Hi I’m Reese this is my podcast let’s get into it. None of this is official medical advice.

In this episode we’re talking about sleep — everyone’s favorite. Nap time, bedtime, sleep time, nigh night time. Whatever. And specifically how light changes your sleep and can make your sleep WORSE. This will help you if you struggle to fall asleep, stay asleep, get up in the morning, or don’t feel tired at night. That’s the intro. I hope you enjoyed it. Let’s go.

So first things first. Light.

Now that that’s out of the way we can get into the meat and POEtatoes about how light affects sleep.

So the most common form of light I’m sure you’ve heard of before or maybe even SEEN it a time or two — The sun. The sun gives off light. We base our entire days around when the sun is giving us light and that is for an important reason.

The sun forms our circadian rhythm. The Circadian rhythm is going to be the most important, crucial, and important thing to understand right now. Basically it’s our body’s internal clock.

And 99% of what I believe in revolves around the idea that you should listen to your body — Because your body has energy, feeling, emotions, pain whereas your mind can get distracted, overthink, make excuses, and get horny which is the most important. You don’t want that to happen.

So listening to your body’s circadian rhythm is going to make sleep the best.  But first you need to set that circadian rhythm. You do this by doing 2 things. 1 is going to sleep and waking up at relatively the same time every day. And by relatively I mean maybe 15-30 minutes difference at max.

The other way you can set your circadian rhythm is with your light diet. Which super conveniently, we are talking about right now.

So a minute ago I mentioned the sun. The sun is the light source that sets your circadian rhythm. Ideally you want to be awake for the sunrise — Because light tells your body that you are meant to be awake.

Like if any of you degenerates have ever pulled an all-nighter, you may have gotten slightly tired at 4-5 in the morning — but once the sun starts to rise and the sky gets a bit lighter, you probably noticed a burst of energy during sunrise and you weren’t tired anymore. That’s your body saying “Yo dude it’s light out so we’re meant to be awake”

Then at sunset it gets dark. I don’t know if you knew that or not… but it does. Now usually people are awake for 16 hours a day give or take. The sun’s not always up for 16 hours. And our circadian rhythm knows that very well so we start to get sleepy a couple hours AFTER it gets dark out.

If you don’t get sleepy a couple hours after it’s dark out, it’s because your circadian rhythm isn’t set right. And it really doesn’t take long to set it right. I’ll talk about optimizing your circadian rhythm in a couple minutes.

But as I was saying, you get sleeping a couple hours after it gets dark out. The general optimal sleeping time proved by science is from 10PM to 6AM. And It makes complete sense according to sunrise, sunset, and circadian rhythm. 6AM is early enough to see the sunrise and 10PM is a couple hours after sunset. This makes sense.

Sleep archetypes will be in other episode someday sometime in the future and I’ll talk about the ideal sleeping time for YOU specifically. But for now, the general consensus of 10PM to 6AM will do.

So because the sun sets, there is much less light. It’s magical. Your body knows there is much less light so it starts winding down a bit and knows the end of the day is coming.

It sounds so perfect. And it is when it isn’t interrupted. But that’s the issue. It is ALWAYS interrupted — By blue light.

Blue light comes from screens, ceiling lights that are white, and in general just cooler, or whiter, light sources. But blue light ALSO comes from the sun.

The sun gives out all kinds of light. From a quick Google search it’s about 40% visible light, that we can see from the color spectrum. And a chunk of that visible light is blue light. About 50% is infrared light which mostly heat and radiation. And about 5% is UV or UltraViolet light — which is on the side of blue light. Cause think about the light spectrum, you’ve got violet (which you can’t see), blue, white, and cooler colors, and it goes into orange, ambers, reds, which you can see, and then infrared on the red light side which you can not see.

And for the smarty pants’s out there you might realize that the percentages I gave only added up to 95%, not 100. Well yeah I just gave rough examples and number. The remaining 5% is probably spread out among everything I don’t know.