Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #77 Why Getting More Light Will Transform Your Health with Linda Geddes

Episode Date: October 9, 2019

Since the dawn of time, humans have worshipped the sun. And with good reason. Our biology is set up to work in partnership with it. From our sleep cycles to our immune systems and our mental health, access to sunlight is crucial for living a happy and fulfilling life. Our bodies and our brains are designed to function during the day and rest at night. But as more of us move into light-polluted cities, spending our days in dim offices and our evenings watching brightly lit screens, we are in danger of losing something vital: our connection to the star that gave us life. It's a loss that could have far-reaching consequences for our health. This week, I sit down with award-winning journalist, Linda Geddes, to discuss just what those health implications are. We talk about the concept of night owls and larks and examine whether getting a lie in at the weekend is really as restorative as it sounds. We discuss jet lag and Linda shares the fascinating findings of her research in this area – including her own experiment of getting rid of light at night in her own home. Finally, we discuss what we can all do to get a little more light into our days. If you are listening to this podcast during the day, you won’t be able to resist the urge of going outside to soak up some natural light! Show notes available at drchatterjee.com/77 Follow me on instagram.com/drchatterjee/ Follow me on facebook.com/DrChatterjee/ Follow me on twitter.com/drchatterjeeuk DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What social jet lag is, is where your sleep and wake times differ between weekdays and weekends. Because if you're a night owl and you're having to get up early all throughout the week, you're probably cutting short your sleep on those weekdays because you're not naturally disposed to feel sleepy until quite late in the evening. So you're getting short sleep on weekdays. And then on weekends, you're sleeping in to make up for that. And actually, to quote the circadian biologist, Till Roneberg, who came up with this phrase, social jet lag, the more of it you have, the fatter, dumber, grumpier, and sicker you'll be. Hi, my name is Rangan Chastji, GP, television presenter, and author of the bestselling books,

The Stress Solution, and The Four Pillar Plan. I believe that all of us have the ability to feel better than we currently do, but getting healthy has become far too complicated. With this podcast, I aim to simplify it. I'm going to be having conversations with some of the most interesting and exciting people both within as well as outside the health space to hopefully inspire you as well as empower you with simple tips that you can put into practice immediately to transform the way that you feel. I believe that when we are healthier, we are happier because when we feel better, we live more. Hello and welcome back to episode 77 of my Feel Better Live More podcast. My name is Rangan Chatterjee and I am your host. I'm now just back from my 10-day promotional trip to Los Angeles

to support the US release of my latest book, The Stress Solution. I'm absolutely delighted to see the response out there and also super pleased that the New York Times singled out my book and wrote a supportive feature on it in their weekend magazine. That will make a huge difference. And getting this information out to more people in the United States, I'm really excited to hear feedback from my US audience in the coming weeks and months. In fact, if you have bought the book in America, it would be absolutely great if you could jump onto amazon.com and give it a review. This really helps with its visibility.

Now, this is the fifth episode of the new season of the podcast. And so far, I'm really pleased with how fast listing numbers are growing. I really appreciate all of you being so passionate about this podcast and spreading its message to your family and friends. As the podcast grows, it is clear that I am going to need more help to support me in my mission to help more and more people become the architects of their own health. I am now actively looking for new team members to help me. So if you feel you have got a skill set that would be of value, especially in

the realm of social media, please do get in touch and send an email to info at drchastity.com. I would really love to hear from you and see if you might be a good fit to join my team. Now, as I record this intro, I've only been back from LA for a few days and I'm actually doing really well with jet lag. I've adopted a lot of the things that were discussed today in the podcast, on the plane and on my return home. In particular, I've been very mindful of when and how I expose myself to light. Since the dawn of time, humans have worshipped the sun and with good reason. Our biology is set up to work in partnership with it. From our sleep cycles to our immune systems and our mental health,

access to sunlight is crucial for living a happy and fulfilling life. Our bodies and our brains are designed to function during the day and rest at night. But as more of us move into light polluted cities, spending our days in dim offices and our evenings watching brightly lit screens, we're in danger of losing

something vital. Our connection to the star that gave us life. It's a loss that could have far reaching consequences for our health. This week, I sit down with award-winning journalist Linda Geddes to discuss just what those health implications are. We talk about the concepts of night owls and larks and examine whether getting a lion at the weekend is really as restorative as it sounds. We discuss jet lag and Linda shares the fascinating findings of her research in this area, including her own experiments of getting rid of light at night in her own home. Finally, we discuss what we can all do to get a little more light into our days. If you are listening

to this podcast during the day, you won't be able to resist the urge of going outside to soak up some natural light. I really enjoyed my conversation with Linda. I think you are going to as well. Now, before we get started, as always, I do need to give a quick shout out to some of the sponsors of today's show who are essential in order for me to continue putting out weekly episodes like this one. I'm absolutely delighted that Vivo Barefoot continues to support my podcast. As you probably already know, I'm a huge fan of minimalist shoes and I've actually been wearing Vivo Barefoot shoes exclusively now for many years, as have my wife and my children. I strongly believe that

our feet are one of the most important parts of our body for our movements and our musculoskeletal health. Their function influences how we walk, run and so much more. Not only have I used them myself for years and found them extremely beneficial for my back pain and general mobility, I've also been recommending minimalist shoes to many of my patients who have reported back improvements in a variety of different complaints, such as hip pain, knee pain and back pain. I've also started to use them a lot more in elderly patients as I think they can really help with balance and mobility. And actually my own mother started wearing them a few years ago and saw big improvements with her own balance and stability. Viva Barefoot shoes are thin, wide and flexible and they make shoes for every occasion for both adults and kids. Now for listeners of my show they have come up with a great deal. They are

offering a 20% off to all new customers in the UK, USA, Australia and selected EU countries. If you have thought about giving them a go, this is a great incentive to start. It's really important for me to say that they offer a 100-day free trial for new customers. So if you're not happy, you can simply send them back for a full refund. I think this is an amazing offer. If you have been sitting on the fence about trying minimalist shoes, do consider taking advantage. You can get your 20% off for new customers by going to vivobarefoot.com forward slash live more. That's vivobarefoot.com forward slash live more. Now, on to today's conversation.

So Linda, welcome to the Feel Better Live More podcast. Thank you. Thank you for making the journey up here today. So you've written this amazing book called Chasing the Sun, which I first came across a few months ago, and we've been trying to schedule this for a little bit of time now. I've got to say it's a brilliant book. It's such a fun read. There is so much research in there, so many anecdotes. But I think you've really touched on something that doesn't get talked about enough in the context of health, and that is sunlight. So may I ask, how did you start to get interested in the science and the relationship between sunlight and our health?

