Andrew Huberman· PhD
Changes in retinal sensitivity make it such that you need a lot of photons in the early day to entrain your clock — which is why sun is best
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The evidence is convergent. Multiple independent sources reach the same conclusion, the underlying mechanism is well-characterized, and even the field's most cautious voices treat it as worth doing.
Changes in retinal sensitivity make it such that you need a lot of photons in the early day to entrain your clock — which is why sun is best
Every Sunday: the week’s new conflicts and verdict changes — and nothing else.
Native comments, Twitter mentions, and Reddit threads about this claim — surfaced together so the conversation isn't fragmented across platforms.
Bookmarking — the dossier-vs-overview split is the right call. Most of the time I want overview; sometimes I want receipts.
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Morning sunlight > evening sunlight. Say the health data. For the science supporting this, see posts from @LaraWeed @StanfordMed & this excerpt: “Standard Time year-round gives people greater opportunity to get the morning sunlight necessary to shorten the period of their central circadian clock from 24.2 hours to 24 hours to maintain synchrony with the outer world.
The important point to understand is that early in the day, your central circadian clocks and all these mechanisms are looking for a lot of light.
And you need to watch the sunrise so you need to see sun within the first hours of your day this was um mid 90s and I remember thinking like how could that be and I started reading about it and the the cells that regulate this had not yet been discovered that was in the early 2000s like we didn't even know retinal neurons mediated this but these guys knew this from their own lives and their own practices and and I started realizing oh there's a mechanism here
Mid-day light also is essential for proper circadian biology.
10 minutes of bright outdoor light within the first hour of waking anchors the circadian phase and improves sleep onset that night.
Morning sunlight exposure shifts the cortisol awakening response forward, improving daytime alertness.
Long-term morning sunlight reduces age-related macular degeneration risk.
Sleep regularity predicts all-cause mortality more strongly than sleep duration.
Tracking deep sleep on a wearable accurately reflects EEG-measured slow-wave sleep.
Caffeine has a half-life long enough that consumption after 2pm measurably degrades deep sleep in slow metabolizers.