This 2-Minute Habit Can Improve Your Sleep and Mood

...unless you live in Antarctica

Millions of people will struggle to fall asleep tonight either due to poor sleep hygiene, a sleep disorder or a lack of healthy evening and morning habits. 

We are asleep for around ⅓ of our lives but very few people will know that their behaviour throughout the day will impact their ability to fall asleep and get enough good quality hours of sleep. 

But it turns out that there is 1 habit that we can easily adopt that will increase alertness, elevate mood throughout the day and make it easier to fall asleep at night and get more good quality sleep. 

Getting sunlight into the eyes as soon after waking as possible, ideally within the first 15 minutes after waking, is scientifically proven to trigger the release of neurochemicals at the right time throughout the day and to regulate our circadian rhythm. 

In fact, German researchers found that light is the most powerful ‘zeitgeber’, or cue, that regulates our circadian rhythm. Even more so than exercise. And this has been proven to be the case in thousands of scientific studies. 

The light we are talking about here is natural sunlight. Yes our mobile devices emit blue light too but it is not powerful enough to affect our morning alertness and mood. 

However the dichotomy is that blue light from our phones IS powerful enough to disrupt our ability to fall asleep if viewed late at night, which is why it’s so important to regulate screen time or at least block blue light late at night.

Dr Andrew Huberman of Stanford recommends getting just 2 to 10 minutes of natural sunlight soon after waking and it’s even more important on cloudy days. 

We don’t need to stare directly at the sun but looking toward the sun, up into the sky, even if the sun is hidden by clouds will guarantee that we absorb powerful waves of light.

So what’s happening in our brain when we do this? 

Our cortisol levels are highest in the morning and lowest at night, at least this is what a healthy cortisol curve looks like. This spike in cortisol in the morning is extremely important for waking up and becoming alert, however, an unhealthy release of cortisol throughout the day and elevated cortisol levels late at night, perhaps due to stress, will impact our ability to fall and stay asleep. 

Physiologically we are going to get a spike of cortisol once every 24 hours, there is nothing we can do about that. But we can time that release by exposing ourselves to sunlight early in the morning. Pretty cool, right?

Second, bright natural light will start the release of dopamine, the chemical linked with pleasure, motivation and the pursuit of reward. This has a profound effect on our mood throughout the day.

In the modern world, humans have become dopamine junkies. Our brains are wired all day long with dopamine hit after dopamine hit. In fact, anytime we want another hit we just pull out our phone, open social media and boom we got our dopamine fix. 

However, dopamine is incredibly important in our neurobiology and triggering the release early in the morning will improve our mood which we can carry into the rest of our day. 

And lastly, getting sunlight in our eyes as soon as we wake up anchors our circadian rhythm. The circadian rhythm is our naturally occurring internal body clock that regulates our alertness and sleepiness throughout the day. Needless to say we want to feel alert during the day and sleepy when we go to bed. 

Throughout times of the year when exposure to early morning sunlight is limited we might experience a disruption to our circadian rhythm. That disruption can lead to seasonal affective disorders, sleep disorders, depression, diabetes and even obesity.

For places on Earth with very little sunlight throughout the day the role of artificial light becomes even more important. 

A 2018 study found that long-term sunlight deprivation in Antarctica led to irregular circadian rhythms and sleep disruption. The paper concluded, “Our results suggest that during long-term daylight deprivation, retinal sensitivity to blue light increases, whereas circadian rhythm stability decreases and sleep-wake timing is delayed.”

Maybe that’s why there are no permanent human habitats in Antarctica. Then again it might be the polar bears roaming around the back garden.

In places where there is plenty of life, like the US, 5% of adults suffer with Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) which can last up to 40% of the year. SAD is linked to a chemical imbalance due to shorter sunlight hours and fewer total sunlight hours in the winter. 

While it might be freezing cold standing outside, getting 2 to 10 minutes of natural light into the eyes soon after waking up is even more important during the winter and this small daily habit can contribute to combating SAD altogether. 

Getting sunlight in the morning is so important that one paper in 2001 found that people in hospitals with bipolar where their window was facing the sunrise spent on average 3.67 days fewer in hospital than those with bipolar on the opposite wing of the building that had no sunlight through their window in the morning.

This paper concluded ‘Natural sunlight can be an underestimated and uncontrolled light therapy for bipolar depression.’ A remarkable finding but can doctors really be expected to prescribe ‘sunlight’ instead of medication to a patient with bipolar depression. The science might be there but it opens an entire social dilemma of what is expected of doctors treating mental health.

Nevertheless, it seems that adopting a small daily habit of getting exposure to natural sunlight as early as possible can have a wonderful impact on our daily mood and can regulate our neurobiology so that we can fall asleep quicker and get better quality sleep. 

Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear if natural sunlight in the morning has any profound effect on your sleeping patterns and mood.

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