The headline is broadly defensible, but the qualifications matter. Effect sizes vary by population, the strongest claims rest on shorter trials, and credible voices push back on how it's typically framed.
So if you get sunlight exposure to your eyes and it does have to be to your eyes in the early part of the day, you increase the amount of dopamine receptor that you have, which allows whatever circulating dopamine happens to be there to have a greater effect on motivation and I should say also on mood and feelings of being in pursuit and generally, in craving and pursuit of things in life.
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So I'm going to cover these in somewhat superficial manner. We can provide links to previous episodes that relate to each of these tools in detail, but I'll give you enough detail about them that would allow you to incorporate them into your routine should you choose. Let's say you want to increase dopamine for sake of increasing motivation. The first thing to do is to understand what the natural behavioral tools are for increasing dopamine and to do those as consistently as possible. Again, these are tools that you'll want to do nearly every day, if not every day. And I know I'm sounding like a broken record on this one, but here again, we come to sunlight and I should say, not just the desire to, but really the need for viewing the maximum amount of sunlight that one can reasonably get given schedules and locations in the world, time of year, et cetera, in the early part of the day, within the first hour of waking, ideally, but certainly in the first three hours of your day, you are going to want to maximize sunlight exposure to your eyes. Never look at the sun or any other light so bright that it's painful to look at. And yes, of course blinking is fine, but no, take sunglasses off, go outside once the sun is out and get some natural light in your eyes. And if it's appropriate or I should say in a way that's appropriate, maximize the amount of sunlight exposure to your skin, but please don't get burned. Please do wear sunscreen if you're prone to getting burned. Typically early day sunlight is not going to burn you, at least not most people, unless you're extremely fair-skinned. So don't get burned. Do what you need to in order to protect yourself from burn.
So there's a wonderful paper. We will provide a link to this paper that shows that sunlight exposure can actually increase the amount of so-called DRD4. This is a particular type of dopamine receptor, the dopamine receptor four. The genes for dopamine receptor four are actually under photic control.