I think the way I first became interested in it was through research on circadian rhythms. So these are 24-hour fluctuations in our biology, but all over our bodies. So everything from our brain chemistry to when we feel sleepy and alert, which is what most people think about when you talk about circadian rhythms, to the functioning of our immune systems, to when we feel sleepy and alert, which is what most people think about when you talk about circadian rhythms, to the functioning of our immune systems, to when we release hormones. And you have these rhythms in your biology to help you prepare for regular events like getting up and being out and active in the daytime and being indoors and protected and sleeping at night. and protected and sleeping at night. And probably about sort of 10, 15 years ago, I was working at New Scientist as a news editor. And I was coming across a lot of stories about circadian rhythms.

I think the International Agency for Cancer Research, I don't know if I've got that name right, but had recently declared shift work a probable human carcinogen, which suggests that shift work contributes to cancer. Or there's certainly an association between working night shifts and later development of cancer. And I've also just written this story about how breast milk varies over the course of 24 hours. So it contains more kind of sleep-inducing chemicals at night compared to in the morning. So

I was really interested in this kind of emerging field of circadian rhythms. And around that time, I took a trip to Las Vegas in the US to cover a conference on a completely different subject. But Las Vegas is a long way away and I had terrible jet lag. And I was in this meeting with these forensic scientists actually, in a kind of windowless meeting room in this business hotel for about three days, working from like nine till five. And then in the evenings, we were kind of going around the casinos and enjoying what Las Vegas has to offer. And with my jet lag as well, by the end of this, I was just desperate to get outside and just, you know, get a little bit of

that glorious desert sunlight. And I just couldn't because the whole city, despite being in the desert, and this was in October, so there was like this beautiful blue sky, it wasn't too hot. Despite this, being in this amazing location, it's impossible to get outside the whole city is kind of set up to shield you from the sun and probably that a lot of that's deliberate because you know casino owners want people to stay in their casinos and lose track of time and light daylight is a really good way we use to keep track of time but they also deploy light in all sorts of cunning ways so they do have been studies suggesting that if you pair red light, especially with fast-paced music, people take riskier gambles and bet more money. Anyway, by the end of this, I was just like, I just need to get outside. I need

to find somewhere to sit. And I just couldn't find anywhere until I was like walking through this labyrinthine kind of underground shopping complex at Caes's palace casino and um i saw what i thought was sunlight up ahead and then when i got there i looked up and i realized i was standing like under this completely artificial sky yeah and and i just went my god our relationship with sunlight has been completely distorted and and changed in this modern world. Las Vegas is kind of an extreme example, but you know. I mean, it is extreme, but there's a real irony there on one level that I think back, you know, to us as humans, we've always evolved. In many ways, the sun's been our focal point, right? We've had to revolve our life around the sun.

When the sun comes up, we can wake up and do the things that we want to do in the daytime. And then as it falls and it sets, we start to slow down and we can unwind and go to sleep. Yeah, you're right. Las Vegas is an extreme. In fact, on one level, it's almost completely flipped it on its heads yeah it's almost in many ways living in las vegas or being in las vegas is putting your body into an environment that humans have never been in for our entire evolutionary history right no and at night at night the las vegas strip is reportedly the brightest place on earth. So it really is, you know.

So man has in many ways conquered nature in Las Vegas, or so it would seem, right? Because ultimately, I think what's really beautifully illustrated in your book is how this is not as trivial as it might sound when we're joking about it. There are some really quite serious implications for our health aren't there yeah our biology is kind of set up to work with this 24 hour cycle of light and darkness and if you if you mess with that things start to happen to first of all to these circadian rhythms so these 24hour fluctuations in our biology that i talked about um so if you're exposed to light at night one thing that does is it pushes your circadian rhythms later that's not necessarily a bad thing unless you have to wake up or go to work to go to work or school the next morning and if you're kind of seeing light late at night and your your circadian rhythms are being pushed later that means the time when you feel sleepy and want to go to sleep is pushed later. So you

potentially get less sleep. And if you get less sleep, that's going to have an impact on your alertness, on your mental functioning, on your mood. But it's more than that because seeing bright light is also a kind of brain stimulant. It boosts your alertness. So if you see light late at night, you're going to feel more awake. But also if you don't see light in the daytime, you're going to feel more sluggish and less alert. And there are increasingly studies showing that bright light actually, it literally wakes us up. So, you know, we now spend 90% of our daytimes indoors where the light levels are like an order of magnitude lower than they are outdoors. Today is kind of gray and rainy and gloomy. It's probably

still, so light luminance or brightness is measured in this unit called lux. And on a day like today, it's about 5,000 lux outside. On a bright, day in the middle of summer it could be as high as 100,000 lux outside but indoors in the kind of standard office it might be two to three hundred lux so it's you know it's hugely dimmer inside than it is outside. So even even on a cloudy day even on a cloudy day we have evolved to actually have at least 5,000, 10,000 lux of light exposure through our eyes into our body. Yet, for many of us living these 90% indoor lifestyles now, we might be getting only 200, 300 lux. So what is the implication of that? What does that mean for us? Well, okay, so light can influence the timing of those circadian rhythms.

It can also influence the timing of those circadian rhythms. It can also influence the amplitude of those rhythms. So how kind of high the peaks are and low the troughs are. So what you see in people who don't get outside much, and particularly this has been studied in hospital patients and people as they age, so elderly patients in care homes, their circadian rhythms kind of flatten. so there's less difference between night time and day time in their biology and that is linked to um poorer health so things like depression um increased risk of dementia that sort of thing yeah i mean it really it's incredible to think about this because you know i think I think about, you know, from what you just said, I think about my mother and mum lives by herself now and she's, you know, she's become a lot more immobile.

