bodybuilders, but not so much powerlifters like, yeah, I'm gonna spike my insulin and my glucose as much as I can after my lift. Cause they call it insulin like growth factor for a reason. And you know, some of those guys are ending up as type 1 or type 2 diabetics later in life because these incredible spikes, well, they also create something called advanced glycation end products which is cross linking of proteins including collagens. You don't want that in your eyes. You don't want that anywhere in your body. So maintaining normal blood sugar would be good. Do you have blood sugar problems?

No, not that I'm aware of. I've been on a low carb style diet for long time.

Are you keto for long periods of time without eating any carbs?

No, I mix in like fruit and vegetables and things like that.

Okay, good. I think being especially with the output for your body, a lower carb diet is great. A zero carb diet might not be really good from an autoimmune perspective. You poke holes in your gut if you do that for too long. And lots of other reasons. That's why I recommend cycling on the bulletproof diet. Who would have ever imagined. And not cycling cheesecake and burritos from Taco Bell either. So you're not eating a lot of sugar, so you shouldn't have glycation products. The other thing that can affect people's eyes, but I don't think is affecting yours, is if you're having mitochondrial issues, kind of brownouts, or you have toxins, which might be an issue for you because you said it kind of fell off a cliff, right?

Yeah.

I remember you texting me, and I said, I can't see, like, what the heck just happened? This was over the course of a week or over the course of two months or what?

I just kind of recognized it, like, one day, and then I was like, that's strange. And then the next thing you know, I'm, like, wearing readers like, I'm 60 years old.

Got it. So quite often you get exposed to a neurotoxin, your vision changes. There's something called a visual contrast sensitivity test, which you can get at certain eye doctors. And it measures. Can you. Can you see the difference between these 64 shades of gray? And if your nervous system is dialed in, you can see it. And if it's not dialed in, you can't see it. And they all look the same to you, or you don't see any gray at all, and it's totally invisible to your conscious mind. But when you say A versus B, you're, oh, what the heck. So this is used to diagnose environmental toxins. And I have seen people, including me, like, I do something wrong biologically, the next day, I'm not 2015. One eye or both eyes may be blurry. And then I've even had times where, wow, that fine print is off. That's weird. But it gets better when you remove toxins and you increase mitochondrial function. Right. So some of this may be that. So when you had this sudden appearance of, you know, of nearsightedness, did you move into a new house? Was there any environmental change that would have changed the toxic load on your body?

Not that I'm aware of. I'm trying to line it up with, like, when it happened. Yeah, nothing that I'm conscious of.

Okay. Do you practice dimming your lights at night?

I have been for maybe, like, the last couple months. So I haven't been.

Okay, so it's a new practice for you?

Yeah.

I'm seeing more and more problems with just eye overuse. Your eyes are not meant to see bright lights at night. It's like candles, fireplace, or fireflies and stars and the moon once a month. That's the entire history of our species until recently. So dimming those lights, it takes time. Replacing crappy lights is a good thing. And you're in your podcast studio, right?

Right. Yep.

What's shining on you right now to make you look so beautiful?

Yeah, we got some pretty bright lights shining on me right now.

And they're LED lights, right?

I believe so, yeah.

So they're kind of flat panels, kind of bright, harsh light. Okay. How much time do you spend under those lights every week?

Quite a bit.

