Morning Sunlight Exposure

Swedish cohort of 30,000 women — sun avoidance as dangerous as smoking for mortality

A 20-year Swedish study tracking nearly 30,000 women found a dose-dependent curve where more sun exposure correlated with longer lifespan. The most striking finding was that women who got the most sun but also smoked had the same mortality rate as non-smokers who avoided the sun, putting sun avoidance on par with smoking as a risk factor.

"There are almost 30,000 women they track these women over 20 year period and they looked at their light exposure habits so how much sunlight they got they had three sort of groups of women right the woman who got the least amount of sun the woman who got a little bit more right in the middle and then the woman who got the most amount of sun exposure"

UK replication with 400,000 people confirmed — more sun exposure, lower all-cause mortality

A UK researcher replicated the Swedish sunlight study with 400,000 individuals and found the exact same results — people who got more sun exposure had longer lives and died less from all causes. There is no study showing that more sun exposure increases mortality.

"Sun exposure had longer lives they died less from all causes so all cause mortality dying from any cause whether that be cardiovascular disease cancer things like that and so this should shock a lot of people you know for me perhaps you as well I mean it sort of is common sense right when we look at our evolution or history we lived out in the sun we were outdoors 24 7 a lot of things were different back then we were we were you know living healthier lives out in the sun that clearly is showing up in the literature right"

Travel health toolkit: sunlight, red lights, cold water, and NSDR on the road

The core travel protocol combines morning sunlight, evening red lights to lower cortisol, local meal timing, exercise, and daily NSDR -- all zero-cost tools that shift your circadian rhythm fast.

"Really the quadfecta of shifting your circadian rhythm in a new place or becoming an early riser is morning sunlight, movement, social engagement, and caffeine."

Jet lag hack: bright light 2 hours before your normal wake time to shift your clock

Find your temperature minimum (2 hrs before usual wake time), then get bright light exposure at that time for a few days before travel to phase-advance your circadian clock.

"Most people won't do that. It's just, you know, it takes a little bit of work, but they just don't have the time ability or your discipline to do that. But it is perhaps the best way."

Morning light exposure for energy focus and better sleep

Dr. Will Bulsiewicz explains how morning light exposure provides the critical signal for circadian rhythm, improving energy, cognitive focus, mood, and sleep quality, recommending either outdoor exposure or a 10,000 lux lamp.

"And the other thing that you're going to notice is that it gets to the evening and you're ready to go to bed and you're going to sleep well. Why? Because of that simple signal of getting light in the morning that your body really needs in order to know that the day begins."

Morning sunlight resets cortisol rhythm and boosts serotonin for better sleep

Stevenson explains how early-day sunlight exposure increases serotonin (the precursor to melatonin) and normalizes cortisol rhythm, citing a study showing sunlight in the morning decreased evening cortisol levels and an office worker study showing those without window access slept 46 minutes less per night.