So she'll spend a lot of time inside most of the day. And, you know, she also loves this iPad that I got her a few years ago. And so not only is she not exposing herself to this bright natural light in the day, often in the evening, she's exposing herself to bright artificial light, which again, in many ways is sort of doing the Las Vegas thing on herself, right? It's almost flipping what we should be doing. And I think I've spent a lot of time thinking about it the last few years, and it was really magnified when I was reading your book, is when we talk about health you know the the

popular media narrative around health always revolves around food and movement and I've been quite keen to sort of expand that out to include sleep and stress as well but but I think there's a really strong case that actually light and our light exposure is another core pillar of health that maybe we have not been thinking enough about. Yes, I think it is. And our light exposure also plays into those things, especially the kind of movement side of things and stress, actually. Because, you know, if you, in my book, I kind of strongly advocate for very small changes to your life. But basically, it involves kind of brightening your daytime and darkening your evenings and nighttimes. But one way, one brilliant way to brighten your daytime is just to get outside, do a little bit of exercise, get up from your desk. You know, if you start cycling to work or walking to work, even getting off the bus or train a stop early

and just doing that like last 10 minutes walking, you know, you're getting exercise. You're also out in nature, hopefully. And that's a kind of stress buster. And, you know, there's increasing evidence that spending all day just sitting down, just not getting up and down again is really harmful to our health. And again, if you're just making little efforts to just get up, just go for a walk around the block at lunchtime or, you know, on your, on your breaks. I think that can make a difference. It will certainly make a difference to your alertness during the daytime, but you're also strengthening those circadian rhythms, which are so important for our health. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you say you would, you would imagine, but I use this as one of the tips

I give my patients in practice. And it's something I wrote about in my first book, and there's a chapter called Embrace Morning Light. And it was in the sleep section. And the whole point was to say, when we talk about sleep, we're often thinking about what we do in the hour, hour and a half before bed. And of course, that can be incredibly important. But we forget about what we do in the morning. And I remember when I remember when I've heard this from patients but I also got quite a few messages on Twitter from people after they read embrace morning light in the four pillar plan they said I've not been sleeping for years very well and I now go for a 20 minute walk outside in the morning and my sleep's got better so although there are other things that could be playing a role it really is that powerful getting outside in the morning is is really really powerful

isn't it for setting that circadian rhythm and i think you had some let me see if i've got it here in your book um i've actually scribbled all over your book i hope you don't mind it's it's because there's so many great great things to talk about that's fine i do lots of book scribbling um and you talked about this german study that suggested that exposure to bright light in the morning boosted people's reaction speeds and maintained them at a higher level throughout the day even after that bright light was switched off yeah and you also mentioned another study when exposure to bright morning lights um basically those who were exposed to it between 8am and noon, went to sleep an average of 18 minutes. It took them an average of 18 minutes to fall asleep at night compared to 45 minutes in the low light exposure group. So this is not just, hey, a bit

of light in the day. This actually changing on biology there's actually another study that i cite in the book which suggests that if you if you it's a lab-based study and it showed that if you expose people to bright lights during the daytime they sleep better the following night they get more deep sleep and they get less fragmented sleep and if they do wake up in the night, they feel less tired the next morning, even though they've been waking up at night. So I think it improves the quality of your sleep. But then there's the mood side of things as well. So we know that larks, so people who tend to be early birds, wake up early, want to go to sleep earlier at night tend to be less prone to depression and mental illness. And actually

lots of, there's lots of other advantages, health advantages to being a lark. But possibly some of this is because they're, you know, if you're exposed to bright morning light, it push, it pulls your circadian rhythms earlier. So even if you're a night owl, if you see lots of bright early morning lights, your, your circadian rhythms are shifted earlier. And I if you're a night owl, if you see lots of bright early morning lights, your circadian rhythms are shifted earlier. And I think why that's important for mood is that mood has a 24-hour rhythm like sleep and like all these other things. And your lowest point of mood tends to be around 4am, 4.30, 5am, before you wake up usually. And then you kind of like going up this slope and getting happier and happier during the daytime. If you shift your circadian rhythms

earlier and then you wake up at say like 6am, 7am, you're already quite a long way up that slope towards a happier mood. But if you're kind of shifted later, if you're kind of like a night owl or you're making yourself a night owl by your light exposure, when you wake up, you're kind of shifted later, if you're kind of like a night owl or you're making yourself a night owl by your light exposure, when you wake up, you're going to be closer towards that trough of low mood. It's interesting, isn't it? And I think let's explore chronotypes because I think that's super fascinating for people, this idea of morning larks and night owls. with this idea of morning larks and night owls um as you as you were describing that i sort of wondered to myself is it that uh you know night owls are more prone to low mood because of their biology or is it because modern society is set up in a way that you know that basically is

preferential to be a lark right right? I am a lark. I'm an early bird. I like getting up early. I'm a total morning person. So, you know, I can get up and sort of, you know, get hold of the day and by lunchtime, I've done loads and loads of work and I feel great. Whereas I've got friends and family who don't really operate like that. And, you know, do you feel that if you don't have that chronotype, you are at a disadvantage in the way the world is set up? Yes, I absolutely do. And teenagers are a really classic example of that because teenagers naturally shift their circadian rhythms later. They can't help it. This is just something that

happens at adolescence. So asking a teenager to get up at 7am to get ready for school is like asking you or I to get up at 5am and there's no one no reason it's no surprise they feel kind of groggy and cross when they get up in the morning. It's funny you say that actually because it's it's what we're recording this at the start of September so schools have just gone back and my nephew actually has just moved to secondary school and after I dropped the kids off at school this morning I know on my way I saw him at his new bus stop because he's got to get like a 30 minute bus to his secondary school and he was half asleep and he was yawning now he's only 11 or 12 years old so he's not quite a teenager but and I knew I was talking to you this afternoon I really thought then wow this is like of course there could be many reasons why someone is tired in the morning

but I thought if this was to continue for a few years I mean is that the best way to start off a teenager in their school day you know I mean are schools adapting to this research are they evolving to this very very slowly. So in the UK, we're relatively lucky actually on international terms, or our teenagers are relatively lucky because in the US on the continent, schools typically start a lot earlier. You know, some schools in the US, at least they used to start at sort of 8am, 7.30am, some of them. And there have been a number of studies now in the US looking at what happens if you shift the school starting time a bit later, more like 8.30 or 9am, which is what happens in the UK. And it has a really big impact on their absenteeism and on their grades as well,

actually. There's been less research on this in the UK because schools here start more like 8.30 or 9am. But certainly there are some schools that are starting to take this seriously. There's a private school in London, which is allowing its sixth formers to start at, I think, 1pm or 2pm and do all their learning in the afternoons and early evenings. But there was a study of a secondary school in the UK, study of a secondary school in the UK which changed its start time to 10am and again you saw this um you saw this drop in absenteeism so kids were less likely to be kind of coming in or not going to school because they were sick um but also their GCSE grades increased following this change they've now changed back I'm not sure why they changed back but they they changed back and then they saw a dip again it's fascinating that because on one level society would probably