Okay. You wondering why your eyes are having problems? Okay. Very bright pinpoint sources like those, they actually cause skin aging in addition to eye aging. So there's people who I actually support who will say, wear sunscreen indoors or long sleeves to avoid tissue aging from harsh LED lights, especially studio lights. Now sunscreen is generally not good for you because of its hormone disruptors and all that. So this is mineral type of sunscreen that isn't the harmful stuff I'm talking about. Or maybe paba, the B vitamin based stuff. So what I'm doing that's different than you is I have 120 watt halogen over there and 120 watt halogen over there. In front of them is a diffuser screen. So basically my eyes are seeing two sun shaped orbs about this big. They call it a diffuser screen from Amazon. For some amount of money at least put that in front of your LEDs. But your life will change if you just get a halogen. Yeah, they're hotter and they use more power and you need to change the bulb every now and then. Who cares? It's $100 lamp. But halogen makes a huge difference because it's warm and because there's infrared light in it. The other thing you can do to chill your eyes out a bit, having a red LED light on somewhere makes a really big difference for you, even if it's just behind your monitor. So you're just changing the ratio of this bright stuff. The eyes are expecting the rainbow of spectrum and heat to come from light. There should always be outdoors in the sun, there's heat and light together. When you get light without heat, the eyes actually don't turn on some of the healing stuff they should do. But I don't think you're going to turn on a radiant heater. I certainly don't do that. But if you look behind me there, see that red light that just came on behind me?

Yep.

At night those things are on. And I have something similar behind my monitor. So that there's just a little bit of a red glow. You'd be like, dave, you're the biggest nerd ever. Look, you're on a low carb diet, right? It's because too many carbs do bad things to you. Okay, Absolutely. I'm suggesting you need to change the ratio of red light to blue light and infrared light in your life the same way you did with your food. And that when you do that, it's going to create long term advantage for you. Okay. It's not as crazy as it sounds when you look at it through that lens. Right, Right. Okay. The next thing I want to do is go back to that training I did. The stuff I learned from Meyer Schneier. We talked about that resting of your eyes. They call that eye cupping. And guys, you can Google Bates method. You can look at Meyer Schneier's book Image M E I E R S C H N E I R One of the more inspiring books ever. You realize what this guy went through to retrain his brain? It's nuts. And it is tiring to do brain training. I have 40 years of Zen that does that. But training your eyes is just as tiring. So I brought something for you. This is actually left over from my eye training years ago. I would refer you guys, but the guy who did that is not there anymore. Like, they don't do that. So what I have. And a functional eye doctor or someone who does neurological eye training or a developmental ophthalmologist can do this. Can you see these little letters?

I cannot.

Well, that's because you have eye vision problems now. That's right. It might be a camera issue. It's just like a grid you would use for searching out a word finding game that you'd find, but they're pretty darn small. And I have a smaller one and a bigger one. So what you do with the nearsighted training or, sorry, the farsighted training, this is to train your up close vision. You have these really, really awesome little things. They're lenses that have different levels of focus. Kind of like readers. Right. But if you wear readers all the time or corrective lenses all the time, your eyes get weaker and weaker by design. Now, every eye doctor who recommends glasses. How dare you say this? Dave, don't you know, guys, I have some information that you may not have. And yes, I wore glasses for the first, whatever, 20, for at least 15, 17 years of my life. I haven't needed them ever since. And I know dozens of other people who've been able to train their eyes. So you can say it's impossible. I have evidence that it's possible. One of us is right, and one of us probably is wearing glasses. So there you go. Right? And this doesn't mean everyone can do it. And I'm not saying you shouldn't wear glasses. Just saying that if you put on progressively stronger readers, you do what most people do. Oh, like I'm just going to walk with a crutch all the time. And. Well, eventually you kind of need the crutch, and then you get a walker, right? And then you get a wheelchair, and it's a progressive decline. But if you're injured, you need the crutch for a little while, and that's okay. So what you do with these things is you look at the finest one you can see, and then you have the correct one. Then you turn it over, which makes your eyes go in, out, in, out, in, out. And you get really tired and probably yell at people around you because your brain's really hating life. Okay. Before that, training, not having toxins and having stuff that increases your mitochondrial function. I don't know, a little MCT oil, some coffee, you know, and all the other stuff you might do, even doing breathing exercises, maybe some wim hof, whatever you like. Anything's gonna charge you up. But you can actually do this. And you can order these. These kinds of lens things online. But honestly, find a developmental ophthalmologist or a neurological ophthalmologist. Call them up. Say, can you train my eyes? You actually do the same amount of effort you put into getting arms as big as tree trunks, you put into having eyes that can be flexible like that. And that's a big part of this. It's like you've been training so much of your body for so long that these guys haven't been trained, and you've increased the load on them a lot without any recovery time because of the shift in your studio lighting. And. Okay, without studio lighting. We have a history of people needing readers, but not as early as you. So you have early onset. Okay, so that's. I'm putting my. My cool toys away.

