The Simple Gift of Light #4
Light can help you move with energy…and perform brilliantly all day long, no matter what you do.
Sometimes I feel a bit like a huckster selling a miracle elixir when I talk about the benefits light can bring to our lives. I picture myself standing in a dusty wooden wagon in downtown Deadwood, shouting to passerby.
“Step right up to the Miracle Elixir Wagon and look ten years younger for only one dollar!”
Ashleigh, my imaginary reader, is no dummy, yet they have a look of confusion as they stare at light bulb boxes labeled “refresh” and “relax.” Can a light bulb deliver refreshment or relaxation? Of course not, no more than drinking a Coca Cola will deliver a music-filled evening with hip friends and raucous laughter, despite what the television commercial shows. You would be wise to be skeptical when someone is trying to sell you something.
How can I convince you that light can do pretty amazing things, if you let it? Can you trust me because I do not sell any lighting products? Can you trust me because I can speak in techno-babble and string together acronyms like LED, CBCP, CRI, and CCT? Hang on to your skepticism whenever anyone wants your money. And let go of it when you want to live a better life.
Yes, I am saying that now is the time to let go of your skepticism, at least for a few minutes, and listen to the guy hawking brighter futures.
PERFORM BRILLIANTLY
I spend a ridiculous amount of time trying to figure out how to talk about light in ways that others find useful. That means The Simple Gift of Light series is by no means my first series aimed at breaking down the technology, science, biology, and technique of light into digestible posts.
Not long ago I wrote a series that categorized what I call the Five Promises of Light: Light can help you do better, know more, feel better, focus clearly, and change easily. A few weeks ago, when I started this series, I chose to focus instead on four key benefits that align with our daily routines: light can help us wake gently, move with energy, relax easily, and rest deeply.
Today I should be writing an entire post on how light helps us Move with Energy, but I am going to change the focus slightly. Light, during our daily routines, can do more than boost our energy. So instead, let’s call this the Perform Brilliantly post.
The simple gift of light, you could say, can boost your physical performance, your mental performance, and your emotional performance to their highest levels. What about the 5 Promises? They still apply, we’re just focusing a bit closer to our daily lives.
PHYSICAL PERFORMANCE
How did you start your day today – after all the wake-up routines were done? I started my day with a 30-minute video workout for wimps, a shower, breakfast, and a quick trip to the office to grab some supplies for the day. Ashleigh, who we imagine working as a nurse, gets the kids ready for school on Tuesdays when their partner has early track practice. There are lunches to pack, breakfasts to eat, backpacks to grab, coffee to make, hair to comb, and a thousand daily tasks required to get a family moving in the morning.
Then they are off to school and work, where Ashleigh regularly logs more than 20,000 steps over a 12-hour shift at the hospital. I find this a bit hard to picture because my job is often extremely sedentary. I sit (and often stand) at a desk. For eight hours a day. But my partner, who works for a non-profit, regularly quadruples my step count, so I know Ashleigh will need a lot of energy to keep going all day long.
So what does it mean to perform brilliantly, physically? Light, when we have the right light in our lives, is a key factor in our energy level throughout the day. Light is a primary trigger of hormonal functions that drive alertness and sleepiness. I am a jogger and am writing this in late Springtime when our days in Wisconsin are nearing their longest and that means my 5:30am runs have way more light in them – the sun rises long before I am done – than in December when I start and finish each run in pure darkness.
I generally run 30-seconds to a full minute faster per mile this time of year than winter. I have been telling myself that I run faster when it is warmer, but I have no idea why. I just assume that wearing fewer clothes and having warmer muscles means I get faster. But what if the brighter early mornings are also contributing to my increased energy level? My body and yours makes cortisol to get us going in the morning when we are exposed to dawn, so it seems possible, perhaps even likely, that light is contributing to my increased speed.
Bursts of speed can be fun, but sustaining our energy all day long is important to our performance at work and in every daily activity. When sequestered below unchanging and inadequate electric light, we miss the signals that keep us moving and end up supplementing with chemicals to lift our energy (and lower it at the end of the day). Our ancestors could move all day hunting and working in the fields, but after four hours of electric light I need caffeine to keep me from crashing after lunch.
MENTAL PERFORMANCE
The phrase “move with energy” just fell out of my favor because it only describes one aspect of how light can help us throughout the day. Our daily rhythms also include periods of higher and lower mental acuity; some studies show that students score higher on tests if they are taken at a specific time of day over another. In essence, if we can be mentally at our best, our performance reflects it. And what do we need to be at our mental best? A healthy circadian rhythm.