deem late starters a bit lazy a bit um yes and actually but there has been a study that has shown that if you have an early bird manager and you're in you're a night owl they will judge your performance as worse than if you have a fellow employee who is an early bird. Because what that manager is seeing, that manager kind of comes to work like you, all cheerful and like, oh, I'm raring to go at like 9am. And then that kind of night owl employees come in and they kind of sit there and they need several coffee coffees to wake up maybe they don't get going um until the early afternoon or even the evening and that like that early bird's manager has gone home and they don't see that that night owl like really really doing their best work in the in the evenings and there's another thing actually which is that um which is which is this thing called social jet lag. So I think another reason why night owls might have worse health outcomes is because of this thing called social jet lag. And actually, to quote

the circadian biologist Till Roneberg, who came up with this phrase, social jet lag, the more of it you have, the fatter, dumber, grumpier, and sicker you'll be. Because what social jet lag is, is where your sleep and wake times differ between weekdays and weekends. Because if you're a night owl, you know, and you're having to get up early all throughout the week, you're probably cutting short your sleep on those weekdays because you're not kind of naturally disposed to feel sleepy until quite late in the evening so you're getting short sleep on weekdays and then on weekends you're sleeping in to make up for that so there's this difference between your kind of sleep and wake times on weekdays and those sleep and wake times on weekends and you're effectively moving time

zones when you do that yeah for sure i mean look there's so many themes I want to pick up on. I guess on social jetlag, we see this in medicine a lot that certain things get triggered by lions at the weekend. So it's very well known that migraines are often triggered by lying in at the weekends. And once you start to understand circadian biology, you start to understand circadian biology you start to now put together some mechanisms as to why that might happen so people are always told to get up at the weekend at the same time as on the weekday as a strategy maybe to prevent a migraine at the weekends which is super fascinating i didn't know that but that but certainly psychiatric episodes have been shown to be associated with jet lag so but isn't doesn't that all support just how strong

um and robust our circadian biology is and how messing around with it can have unforeseen implications yes i think it does um we were just talking about how um how social jet lag is literally like real jet lag that you're kind of shifting time zones, you know, twice a week between the weekdays and weekends. Your body clocks will adapt, but actually what's increasingly becoming evident is that we now know we have these clocks in all our tissues. It's not just a kind of single clock in the brain. You've got them everywhere in your, you know, your heart cells, your liver cells, your fat cells even have these clocks. And they don't all adjust at exactly the same rate. So if you change time zones, either by traveling abroad or by shifting your sleep-wake times, you're dragging all of those

clocks along to a new time zone, but they don't all move at the same time. So what you get is this, this kind of circadian desynchrony spreading throughout the body, where these clocks start to be out of time with each other, and eventually they will all get back in time with each other. But in the meantime, you know, you have this kind of, the way I see the body and these circadian clocks working in the body is a bit like a factory assembly line you know to do something simple like digest a meal it requires coordination between quite a lot of different organs and tissues you know you've got your gut cells you've got your liver you've got your um you've got your fat cells you've got your pancreas that produces insulin so you need this kind of coordinated talk between these different organs and just like in a factory production line if things start getting out of time with each other you get a less efficient manufacturing process and a like less

good product it's the same with our health I think I think people who've traveled over multiple time zones will recognize that that even if you start to adjust to the new sleep time you know your gut yeah your digestion things aren't quite right so some of it's left behind on your old clock still or it takes a bit longer and you know you can have the sensation that I've certainly felt sometimes when you you eat in your new time zone out of sync with what your body's clock is is telling you is the right thing and the next morning you can actually feel hung over and you've not drunk any alcohol but you feel hung over because everything's just slightly out of sync yeah and i definitely get that that's one of the worst things i find about jet lag is that kind of digestive problems um but actually food food

is another thing so light affects the timing of our clock and and causes our clocks to change time but actually the timing of when we eat also affects the timing of some of those clocks in some of those tissues. So ideally, we want to be kind of syncing our kind of our light exposure and our eating patterns with, you know, we want to be basically getting up eating. And then, you know, when it gets dark stopping stopping eating I mean that's the way we evolved and I think if you're kind of eating later there's evidence that if you eat later you're more prone to put on weight even though you're eating exactly the same meal um I think really what we want is regularity both in our light exposure but also in our meal times and

our exercise so there's some evidence now that exercise also affects the timing of those clocks yeah absolutely absolutely it's very clear light does food is known to to impact the circadian clock and you know i think we're going to find more and more things are and i think this really for me it really highlights why i think humans so certainly if i talk about myself and my experience with patients when you have a routine that's roughly, you know, pretty similar from day to day, you just feel better. You know, when your sleep times are regular, when your meal times are regular, even Monday to Friday, and you maintain that at the weekends. I mean, some people may listen and go, well, what sort of life is that? That's a, you know, people might think that's a

boring, dull life. I don't know whether it's my age or not I love regularity and routine I love being able to go to bed at the same time wake up at the same time eat roughly at the same time and um you know Sachin Panda who you've I think quoted a couple times in your book he's and he's been on the podcast he he's done incredible research to show that the timing of our meals certainly has huge importance, arguably could be as important as what you eat. I mean, I think the jury is still out on that, but it's pretty powerful that just changing the timing of your meals can impact your weight, your immune system, and your circadian clock. Yeah, yeah. And I think, I think I, you know, so I, so while I was writing this book, I made quite a few changes to my lifestyle most

starting with light really um and we can talk about my experiment I would love to talk about that it sounds like the sort of wacky experiment that I would do with my kids like right kids daddy's got a new plan today like what is it this time so you know but we will go into that I'll tell you about that in a minute but but so the first kind of changes I made was to do with my light exposure but then I got more and more interested in this kind of this idea of social jet lag and also the meal timing. And I mean, just in the last year, I've been recording a podcast for the BBC, which involves having to get up one day a week really, really early to go to London. And I just started going, I know from all my research that this is bad for me,

but I really, really feel it because one day a week I'm having to get up at 6am rather than 7.30 when I normally do. And the next day I just feel like I have jet lag. And I, you know, so now I'm trying to, I've realized that if I'm going to keep going to London or having, you know, some days where I have to get up early, it makes sense to always try and get up a bit early. And then, but you know, once you do that, and once you establish that regularity, you do feel better. So why don't you know, you've tantalizingly told the listeners and the viewers about this experiment that you did. So first of all, tell me what was the experiment. And also, I'm really intrigued to know, when you came home one day with this idea and you thought you'd tell your husband is it