With the, like, I guess the red. The red true darks and the yellow true dark glasses. I think the ones I have. I think. I think. I think the red ones are normal. I don't think they're magnified at all.

No, they're not.

It's hard for me to really see anything with that on. So how can I. How can I. I just go I just usually wear them for a little bit and I usually just go to bed because I'm like, you know, I can't look at my phone. Which I think is a good healthy practice anyway.

So when I read at night, whether it's a screen or even a piece of paper, I have dimmed it as much as I can and I put on the glasses. So my night vision's better than yours. I also have a huge supplement advantage. So here's what I'm doing supplement wise. There are great studies on bilberry, astaxanthin and lutein as well as xenolutein and a bunch of other things like that. I don't know what eye formula you took, but it's not going to give you huge changes overnight. Except with night vision. And seeing through red or seeing during red light is similar to night vision. You actually, when you have red lights, I have. Even my exterior lighting on my house is all red. So I walk outside, I can see the Milky Way. And if that's partly because I live on an island pretty far north so there isn't light pollution, but it's also because my eyes don't get killed by my porch light. Right. Also that no bugs come to it. But what I do is I take five, which is a lot of the eye armor formula that I put together when I worked with Bulletproof and it has an absurd amount of astaxanthin in it. And I'm not recommending anyone do what I do, but I'm just sharing my practice of taking these things. You and me both, Mark, are big guys. What do you weigh, like 230. Okay. We actually weigh exactly the same amount. But you're like a foot shorter than me, right?

Something like that. I think two feet shorter. Yeah.

What are you like? I'm six four. So you're probably like five' nine or something. I don't remember. But I don't see height at all because everyone's about the same height to me.

I'm like 5 11, something like that.

Okay, so you're actually like just about the perfect six feet taller, but okay squats, you know, you're denser than me, we'll put it that way in a good way. So. But we're the same body weight. So it's approximately the same amount. But most of the vision supplements out there, we are balancing. Look, are people really going to buy this if I put as much as I want to put in there? Right. Versus you know, I'm going to have enough that there's clinical results to do this. I know it's going to help people, right? And it's not the case with all supplements that more is better. You know, you can overdo zinc and copper and minerals and B vitamins and stuff like that. So I don't want to tell you guys to go out there, but there are some really good arguments that having large, large amounts of astaxanthin are good for you. And Bilberry, we know, helps pilots from World War II, they figured it out that you can see better at night. So I think you want to do those because night vision means you can read under those red things and it's going to help your eye strength. And I'm still grateful that I can go to the store, I can pick up the bottle of supplements and they've got kind of a gray text on a green background in super fine print, and I can read it. I don't need glasses, but there are some days where I'm like, man, my vision is a little bit blurry today. And then I sit there and I do some exercises and I have learned to consciously focus my eyes. I can cover one eye and make the other eye go in and out. I didn't have that skill before I trained it. And that usually clears things up. And if not, I take some charcoal and I get my toxins down. And funny enough, the next day I can see you again. So your, your daily visual performance does vary. All right. You mentioned something at the beginning, getting sunlight in your eyes in the morning. There are studies that show getting ultraviolet light into your eyes helps with vision. Although the study that I'm aware of, uh, most says that it helps with, with nearsightedness. I don't know if it helps with farsightedness, which is what you're dealing with, but it probably would. And this isn't a huge amount. It's 20 minutes sunrise, maybe even sunset. The reason you're doing that is there's some circadian timing that's good for you. It's why I recommend it. Normally you don't need to stare right at the sun. In fact, a lot of people would tell you that's bad.