If anyone is struggling with sleep, I highly recommend episode 1-3 of the Huberman Lab podcast (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-XfCl-HpRM), it has literally changed my life. Dr. Huberman is a Neurobiologist at Stanford and explains the science of sleep vs just telling you to not look at bright screens at night.
I struggled with sleeping for 20+ years, now I easily wake up early.
The biggest game changer: Sunlight in your eyes within 30 minutes of waking up. Try morning walks for 1 week (without sunglasses) and your life will be changed.
>The biggest game changer: Sunlight in your eyes within 30 minutes of waking up. Try morning walks for 1 week (without sunglasses) and your life will be changed.
For me I had to also really avoid light at night. F.lux or Windows Night Mode is not enough. You gotta suffer with strong indoor lightblocker glasses, or use e-ink or something at night.
And in the winter there sometimes isn't enough sun. You need a LOT of lightbulbs to make up the difference. A minimum of 10 100-watt bulbs in my experience, and even more is better.
The real test if this will help you: think back to a time when you were camping, or maybe a child at a summer camp in the woods, or a vacation somewhere without lots of light at night and where you got lots of sun in the morning. Did your sleep schedule naturally shift to become more regular? If it did, then light therapy has a very high chance of helping you.
> A minimum of 10 100-watt bulbs in my experience, and even more is better.
Plugging in some rough numbers, that seems equivalent to a ~170W LED flood light. A 200W version is $70 from Amazon (e.g. [1]). Are the emitted wavelengths crucial or is such a lamp on a timer a viable way to get early "sunlight" in the winter?
That may have been exactly the article I saw, there's certainly more useful information in there than I can answer. I pretty much just took away MORE BULBS.
The setup that I have... I have 5 led flood lights, 1 3000K, 2 4000K and 2 6000K.
I point them at the ceiling to get diffused light. I use different combination of some on / off to get the right warmness depending the time of day. Ie. 3000K in early morning / late in the day. Combination of 3000K and 4000K for around 9am. 2 4000K if I feel sleepy.
They work quite well. I suggest trying it out if you have seasonal affective disorder or trouble sleeping
> Did your sleep schedule naturally shift to become more more regular? If it did, then light therapy has a very high chance of helping you.
You just made me feel I might be on the brink of a startling discovery. Holy hell, I have tried a lot to improve sleep. I haven't tried this. And while there was one confounding variable in my case with camping, it did indeed shift my sleep rhythm to the day/night cycle of the country I was in!
Also remember that when you're out camping, you're probably getting more exercise, too, not just sunshine. A walk in the sunshine is both walk and sunshine. The two in combination may explain more than sunshine alone.
I've thought about trying to simulate an outdoors awakening. With Phillips hue lights you can simulate the sunrise, then a smart thermostat for having the air become warmer. You could play bird chirping noises as well. Can't do much about making the air smell different in the morning like it does outdoors.
you can definitely have one of those perfume sprayers, and there's bound to be lots of companies making a "morning woods" fragrance somewhere that you can plug in there
I also tried colored LED lighting in my computer space. I turn it down and red, kind of like those rooms where people develop photographic film. It works wonders for getting me to feel tired after a while.
I worked some pretty grueling swinging shift work as a Stationary Engineer in a high pressure steam boiler plant for a couple of years. I bought a "bright light therapy" lamp and it seemed to make a difference for a while, but I was never able to make it's usage a sustainable habit. Just throwing its existence out there in case it could be helpful to someone.
The suggestion is sunlight without sunglasses after waking up. That is extremely bright light hitting your eyes. Wake-up alarm clocks may be helping you, but not as a substitute for whatever is being suggested here.
> Sunlight in your eyes within 30 minutes of waking up.
I live in Florida - our license plates don’t call it the sunshine state for nothing - but even here the sun doesn’t rise at 5am. Short of blasting my retinas with bright lights soon after reveille, I don’t see where I’m going to obtain sunlight this early in the morning.
(It’s 07:21 local time now, and the sun is just now coming up. It’ll be a beautiful sunrise, but I’ve already been awake 2.5 hours…)
I have one of the Phillips alarms [0]. Do not currently use it, but regularly did for a year or two.
I don't feel it's bright enough to mimic true sunlight, but it is much brighter than typical light sources. Especially at full brightness on a nightstand.
I've never had problems waking up, so can't speak to those who do. But I would absolutely say it made the experience of waking up smoother and more pleasant.
I'd describe it as a normal waking being jarring, even without alarm, where I have a brief moment of confusion as my brain snaps into consciousness.
Whereas with the light almost every morning was a smoother transition, where I rose to consciousness more gradually, while still sleeping, and then basically opened my eyes already awake.
Even now. I've been awake since 5, it's now 9 am and we're just getting to the point where I would consider it day time. And that's 3 months away from the darkest day of the year. Changing to standard time changes a bit for a bit, but up here in Canada we go to work and come home in the dark.
I'm pretty allergic to Smart Home sort of stuff, but I've wondered if it makes sense to get a bunch of lights I program to be "Bright and sunlike" during the day and "dim and reddish" at night for my home.
It seems like this might be a passive way to add in some of the benefits of "morning walk in the sun" and "avoiding screens at night", and one that might be more robust to winter. Obviously the lifestyle improvements stemming from going for a walk and not doomscrolling twitter go beyond the light hitting you.
Man, I was able to go from barely able to wake up with alarm at 8:30 to waking up at 7 or even before by my own, even on weekend when I was up a little longer. And all it took was to force my self 2 times to get out of bed and have a coffee on the balcony to soak up the sun. That podcast is golden. I think the main help was to be able to go to sleep earlier thanks to tuning the system. I feel tired at 10-11 PM. That never happened to me before.
> Sunlight in your eyes within 30 minutes of waking up
Sure, that's super easy in summer. I wake up naturally no problem when the rise is up. I've thought many times of getting sun-equivalent lights that I can schedule to turn on for this reason.
Um, it actually does, if you have a circadian rhythm sleep disorder (for which one of the treatments is light therapy, aka getting sunlight in your eyes[1]).
Conversely, I'm not aware of any sleep disorders that are treated by drinking a glass of water in the morning.
I don't think that you have a sleep disorder, and so your anecdote isn't even usable as anecdata for those of us who do (including the top-level comment, which reads "I struggled with sleeping for 20+ years" - this isn't just "occasionally sleeping poorly").
It's not. I couldn't get through the first 2 episodes without rolling my eyes every 10 minutes. It's full of all the standard neuro-bunk that is everywhere these days. Making very obvious points about human behavior that neuroscience does not illuminate, but making it sound otherwise ("kids are more impulsive because their brains are different"...duh). And cherry picking studies to confirm some "blow-your-mind" point that is actually much more fuzzy and contentious than he is willing to describe ("brain rewiring ONLY occurs during sleep"...not remotely supported by any study anywhere, and conveniently he never posts any sources or studies in his description or on his website). The cherry on top was noticing that he invited noted neuro-bollocks offender Matt Walker (who wrote a book called "Why We Sleep" which literally never even attempts answer the titular question). I'd pass on this one.
I agree. Listened to the episode on ADHD and it was pretty lame, unstructured and somewhat wrong at times. Also saw there is an episode with Lex Fridman, so I guess it's the same pseudo intellectual bla bla bla sponsor juice. Not the best advertising for those big name universities, tbh.
Btw. I can wholeheartedly recommend the "big biology" podcast, if you are interested in biology in general.
I struggled with sleeping for 20+ years, now I easily wake up early.
The biggest game changer: Sunlight in your eyes within 30 minutes of waking up. Try morning walks for 1 week (without sunglasses) and your life will be changed.