and your kids about your new idea what was the response okay well and this is relevant to this whole thing of you know well I don't want to go to bed early and it's really boring if I go to bed early because you know a lot of us like well I feel alert at night and I want to go out at night and see my friends and stuff but after this, I've kind of changed my view of this. So my idea was, what would happen if we go cold turkey on artificial light after dark? That was my original thing. I was just interested in what happens if we get rid of all this artificial light. And so I went and saw these sleep researchers at the University of Surrey and said, I'd like to do this experiment. Will you help me? And they said, yes. But what we'd like you to always also think about is to try and boost your daylight exposure, which is how I first came across all this research, all this emerging research about the importance of daylight. of daylight um and um so we devised this experiment where and we did it in the middle of winter um where i would turn off the lights in the house after i wanted to do it when the sun went down

but that that was kind of impractical because i wanted to carry on my work as normal and i i work on a computer so so i couldn't really and you're a journalist and i'm a journalist and i work on a computer. So I couldn't really... And you're a journalist. And I'm a journalist and I'm a freelance journalist. So if I don't work, then I don't get paid. So it was impractical to do that, but that's kind of okay anyway, because if we evolved closer to the equator with a more kind of like 12 hour light dark exposure thing, we reasoned that that wasn't such a terrible thing to do to turn the lights out at six. So the idea was that from 6pm onwards, there would be no electric light and we would use candles instead. And then in the daytime, I would try even though it was the middle of winter, I would try and even though I'm bound to a desk in my work, I would do everything I could to get as much bright light exposure as

possible. So that was things like, you know, after the school drop off in the morning, just, you know, sitting in the park with my notepad, doing my to-do list outside rather than at the kitchen table where it's really dark. And, you know, going for a walk around the block, like I said earlier, at, you know, at regular intervals, trying to eat outdoors. Also, you know, just taking, taking you know when I made my breakfast in the morning just going outside with my cup of tea and just you know standing in the garden and eating my cup of tea and my bit of toast um and also swapping kind of indoor exercise I did quite a lot of exercise um but swapping going to the gym in like a windowless exercise studio for doing the

same kind of exercise outdoors um but I had to convince my family to also at least turn out the lights at night and at the time I think my kids were kind of six and four and my daughter's so you can exert some influence over them still at that age I guess well yeah I mean yeah I mean I could say this is what we're doing uh and you're gonna have to live with it but my daughter's response was to burst into tears and say oh mummy it's gonna be spooky I don't like the dark and I kind of said oh no it'll be lovely you know we go camping quite a lot it'll be just like going camping you know like having fires and candles and she wasn't completely convinced um my son who's really into Halloween at first was like this will be great and he also said if it's like camping can we have lots of marshmallows so I did a lot of bribing with marshmallows

but actually by the end of living like this you know we we did this on off for six weeks in the middle of December well it was beginning of December until mid-January and by the end of it was my it was my six-year-old daughter who was the one who was saying, I really like it. It's really cozy and nice in the evening to have the lights dimmed. And it was my son who was complaining that he couldn't see his toys and he wanted to watch telly. But, you know, it actually was a very positive experience for us. What was the impact of doing this? So you know for you and your husband sure but also i'm interested with your kids did you notice anything different were they was their mood

different energy were they sleeping better i mean what what went on with the family i was the only one who actually feel i i did a load of tests on myself so you objectively tracked your data i tracked my data i didn't track i didn't track my family's data because it was just too complicated. And my kids go to school and it's difficult to control all that stuff. But I tracked myself very, very extensively. So the impact on me was that, first of all, I felt sleepier earlier in the evening. It was December. It was the run up to Christmas, which is a really sociable time. So we did have quite a lot of guests coming to our house. I think in part out of curiosity to find out what on earth I was doing and what it was like to live

with candles. But I was definitely sleepier earlier in the evenings. I wanted to go to bed at 9, 10 o'clock rather than 11 or 12 o'clock. I didn't always do that because of social obligations, but I wanted to. Once a week, we took readings of my melatonin. Now, melatonin is a hormone that you release. It's under the control of the circadian clock, you release it in the evening at night. And it's basically a kind of biological signal to your whole body that it's time to shift change into night mode. And one thing it does is it impacts on the sleep centers. So it does tend to, you know, you release melatonin and your brain kind of goes, ah, nighttime, it's time to feel sleepy. Here's some sleep signals.

And what we found was that I started secreting melatonin between one and a half and two hours earlier than when I lived normally. So that explains why I was feeling sleepier earlier, because my body was saying it's nighttime two hours earlier. I mean, for people listening listening i just want to emphasize how you know how striking a point you just made we're talking about a very important hormone in our body yes it's associated with sleep there are other studies associated suggesting it's an antioxidant that it may have some anti-cancer properties potentially and you know we can maybe explore that later in our conversation but this is an important hormone that is under this circadian clock that simply by switching off artificial light in the evening you are shifting maybe two hours beforehand you're changing an important hormones

secretion by two hours yes that is significant if a drug was doing that we'd be talking about it there would be a list of side effects on it yet we're sort of many of us are doing that we'd be talking about it there would be a list of side effects on it yet we're sort of many of us are doing that every evening yeah on our devices without the awareness of the implications but the other thing is that i also so i did some weeks where i was turning off the lights in the evening we did a week where i both turned the lights off and got outdoors more and we did a week where I didn't worry about my light exposure in the evening. I just got outdoors more in the daytime. And on that week as well, we saw this shift towards earlier melatonin secretion. So are you saying that even if you didn't, you can mitigate the impact of your sort of artificial light exposure in the evenings by getting more

daylight in the day yeah well you can shift your clock earlier by getting more daylight in the day but that um german study you mentioned earlier about if you expose people to bright light in the in the morning um that improves their alertness throughout the day. That also showed that it mitigated the effect of bright light at night on circadian rhythms. So usually if you see bright light at night, it will shift your clocks later. If you see bright light in the daytime, it seems to stop, even if you're exposed to bright light at night, it seems to stop that shift. It's almost like your body locks onto the brightest source of light it sees in that 24-hour cycle and uses that to kind of set its timing and that is for me that's like a i mean i've seen some of this research and i think that that is something that people should really be taking hold of and going okay look

trying to get people to reduce their screen exposure in the evening can often be very challenging i know that myself it's extremely challenging on a regular basis to do that now at least by getting more natural light exposure in the day you are actually potentially insulating yourself from some of the implications of being on your screens in the evening so people can almost how can i put it have their cake and eat it right if they get outside more yeah yeah yes i think so but i think you still ideally want to you don't have to switch off your screens but you can dim your screens you can tune out some of the blue lights or blue wavelength light which our circadian system seems to be particularly responsive to and you can do simple things like you know you don't have to get rid of screens and

