Get Out! A Super Simple Sleep Solution
Natural daylight, especially in the morning, will help you fall asleep and improve overall health and happiness
It’s hard to imagine a simpler or more effective prescription for improving brain power, emotional stability, productivity, and overall health and happiness than this one: Spend more time outside. Soaking up plenty of natural daylight, even on a cloudy day, is vital to falling asleep at a reasonable time each night, a new study confirms.
“Our bodies have a natural circadian clock that tells us when to go to sleep at night,” said the study’s senior author, Horacio de la Iglesia, PhD, a professor of biology at the University of Washington. “If you do not get enough exposure to light during the day when the sun is out, that ‘delays’ your clock and pushes back the onset of sleep at night.”
The link is rooted in eons of evolution that set human body clocks on a roughly 24-hour cycle, tied to the rhythm of the sun but easily fooled by light bulbs.
The benefits of exposure to daylight go well beyond better sleep.
Eye-opening benefits
Even on a cloudy day, natural daylight is about 1,000 times brighter than typical home or office lighting. The new finding adds to…
