Hack Your Brain With Light
Suffer From Insomnia? Light Hacking Will Change Your Life
Page 1 of 2
It was only 33 years ago that a Harvard researcher proved that light governs our internal clocks. Since then, advances in measuring light, creating light, and even how we measure ourselves have unlocked an enormous amount of knowledge about how we can control ourselves with light.There is a reason I learned this. I moved from sunny California to Canada — a part of the world where the sun doesn’t shine as brightly. No, I didn’t get depression or Seasonal Affective Disorder — a clinical disorder caused by long winters. I just noticed that I got… slow. My entrepreneurial mojo didn’t completely disappear, but it wasn’t running at the levels I’ve come to expect from myself.
So I hacked it. And, in the process, I learned some things you probably don’t know about lights.
The Risks Of Getting Your Lights Wrong
Many studies have linked late-night exposure to light to some really unpleasant things, like obesity, breast cancer, prostate cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and more. Exposure to the blue spectrum of light is known to suppress production of melatonin for up to 4 hours, which interferes with sleep. Even worse, it doesn’t take much light to cause the effect.
What To Do At Night
In my own quest to hack my energy levels with light, I decided to do several things in the evening:
- Turn off bright lights before bed
- Stop using compact fluorescent lights (those curly bulbs) because they give off unhealthy amounts of blue spectrum and cause eye strain
- Switch to amber or red bulbs, which have no blue spectrum
- Wear orange-tinted glasses (not the sexiest item in my wardrobe)
- Stop staring at bright screens for two-plus hours before bed (by using f.lux)
- Black out my sleeping area by taping over LEDs or unplugging
The difference was profound — better, deeper sleep. (Disclosure: I do lots of other sleep hacking things, too.) In fact, I carry electrical tape with me when I stay in hotels (often) so I can tape over the omnipresent blue LEDs that ruin my sleep. (As I type this, I'm in a Los Angeles Hyatt room, which has fresh black tape over 2 LEDs that would otherwise interrupt my sleep.)
Using Light For Better Skin?
There is a body of evidence that light in the red spectrum triggers collagen synthesis. More collagen in the skin means less wrinkles and healthier skin. Since red light also has no blue spectrum, I use red light at night when it’s convenient. It’s surprisingly simple to install a $25 remote controlled stick-on color LED lighting strip over your bed. Better still, red light triggers the cellular power plants called mitochondria to work better through something called the mitochondrial transport chain. When your cellular energy is higher, you sleep better and you have more energy during the day.
That achieved part of my goal — more energy during the day. But I wasn’t done.