"I started to embark on a lot more exercise and movement, even though they were saying to be careful, don't do this, don't do that, bed rest, bed rest. Your body doesn't heal unless it has a reason to. So your body requires movement in order to heal itself. So that's part one. But the assimilation of nutrients, the regeneration of your tissues, the vast majority of that takes place when you're at rest, specifically while you're asleep. And sleep is known as the, quote, the anabolic state for humans. Just being awake is catabolic. We could argue that during certain phases of meditation, we can get into more of an anabolic state, but just being awake for the average person is very catabolic and it's just the way it is. So we need that sleep and recovery. So once I was able to start to change some of the things in my daily ritual, all of a sudden I start to sleep better. And mind you, I was helping to keep Tylenol PM in business, man, at that time. I was popping those pills every single night just to get what I thought was a couple of extra hours of sleep, one to two hours of additional sleep because the pain would wake me up. But I didn't understand that I was really sacrificing my sleep quality and also leading to some really weird side effects that I didn't know until years later were attributed to taking the prescription medication as well as the over-the-counter stuff, like restless leg syndrome. This was before it had a sexy pill to go along with the name. So I'm just laying there in bed trying to go to sleep and my legs are active. I'm just like, go to sleep, legs. And it was so weird. And nobody really gave me an answer when I talk to my physician about what it was. It didn't have a quote diagnosis yet. And so long story short, once I started to change my sleeping habits, it's like the floodgates open and everything started to improve so fast to the degree that I lost about 28 pounds in the next six weeks. The pain that I've been experiencing for the past two and a half years was virtually gone. And the people who know my story, eventually fast forward the good happy ending when nine months later, when I got a scan done of my spine, I was able to regenerate some tissue, actually grew a half an inch when I had lost about three fourths of an inch in my height. And my physician was just like, whatever you're doing, keep doing it. And that was the birthing of my career. And so that was the first part for me. But when I started my clinical practice, which I ran for over a decade, I saw about at the five year mark, all of these amazing success stories, you know, and we had around, right around 89% reversal rate for people with type two diabetes, you know, so essentially helping them to get off their metformins, insulin, things like that. But there was always this category, this class of people who wouldn't get the results everyone else was getting. And it wasn't a lack of trying, because that's the first thing as a trainer, you would think and also as a practitioner, you know, in health, is that the person isn't doing the thing, you know, you're not following the program. But a lot of times, that's not the case. You know's the case. There are people who are sneaking honey buns under their shirt and doing stuff behind closed doors. But for the most part, people are honestly trying to do their best and get the result. And so I finally remembered, I'm not thinking about sleep problems because I'm sleeping so well and I'm healthy. Let me ask these people about their sleep. And it blew my mind. I could not, it was just like automatic. Everybody that I talked to who weren't getting the results, well, we'll just say 99%. There was like a handful of people who were sleeping to what I thought at the time well, but people getting less than four hours of sleep. They were waking up habitually multiple times during the night to go pee, or they've got a snoring partner, or they have sleep apnea, and all these things that people weren't telling me in the initial forms that they were supposed to fill out. And so that sent me on a quest to find out how to help these people to improve their sleep quality immediately. And again, man, once we did that and really locked in some of these strategies we're going to be talking about today, it's as if the floodgates would open, man. And sometimes they would get results faster than people who didn't have sleep issues. It so quickly changed the things that were going on from their insulin sensitivity to weight loss, to improving their cardiac function, just so many things changed. And once that happened, man, I had to tell the world about it. So that kind of birthed a couple of episodes of my show and I saw it got a bunch of downloads. So I was like, people want to know about this. So that's when I first wrote the book and here we are today. Yeah. And I failed to mention this in the introduction, but you and I had a really fascinating discussion a few months ago on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show about how you essentially simulated stem cell injections without actually getting stem cells injected through the use of some of these things like aloe vera gel and colostrum and chlorella and different things that you use to regenerate your spine. And that's obviously a whole different rabbit hole. But for those of you listening in who want to hear about that part of Sean's journey, just go to the show notes for this episode at bengreenfieldfitness.com slash sleep smart. That's bengreenfieldfitness.com slash sleep smart. Because hand in hand with what Sean and I are about to talk about when it comes to sleep, I'd recommend you go and listen to that episode that we did, which is entitled Lightning Speed Healing Hack or Overpriced Fad, What You Need to Know About Stem Cells. So go listen to that if you would like. But in the meantime, Sean, first question that I have for you about sleep is whether with all these different hacks and modalities and the things that you write about in the book, are you tracking sleep or quantifying sleep at all? Do you use any of these devices? Yeah. So this is why I really love talking with you. You know, I've done so many different interviews, especially the past year or two years actually on this topic. And, you know, because I know that you're somebody who is tracking this stuff and a lot of, a lot of different ways, a lot of different experimentations for myself, I err on the side of the old faithful, which is just paying attention to my body, you know, and specifically how I look, feel and perform. And I know myself very well, you know, I'm one of those people, especially being in this field, and I know you the same way. I know I'm very in touch with my body and how sensitive things are. You know, so if I take a certain supplement, I'll notice a difference, you know, and most people might not notice, especially right off the bat. So I'll notice a little bit of, if I don't sleep well, a little bit of cognitive impairment, you know, so I'm not as sharp. The energy levels are low, obviously. And, you know, simple things like, and also I'll just, I'll put it like this, emotional inconsistency, you