Using Light (Sunlight, Blue Light & Red Light) to Optimize Health

In healthy adults, even just one night of sleeping in a moderately-lit environment, this 100-lux environment, caused changes—increases in nighttime heart rate, which means that the sympathetic nervous system was overly active... decreases in heart rate variability... and increases in next morning insulin resistance, which is an indication that glucose management is suffering.

In terms of thinking about a protocol to increase testosterone & estrogen, mood, and feelings of passion, the idea is that you would want to get these 2-3 exposures per week minimum of 20-30 minutes of sunlight exposure onto as much of your body as you can reasonably expose it to.

While UVB exposure in the morning and throughout the day is going to be very important for elevating and maintaining elevated mood, avoiding UVB light at night is actually a way in which we can prevent activation of this eye to perihabenular pathway that can actually turn on depression .. Avoid exposure to UVB light from artificial sources between the hours of 10 PM and 4 AM.

If you wake up in the middle of the night, and you go into the bathroom, and you flip on the lights, and those are very bright overhead fluorescent lights, your melatonin levels... will immediately plummet to near-zero or zero.

Even on a cloud-covered day, you are going to get far more light energy (photons) through cloud cover than you are going to get from an indoor light source, an artificial light source.

Even one exposure to UVB light changed the output of particular hormones and neurochemicals in the body, such as corticotropin hormone and beta-endorphins, which are these endogenous opioids ... Here, I'm referring to endorphins that our body naturally manufacturers and releases in order to counter pain and act as somewhat of a psychological soother, also.

If you're somebody who's experiencing chronic pain, provided you can do it safely, try to get some UVB exposure, ideally from sunlight. I think the 20-30 minute protocol 2 or 3 times per week is an excellent one.

When we get a lot of UVB light in our eyes, or I should say sufficient UVB light in our eyes, a particular channel, a particular set of connections within the sympathetic nervous system is activated, and our spleen deploys immune cells and molecules that scavenge for and combat infection.

One of the best things that we can all do is to get the proper amount of sunlight each day—and by proper, I mean, appropriate for that time of year. So, in the summer months where the days are longer and nights are shorter, we would all do well to get more sunlight in our eyes ... And in the winter months, it makes sense to spend more time indoors.

The amount of melatonin that you're releasing each night is changing according to time of year ... When you start supplementing melatonin, you start changing the total amount of melatonin, obviously, but you're also changing the normal rhythms in how much melatonin is being released into your brain and body across the 365-day calendar year.

There are beautiful studies showing that if we get more UVB exposure from sunlight or from appropriate artificial sources that spleen and immune function are enhanced.

Just brief exposures to red light early in the day can offset much of the vision loss that occurs in people 40 years or older.

Long-wavelength light, like red light and near-infrared light, has this amazing ability to penetrate through tissues, including your skin. And so, if we were to shine red light or near-infrared light onto your arm, it would pass through that top layer of skin. It might impact it a little bit, but it could penetrate deeper into your skin, not just to the skin layers, but maybe even down to the bone—maybe even down to the bone marrow.

In general, infrared saunas don't get hot enough, temperature-wise, in order to trigger some of the important effects on growth hormone and heat shock proteins and some of the other things that sauna has been shown to be excellent for.

Different wavelengths of light, because of the way that their wave travels, can penetrate tissues to different depths.

Different wavelengths of light not only can penetrate down into different tissues and into different cells of your body, but they can also penetrate and access particular organelles, meaning mitochondria or the nucleus or the different aspects of your cells that are responsible for different functions.