A short talk advising morning sunlight exposure (10–20 minutes) to stimulate retinal photoreceptors and set circadian rhythms, which affects hormone production (cortisol, DHEA) and sleep/energy. The speaker also recommends sleeping with natural darkness (avoid late-night sleep after ~10:30) and using full-spectrum white light in low-sunlight seasons as a biohack to entrain rhythms.
The three things that really have shifted how I feel. The first thing is as soon as you wake up in the morning, you need to go outside and get sunlight on your retinas. Retinas are the space in the back of your eye that respond to light and that produces chemicals in your body. It's part of your circadian rhythm and so it affects how much cortisol and DHEA you make and all of these really important hormones to be able to function and create and have energy. And so the game changer is when you go outside as soon as you wake up and get that sunlight onto your retina. So you're just outside enjoying the sun for a good 10 to 20 minutes before you get going for the rest of the day. So you like I just take my dogs for a walk as soon as I get up because that gets me outside in the sunlight. You don't stare at the sun directly or anything like that, but you want to make sure you're not wearing sunglasses and that you're just getting out there and getting exposed to the light. Your skin responds, your eyes respond, everything responds to that actual sun penetration and it sensitive sets your circadian rhythm up for the day to help you produce energy and then you can sleep better that night. So honestly, our bodies were created with these clocks. We have multiple clocks in our bodies. They're all physiologic clocks. They set our circadian rhythm and we need to go to bed when it gets dark. That's part of it as well, is you want to make sure that you're falling asleep. You know, if you're Falling asleep after 10:30, there's a high likelihood that you're not going to make the melatonin, that you need to sleep because your clock wasn't activated. And so you really want to go to sleep when it gets dark, wake up when the sun comes up. So we really are connected to the universe in that way. That's how our bodies were created to function. And so optimizing the circadian rhythm is going to be key for your energy production. And if you're like me, I live in Michigan. And so it's not always sunny, and especially in the winter months, we might not see hardly any sun or light at all. And so that's when you have to do a little biohack and get a full spectrum white light. You can buy that quickly on Amazon. And you just shine that toward your face for the first 10 or 15 minutes of the day and it will stimulate the your same clocks. So that's what I do in the winter. And I've done it so long that my circadian rhythms are really well set and I don't have to do it every day. So I think I did it. I made sure I got outside and got the full white light for like a month, where I finally felt my circadian rhythms just shift back into balance. And that really helped me fall asleep easier, stay asleep until morning and then have energy through the day. So please, try those little hacks. It's a game changer.