know, so I'll notice that I'm a little bit more irritated by traffic, by my kids, by requests for my wife, which are ongoing anyway. So it's Like, why would I get an attitude about it? You know, so I would, I start to catch myself and see that I'm just, I'm not really on my game. And so those are some of the big ones. Also, you know, I noticed because I do some type of training every day and my balance will be noticeably impaired. You know, I kind of do a little bit of a test every day before I start training and just, you know, fooling around on a stability ball or something like that. And I'll notice the days that I don't get the high quality sleep, which is very, very rare that I'm not able to keep my balance as efficiently. So I err on the side of that because, you know, for myself personally, which I want to definitely hear what you're doing on this front and what you found to be effective. But for me, I'm like gadget free when I'm in that in that bed. Yeah, I too went gadget free for a very long time. And then I'd even though I issue constantly being plugged into something, because I want to stay away from like Bluetooth signals and Wi Fi signals while sleeping, I now am quantifying sleep. So before what I did was I would wake up and I would take my heart rate variability or my HRV measurement. Because what I've found was that even though, like you mentioned, when I'm just listening to my body, I can tell when a poor night of sleep is going to lead to me getting injured or ill. You just Like you just feel those things building up, especially like consecutive poor nights of sleep. What I found was that I could predict two to three days in advance, not just a neuromuscular lack of recovery that could lead to poor sleep, but also a greater risk for injury or illness when my heart rate variability would begin to dip low in the morning days in advance of me actually getting injured or ill. And what I'd find is if I'd push through low heart rate variability, a low heart rate variability morning score that even if I felt good for a few days pushing through it, if I ignored that score and just listened to right, without paying attention to that score, for some reason, it's so, so easy to stay tuned to our musculoskeletal system, right? Like, am I sore? Do my joints hurt a little bit? Do I need a recovery day off? But sometimes you don't realize when your neuromuscular system isn't quite as recovered. And so that's what I was doing for a long time. But now I use a device that I just discovered. And I've got no financial affiliation or anything with this company. But there's this ring called an Aura ring. And it measures your temperature, your respiration, your heart rate, your heart rate variability, your steps. It's like a Fitbit on steroids, basically. But the cool thing is it has a computer built into it, which means that you can put it in airplane mode while you are asleep and not get exposed to any type of Bluetooth radiation or anything like that. And in the morning, you simply open up your phone and you sync it to your phone, and it shows you sleep latency, rapid eye movement sleep, non-rapid eye movement sleep, sleep cycle, sleep efficiency. At what point during the night your heart rate dropped the lowest, which I never realized is actually that is supposed to be consistent. And if your heart rate drops its lowest later on in the night, like at, say, 4 a.m. or 5 a.m., and you're usually dropping your lowest at, like, 1. 1.30 or 2am, it's actually a sign of poor recovery or a poor night of sleep. So now I am kind of geeking out on sleep cycles. And I recently wrote a whole article on it. I'll link to it in the show notes for this podcast that you and I are doing. But yeah, I've kind of gone past the unplugging stage and I am now quantifying and tracking. I kind of like that concept of the combination, right, of listening to your body and then better living through science. Yeah, I love it, man. And that speaks to something really important too, because it was a sleep expert. His name was Phil Gurman, Dr. Phil Gurman. And he basically found over the years that and compiled studies showing that over time, people who are basically getting less sleep than that's optimal, you know, say getting six hours of sleep a night instead of eight or whatever it is. And by the way, at no point in time in Sleep Smarter do I say you need to get blank hours of sleep because it's really not about the hours, which we'll come back to. But he said that people begin to feel like they've adapted to the sleep deprivation across the board. And they essentially we get used to it. And I know that I've done that throughout my lifetime as well. But if you look at how we actually do on tests of mental alertness and performance, specifically, they start to go downhill and also our biomarkers, you know, so even though you feel like everything is normal, those things do start to go downhill. And again, this is why I love talking with you because it's like having that balance of both. Yeah. So yeah, man. Yeah. Interesting. Now, now speaking of, of, uh, science, you talk about sunlight, you have, you have a whole chapter on light during the day. You talk about getting more sunlight during the day. And I like how you go into how that helps to normalize your circadian rhythm, how that exposure to blue light during the day can help you to sleep better at night. Interestingly, did you see the recent study that just came out that showed even that exposure to blue light or sunlight during the day actually diminishes your sensitivity to things like Kindles and e-readers and phones and stuff like that at night? It decreases how damaging they can be? Wow. No, I have not seen that one yet, man. You got to forward me that. Yeah, I will. It's very interesting, but basically it goes into the fact that you get less of the melatonin suppressing effect that phones and Kindles and stuff can have if you get a bunch of sunlight or blue light during the day. So it's all about, you know, like not just absence of blue light at night, but presence of blue light during the day. And I know you get into sunlight in the book, but I'm curious if you've done much experimentation or if you've looked into blue light boxes or in-ear phototherapy or any of these glasses that produce high amounts of blue light or any of like simulate sunlight? Yes. Yeah, definitely. I've experimented with quite a few things, but I want to point out really quickly why this matters. You know, and I know you talk a lot about this stuff too, but exposure to sunlight. So this is one of the things that in essence, it, it quote, can help to quote, reset your, your cortisol rhythm. All right. So your circadian clock a little bit. And so, you know, humans through evolutionary biology, we've had a very predictable light and dark pattern. And obviously today we can essentially simulate a second daytime by coming home and just blasting every single light. And we don't even think about it, you know, and it's just a part of our culture. And so your body really starts to get out of sync with what's real and natural and what your genes expect you to do."