go back to the dark ages and just have candles in your house you can you know just switch off your overhead lights and just switch to like dim table lamps around your home as well that's going to dim your light exposure and then if you're combining that with more daylight then that's going to that's going to be better yeah what did you do i'm intrigued because you know we actually try and do some of these things in our house the more i read about light the more i get quite particular on it in the evening so i don't want these lights from the ceiling on i just want either candles or dim lights on but our bathroom has got these big bright led lights in yeah and so obviously it's sort of summary time at the moment so i tell the kids you don't need the lights on in the bathroom when you're when you're going but what did you do

at night in the bathrooms yeah well i'm really annoyed about our bathroom lights actually because when we when we moved into our our house five years ago we got these dimmable bathroom lights um and they were great because we've got the led bulbs in the ceiling and you could pull the cords and it would dim them right down so that's great but then there was some problem with them and our our electricians basically said sorry we can't we can't sort out the dimmer and now the only thing we have in our bathroom is bright lights and that's a problem so i now have this little night light that i use when i go to the bathroom at night i just put on this little you know you just shake it and it comes on and it's just a dim light in the bathroom so you can see but it's not this

really bright glaring thing um when i was doing my experiment i think i used candles which is a bit of a health hazard or fire hazard yeah yeah we say that and i guess it is um you know before the advent of artificial light i'm sure that's what people did right well yes well i was about to say i went and stayed with an amish family in pennsylvania while i was doing the research for chasing the sun and they have oil lamps in their in their bathrooms so you know the kind of paraffin old-fashioned paraffin lamps that's that's what they tend to there you go well we're gonna we're gonna go to that let's just close off your experiment so you were noticing big changes yeah oh yes so so i also tracked i did these kind of mood

and alertness questionnaires just before i went to bed each night and when I woke up in the morning. And the main thing I saw from that is that on the weeks when I was doing these interventions, like cutting out light and getting more daylight, I was waking up raring to go. I was waking up alert and my morning mood was much better. But then the impact on the rest of my family. So we didn't track them in as much detail, but definitely my husband commented on how nice it was in the evenings and how he just felt more relaxed. My daughter at the end of this whole ordeal was, you know, saying, I really like it. It's really relaxed. People who came to our house to visit, in fact, we had a New Year's Eve party in the dark. And apart from, you know saying I really like it it's really relaxed people who came to our house to visit in fact we had a new year's eve party in the dark and um apart from you know nearly giving our

guests food poisoning because we couldn't see if we'd cook the beef burgers and nearly chopping my finger off um apart from those things which um you know living with candles are problems um they also commented we had some friends who'd been at another party first and then they came to our house and they said wow it's really chilled out here in a really good way you know people people behave differently when when the lights are low i think um and the other thing on that new year's eve party that everyone commented on was we you know we had quite a lot of people over and so we put and we've all got young children so a lot of people put their kids to bed up upstairs in our in our house and you know usually you've got kids if you try and put like a load of sort of three to eight year olds to bed en masse in a in a room they're not they're not asleep you know they'll still be up at midnight um but they were

i kid you not they were all asleep by nine o'clock you know what it's it's so interesting to hear that because i really do feel that light influences you know it exerts such an influence on the way we are our moods our sleep levels our alertness so much is influenced by lights and i just don't think we've taken it seriously enough. I remember coming across some of this research a few years ago when my kids were young. My kids would always get up super early and they always wanted a nightlight on in the hall or in their room, which was a white nightlight. And a few years ago when I was researching this and I came across that red light has a very has it has less

of an impact on our circadian rhythms than white lights or blue lights and so I thought okay fine so I bought a a red bulb and put that as a night light and I'm not kidding you instantaneously and again this is not a scientific experiment this is is just my experience of this. My kids were sleeping an hour later every morning consistently. And I thought, so in my head, I was thinking, this is not a coincidence. Their nightlight has changed from white to red. And it felt as though it was no longer altering their circadian rhythms. They were sleeping for longer. And, you know, it's just something, it's interesting to reflect on that and then hear the story about when you don't have artificial light in the evening, you put all these kids together en masse and they all fall asleep.

It just makes me, it really makes me reflect on, have we missed over the last 20, 30 years, in all our discussions on health, have we missed a big part, a big piece in the jigsaw? Could our exposure to light potentially be more important than the food that we eat? I don't think we know the answer to that yet, but I think certainly it's been underappreciated. And also it's really worth just reflecting on the fact that we take light at night for granted. It's only 140 years since Thomas Edison invented the incandescent light bulb. Before that, I mean, we had gas lights for a few decades before that, but it was in the early 1800s. And that's only just over 200 years ago that light in the evening was a thing. Before then, all we had were like tallow candles or whale oil lamps, which most people couldn't afford, or firelight. And so most people went to bed not long after the sun went down. They stayed up a little while around fires and so on but they didn't have artificial light and our biology

is set up for there to be darkness at night it's it's like it's amazing to hear how malleable our our body clocks are because you made the change and experiment with your own family and you're suddenly feeling sleepier than you normally are when my wife started wearing these blue light blocking glasses that i got her in the evening so even if she went on her laptop and she put her her blue light blocking glasses on i think for a week at 7 p.m by half seven she was yawning her head off and thinking and normally she could stay up till 10 half 10 yeah and so suddenly by blocking light exposure you're almost allowing your body to return to its natural rhythm. And

I think this has got implications. I mean, we've obviously talked about night owls and morning larks. And what I find interesting about this is that I accept that there are different chronotypes, but I also think that some people believe themselves to be night owls, whereas they're actually larks, but they're using light to shift their rhythm you know this is just what i've seen with friends and with some patients where they've always sworn that they're night owls and as they start to change their light exposure they find actually that they're morning larks so yeah i just wonder what your view on that is yeah well i always thought i was a night owl and then i got chron chronotyped. I went, you know, these university, in fact, I was making a documentary for the BBC about chronotypes

and night owls and larks. So I got chronotyped myself, which involves doing this questionnaire. I discovered that I'm an intermediate type. So actually, it's a spectrum. You're not one or the other. But I'm kind of somewhere in the middle between these extremes. But doing this experiment made me realise, actually, I'm far more of a morning person if i let myself be um then then i give myself credit for i mean what has when did you do this experiment was it last christmas it was two christmases ago might even be three christmases ago okay so we're at least two years past it so given that you've written a book on this right and you researched it and you know the implications i just would love to get an idea that the sometimes we know the right thing to do but the modern world makes it hard for us to practice what we know and that forget light for a