Ugh. Circadian rhythm is getting dangerously close to techno-babble, and I promised to stay away from confusing terminology and concepts. But circadian rhythm- the natural daily cycle of our body’s functions- is key to human wellbeing and is triggered and regulated naturally by light. So let’s call it, at least temporarily, our Natural Clock.
Our Natural Clock is a complicated mechanism. The un-scientific chart above is simply intended to illustrate that light and its impact on our daily routines are wrapped together in countless biological subroutines that interact minute by minute, ultimately delivering impact on our Natural Clock and all its functions, like mental sharpness.
I mentioned my need for caffeine after lunch to keep my energy level up – it also boosts my brain, albeit temporarily. When I was in college, I was drinking rather large quantities of Coca Cola and increasingly dependent on the caffeine to boost my work in architecture studio at 2:00am. I was trashing my Natural Clock.
At the same time I was experiencing awful migraines. I would be in agony for several hours, then practically useless for another dozen, then feel like I had a hangover for the next day. At one point I had two migraines in a single weekend and was in such bad shape that I headed to the emergency room. I started loosing feeling in my hands on the way to the hospital as I worried intensely that I had a brain tumor.
The nurse in the emergency room calmly told me I was hyperventilating and that I could either calm my breathing or I would get so out of breath that my body would pass out to protect itself, but leave me with a big headache. Since I figured one big headache was enough, I breathed into the paper bag and calmed down, though multiple shots of pain medicine did little to relieve my suffering.
The following week I had a followup with my doctor who began by asking a few questions.
“Do you eat good food?” You mean like pizza and burgers? Yep.
“Do you sleep regularly?” I hope he doesn’t ask about my all-nighters this week. Plural.
“Do you consume large amounts of caffeine?” Well, that depends, please define “large.”
After the appointment, I quit caffeine for years yet somehow became a morning person who loves to wake early and exercise. Why didn’t I fall into a deep perpetual sleep when I backed off the caffeine?
Study after study shows that exposure to natural daylight, in sufficient quantities of time, has the exact same effect as caffeine. In other words, if I wanted to be wide awake, I could take a 30-minute walk in the sunshine and possibly avoid the caffeine altogether. Since my first job after college was on construction sites, I had plenty of sunlight every day, and giving up caffeine only had positive effects.
I didn’t need caffeine to stay sharp; daylight triggered the release of mental energy I needed. Now, once again bound to a desk indoors, I have fallen on the crutch of a little caffeine after lunch instead of a nice walk.
EMOTIONAL PERFORMANCE
Okay, yeah, emotional “performance” sounds a bit like I am pretending to be happy to see you while I’m really just trying to get out the door. Performance may not fit every use, but if you imagine your mood center as an engine, you want it performing to the best of its ability.
Ashleigh starts their day with their family and partner, then interacts all day long with colleagues, doctors, patients, caregivers, and friends. This requires emotional energy, and I suspect most of us have a finite amount of emotional and relational capacity readily available at any given time. Wouldn’t it be nice if light could help us boost our mood? It can.
Researchers recently discovered that, in addition to light triggering signals for vision and for Natural Clock synchronization, a third pathway from our eyes goes directly to our mood center. Seeing a pretty sunset can positively affect our mood because we appreciate beauty, and it is likely that the photons themselves can also trigger positive feelings.
One of the largest studies to date, on tens of thousands of individuals, found that night-shift workers face significantly higher rates of anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts. Yes, they were able to separate factors to determine that lack of access to sufficient natural light is highly likely to negatively affect your mood.
When our Natural Clock is in sync with sunlight, we also sleep better (more on that in a future post or two). Better sleep gives us more emotional energy, boosting our mood even further. A meme crossed my feed recently that said “Everyone is being really annoying today and, on top of that, I slept terribly last night.” Those of us in the know chuckle because we know from personal experience that poor sleep can make us irritable and make us less tolerant of others.
It took me decades of suffering from anxiety and occasional depression to realize that some of the time I am not terribly sad, I am just terribly tired.
Can light help our emotional performance? If we get enough of it, at the right time, light can boost our mood and contribute to better sleep that further improves our mood.
PERFORMANCE REQUIRES REST
Light can help us perform brilliantly, all day long. But every performance, be it physical, mental, or emotional, requires rest before repeating. And deep rest begins with relaxation, the focus of my next post.