This is not some woo biology thing. This is grounded in the core of our physiology. There are literally hundreds if not thousands of quality peer-reviewed papers showing that light viewing early in the day is the most powerful stimulus for wakefulness throughout the day. It has a powerful positive impact on your ability to fall and stay asleep at night.
How to do it? and when?
- First hour after waking
- 5 ~ 15 minutes after waking
- Bright, clear day
- Low solar angle → Sun is low or the sun is getting overhead
- Don't look at the sun directly
- Totally fine to blink
Try and get outside ideally within the first 5 minutes of waking or maybe it's 15 minutes, but certainly within the first hour after waking. And if it's a bright, clear day, the sun is low in the sky or the sun is starting to get overhead what we call a low solar angle, then I know I'm getting outside at the right time. If there's cloud cover and I can't see the sun, I also know I'm doing a good thing because it turns out, especially on cloudy days, you want to get outside and get as much light energy or photons in your eyes.
Let's say it's a very clear day and I can see where the sun is. I do not need to stare directly into the sun. If it's very low in the sky, I might do that because it's not going to be very painful for my eyes. However, if the sun is a little bit brighter and a little bit higher in the sky, sometimes it could be painful to look at. So the way to get this sunlight viewing early in the day is to look toward the sun. If it's too bright to look at directly, then don't do that. Just look toward it but not directly at it, and it's definitely fine to blink. In fact, I encourage you to blink whenever you feel the impulse to blink.
How it works?
Never look at any light, sunlight, or otherwise, that is so bright that it's painful to look at because it can damage your eyes. But for this morning's sunlight viewing, it's best to not wear sunglasses. It is fine to wear eyeglasses or contact lenses, so-called corrective lenses. In fact, those will serve you well in this practice because they will focus the light onto your neural retina and that melanopsin intrinsically photosensitive ganglion cells. If your eyeglasses or contact lenses have UV protection, that's fine. There are so many different wavelengths of light coming from the sun and they are brighter enough that they will trigger mechanisms that you want to activate at this early time of day.
The bright artificial light in your home environment is not going to be sufficiently bright to turn on the cortisol mechanism and the other wake-up mechanisms that you need. Early in the day, right around waking, you need a lot of light, a lot of photons, and a lot of light energy. Artificial lights generally just won't accomplish what you need them to accomplish, but at night, even a bit of artificial light can really mess up your circadian, your 24-hour clocks, and all these mechanisms that we're talking about.
Another key thing to notice
Don't try to get this sunlight exposure through a car's windshield or a window whether or not it's tinted or otherwise. It takes far too long, it's simply not going to trigger the relevant mechanisms. You would be standing there all day trying to get enough light into your eyes from the morning sunlight and by then the sun will have already moved from low solar angel to overhead. And it won't work for all sorts of mechanisms related to your circadian rhythm functions.
How much light viewing do you need?
This is going to vary depending on the person and place, literally where you live on earth, whether or not there's a lot of tree cover, whether or not you have sensitive eyes or less sensitive eyes. It's really hard to give an absolute prescriptive, but we can give some general guidelines. In general, on a clear day, meaning no cloud cover or minimal cloud cover, you want to get this sunlight exposure to your eyes for about 5 minutes or so. On a day when there's cloud cover, the sun is just peeking through the clouds, or it's more dense cloud cover, you want to get about 10 minutes of sunlight exposure to your eyes early in the day.
This is really the foundational power tool for ensuring a great night's sleep and for feeling more awake during the day.
Source: Dr. Andrew Huberman
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The next daily routine blog topic might be "Dream", but it's the dream that happens when you sleep.