minute that goes for anything we're even eating the right way or moving enough you know we're always fighting against it in the environment in which we live so with all your knowledge with your research with your own experience what has managed to stick in you and your family's lifestyle from over two years ago yeah dimming the lights in the evening so not so know, we still use quite a lot of candles, actually, we still tend to light candles when we have dinner. I have realized that just using candles is completely impractical. I mean, for one thing, there's the air pollution worry, because you know, you're releasing a load of soot into your into your house. But you can get so we so I've installed these color changing light bulbs, dimmable colorable color changing smart light bulbs. So we use them particularly in our kitchen and particularly over our kitchen island. So I can kind of, you know, I can filter out all the blue light in the evening and make

things quite dim and then, you know, add in candles when we're sitting down for dinner. And then daytime, I exercise outdoors now. I used to be a real gym bunny and now I so this morning even though it was it was raining this morning and I went out and did this HIIT class in in the park with a load of other women in the rain and I felt brilliant afterwards so those are kind of two two big things like I said I'm kind of working on trying to be have a more regular sleep wake cycle um i don't always achieve it um but when i don't achieve it i'm more mindful of like how i feel the next day and i kind of go i really need to stop doing this but it's it is difficult i think the two things you mentioned i mean the the gym and exercising outdoors again is something that i think i've started to shift to more and more

over the last few years again i would go to the gym quite a bit and i just don't want to really anymore i mean i'll go occasionally but it's i think a i'm drawn to to movement and the natural environment more now um i know the benefits of nature i know you know all the studies on that but at the same time with the circadian biology research you know actually i should try and get outdoors as much as i can yeah and there's i think there's there's something freeing about running or exercising in the rain when you know that you know actually actually feels great as well afterwards you feel like you really conquered the elements yeah yeah um so that's something i can totally resonate with and yeah i'll tell you the other thing i've really done is i've taken up wild swimming so there's a there's a lake in north bristol yeah this is and i'm completely addicted to it oh my god i can't

believe you're saying that the last three months i i did it for the first time in bantham about in the middle of june yeah i was scared out my wits and i'm hooked now i'm utterly hooked yeah you've got to start doing in the winter so i look forward to it yeah where do you go there's a lake in north bristol called henley's lake and it has this kind of old school um uh i guess it's an edwardian kind of swimming club um it's just celebrated its centenary actually um so and they have a they have a little sauna there so this this i when i was researching the book i went up to scandinavia to kind of figure out how they they deal with the winter.

And one thing I noticed in Sweden was that they're really into saunas and jumping in, you know, into the Baltic Sea afterwards, which is completely freezing. And you get this big endorphin rush. But also I went up to Tromso in the far north of Norway, where given the latitude, you'd expect there to be a really high prevalence of seasonal affective disorder, and there isn't. And so there was a study into why this might be. And what that found was that it could be to do with people's mindset up there, their mindset. So they have far more positive attitudes to winter compared to people in the South of Norway. And I started thinking, well, that's really interesting. I think I need, because I get a bit miserable in the winter,

and my mum definitely does. And I kind of went, well, I really need to find some things to start looking forward to in the wintertime. And outdoor swimming, maybe I could do that in the winter and get that like sauna endorphin rush as well so last winter I like once a week would go down to Henley's Lake and get really hot in the sauna go into the lake well like freeze and then get back in the sauna and it was brilliant some of my best mates live in Bristol actually and I think um well if they're listening now I'll be coming down this winter guys to stay and we'll all go to the lake Henley's Lake is it? Henley's Lake yeah. Yeah I'm going to try that. Just taking a quick break in today's conversation to give a shout out to the sponsors of today's show. Athletic Greens continue their support of my podcast. To be really clear I absolutely prefer

that people get all of their nutrition from foods. But for some of us, this is not always possible. Athletic Greens is one of the most nutrient-dense whole food supplements that I've come across and contains vitamins, minerals, prebiotics, and digestive enzymes. So if you are looking to take something each morning as an insurance policy to make sure that you are meeting your nutritional needs, I can highly recommend it. For listeners of this podcast, if you go to athleticgreens.com forward slash live more, you will be able to access a special offer where you get a free travel pack box containing 20 servings of Athletic Greens, which is worth around £70 with your first order. You can check it out at athleticgreens.com forward slash

live more so you mentioned this place in norway you went to is it the whole of norway that doesn't get affected by no seasonal affective disorder or just this particular just this particular spot and also i think spitzbergen but then people who go to spitzbergen have got to be a little bit crazy anyway you know this is like in the far but so this what's it called again tromso tromso so tell me a little bit about tromso what's going on there why have they got positive mindset is there something historical that's led to that so tromso's in the arctic circle um generally the further north you go the higher the prevalence of seasonal affective disorder is interestingly the amish are another the amish are you know again we talked about amish light exposure so they don't have electric light but they also spend a lot more of their daytimes

outdoors because they a lot of them are agricultural workers the women tend to attend large gardens um you know they grow their own grow their own food and they like walk or scoot around because they're not allowed to drive cars. And they have the lowest prevalence of seasonal affective disorder of any Caucasian population studied so far, which also suggests that our light exposure might have something to do with this. But certainly the further north you go generally, the higher the prevalence of SAD is. So there does seem to be a little bit of a genetic adaptation. So if you look at the population of Iceland, they also seem to buck this trend a little bit. And there was a study that found that people of

Icelandic descent living in a little area of Canada had a lower prevalence of SAD compared to other Canadians living nearby. But yeah, if you go to Tromso, they also seem to buck this trend, even though the rest of Norway, people in the South don't like winter so much. And this psychological study was set up to try and figure out what it is about people in Tromso. And they found that they have this positive winter mindset. So in Tromso, in, you know, between kind of early December and mid January, the sun doesn't come up above the horizon. I went there about, I think it was about sort of the 10th to 15th of January. And so the sun was on the verge of coming back, but it wasn't quite back.