Bright light exposure protocol for morning cortisol boost

Detailed protocol for getting bright light into your eyes within the first hour of waking to boost cortisol levels by up to 50%, which helps establish proper circadian rhythm and improves energy throughout the day.

"The protocol is to get bright light, ideally from sunlight, into your eyes within the first hour of waking, ideally within the first 30 minutes."

Sunlight as essential nutrient for human health

Saladino makes a comprehensive case that sunlight is essential for optimal human health, discussing benefits for mood, vitamin D production, endorphins, and nitric oxide release, arguing it should be considered a nutrient alongside diet.

"I would say essential for humans, that it is a nutrient, that we could even expand the conceptualization of an animal-based diet to be organs, meat, fruit, honey, raw dairy, and ultraviolet sunlight outside. But when I make that case that sunlight is so essential and so valuable for humans, I'm sure many people will say, but Paul, doesn't sunlight cause skin cancer? So I will talk then about melanoma, a skin cancer that is canonically thought of as a sun-associated."

Light exposure for circadian rhythm regulation

Huberman and Walker discuss the importance of getting 30-40 minutes of natural daylight exposure early in the day to regulate circadian rhythms and improve sleep quality. Walker shares how he selects gyms based on east-facing windows and discusses research showing workers near windows sleep 30+ minutes longer.

"Yeah, I agree. Along those lines, as a vision scientist, I've been very excited by the work on these non-image-forming cells in the eye, the so-called melanopsin cells that inform the brain about circadian time of day. And I'm a big proponent of people getting some sunlight, ideally sunlight, but other forms of bright light in their eyes early in the day and when they want to be awake. Essentially during the phase of their 24 hour circadian cycle, when temperature is rising and then starting to get less light in their eyes as our temperature is going down in terms of later in the day and in the evening. Are there any adjustments to that general theme that you'd like to add or is in any way?"

Morning sunlight preps cells to handle midday UV without burning

Early sunrise exposure builds structured water in cells, boosts mitochondrial melatonin, and kickstarts the cortisol rhythm -- all of which precondition the body for stronger midday sun. Skipping sunrise and jumping straight into intense sun is a recipe for oxidative damage.

"Also, they're helping the mitochondria to basically make energy and kind of be more resilient and have more melatonin as well. There's also the benefits of getting this cortisol rhythm going, which is, as I mentioned earlier, So I would say it seems quite clear, based on my understanding and the evidence that there is, that getting morning sunlight, early morning sunlight is going to help to make your system more prepared and sort of preconditioned for midday and later sun exposure versus like staying out late, drinking, which is also an issue. Of course, dehydrates your body and whatnot. That's what a lot of people do when they're in the tropics, you know, having."

Sunlight for circadian rhythm reset

Jim Kwik emphasizes morning sunlight as essential for resetting circadian rhythms as part of his brain optimization morning routine.

"But going back to sleep, that sunlight is so important first thing in the morning, right?"

Morning sunlight for alertness and adenosine clearance

Huberman recommends getting sunlight in your eyes as soon as possible after waking to enhance alertness and help clear residual adenosine from the system.

"Typically, people get out of bed, they might look at their phone. As you know, I encourage them to go find sunlight if the sun isn't out, to turn on bright lights and then get outside and get sunlight in their eyes as soon as they can."