So it was a very weird, it was a very weird experience actually. In the morning, there was light. It felt like the sun was about to come up. And you know that if you're ever out just sort of before dawn, just before the sun comes up, it's kind of like quite a magical time yeah for sure and it felt like that in the mornings and the light was quite pinkish and i think another big thing about tromso is they have a lot of snow so you've got this kind of pinkish light bouncing off the off the snow a lot of the houses painted white so actually it's a kind of quite magical magical place in the winter and then you get kind of towards noon and you and you's a kind of quite magical place in the winter. And then you get towards noon, and you're still kind of like, oh, any minute now, the sun's going to come up. And then suddenly,

it starts to get darker again. And it really messes with your perception of time. So I remember thinking I was booked in to go and see the Northern Lights that evening. And I was spending the day walking around Tromso interviewing people and, you know, getting a sense of what it's like to live without the sun. And, um, and I, and I'd, I'd arranged with my Airbnb host that I was going to borrow some cross country skis and kind of go off cross country skiing. And I suddenly was like, oh my God, I don't have enough time. I've got to go and see the Northern lights like really soon. And then I looked at my phone at the time and it was only about 2 PM. But you felt it was like, I felt like it was sort of 6 or 7 actually and I needed,

and just that lack of sun and the fact it was getting dark so quickly. And one of the locals feel that as well because I guess you'll be, your whole mindset and perception of time is based around presumably being in the UK. So at that time of year, you know that the sun starts to set

around four or half four. And so I wonder if people who live there all the time that time of year you know that you know the sun starts to set around four or half four and yeah so I wonder if people who live there all the time have started to adjust to that I think they have but they see they very much see those dark times as special times they they kind of embrace this whole concept of course league or course which is basically coziness and so they you know they they kind of go okay and I And I interviewed a, so this, I interviewed a Sammy reindeer hunter, Sammy reindeer herder, you know, kind of indigenous people of the far North. And he said, yeah, well, we've, you know, we, we accept that we're different

people in, in the winter and the spring and the summer and the autumn. And he said, you know, in the winter, I don't feel very soci sociable i don't want to go out and see people but i just you know i enjoy spending time indoors by the fire um and and with close friends you know with close family and then in the summer and then my airbnb host also said that she said you know in summer people are crazy you know we go out hiking in the mountains at two in the morning people are different and they accept those differences but they also get on with things you know they also because they're forced to, everyone has cross-country skis. You see people running with head torches, you know, because it's dark and they want to get some exercise. So they

go out running with their head torches. They have these cross-country ski tracks that are all floodlit. Children's playgrounds are floodlit. So, you know, you've got kids climbing around on climbing frames in the dark, but they can see because there's lights um and they just get on with things really i mean for me there's so many take-homes from that i mean one take-home might be that maybe we can reframe the way we view winter and autumn and dark nights and you know if i you know as a parent of young kids i always i'm very conscious of the language I use around them thinking you know for example it's something I mentioned on the podcast before um you know I grew up when it you know my parents are immigrants from India you know they've grown up in very hot sunny climates and come to the UK

and I also I very much you know if the weather was bad I wouldn't want to go outside I want to stay indoors I've almost gone I flipped gone the other way with my kids and you know if it's weekend time like it's raining oh brill we can go out get wet and muddy and really try and use language so that i don't start to condition them yeah in a way that you know hey i don't know if i'm doing the right thing i'm just trying my best like all parents are but it makes me think maybe we you know we and any parents this thing we could take that approach for winter and go hey look it's going to be dark it's going to be cold what are the cool things that we can do now yeah yeah no i think so and there's there's some interesting research coming out of a lab in america looking at using

cognitive behavioral therapy for seasonal affective disorder so basically um trying to challenge people's perceptions of winter and and basically you know rephrase winter so rather than kind of going i hate winter i can't do anything in winter rather like framing that as winter's a bit more challenging i have to think harder and work harder to find things that i enjoy but i can still do it if i if i put some effort into it and and these studies of of cbt for for sad suggests that actually it can be as effective as light therapy and the effects of it might be more long lasting than than light therapy so although you know although your book's about chasing the sun and sunlight um it's it's sort of what i'm getting is that

mindset plays a role here as well right yes it's light exposure but it's also our mindsets as we go into these things super super fascinating that you've got to visit these areas and actually experience that it sounds magical actually the thought of actually experiencing that sort of pink hue of light and yeah it's totally it's totally beautiful and i'd love i'd love to go back again in fact i want to go back in the middle of summer as well i i'm already thinking oh that might be a nice thing to go and do this winter at some point so i'll have a look see what flights are like that it sounds cold as well it's pretty cold yeah but it's you know it's beautiful yeah it sounds fantastic i've got i

was actually reminded all this stuff reminded me of a thing i had a swedish friend when my when my babies were little um called hannah gronberg and and she she taught me this phrase that there's no there's no such thing as bad weather only inappropriate clothing and i i completely agree and doing my experiment and kind of getting outdoors more in winter also taught me that i do now like in winter i try and get out and i just put on more layers and lots of waterproof clothes and get out there and also you know really actually winter we often look out the window and go oh god it looks horrible and cold and gray and gloomy but once you get out there it's not as bad as you think it is and often it's really beautiful and you know your parks and places are often deserted so you have the whole space to yourself

yeah no for sure i wonder if these are problems that affect people in the equator as much in the sense that you know in the equator you know typically the weather would be a lot better i guess people would naturally go outside more in in the daytime just because the weather would be a lot better i guess people would naturally go outside more in in the daytime just because the weather lends itself to that of course it could be too hot at certain times but i wonder if they you know there's many other factors to consider of course but even if they are getting modernized and being on their screens in the evening and exposing artificial light i wonder has the impact been less on them because of the fact that they're getting so much natural uh sunlight in the day do you know anything

on that at all i don't know about that but one thing i would say actually is that let's forget about light exposure at night but one one big problem that's emerging in in those countries is um is vitamin d deficiency because everyone's spending so much more time indoors and because the darker your skin is the more time you need to spend outdoors to to make vitamin d um so vitamin d deficiency is a growing problem in those more southerly countries yeah and it's you would never expect that because you think they've got all this sun out there and it's the same you know my family from india it's the same thing there and it's it's interesting actually that culturally uh for my parents generation you know they never wanted to be out on the sun so you know I always want to go out in the sun my folks wouldn't want

to go out and particularly my mum wouldn't want to go out in the sun and it's it's it's sort of bizarre because we're the other way actually here when the sun's up we want to get outside and enjoy it and I think if you've grown up with it certainly culturally there's many other reasons for why they might want to stay inside which is it's just super fascinating yeah and actually one thing I think I should say because I've been talking about all this importance of getting outdoors I certainly wouldn't advocate that people get outdoors and go out without sunscreen and just you know bake themselves because the sun is a double-edged sword you know sunlight is really important for synchronizing our circadian rhythms and so on, but it still does, too much of it does raise a risk of skin cancer. So I think you have to be careful of that.

I think the other thing to say actually about light exposure and countries like India, and particularly China, is that there's this growing epidemic of short-sightedness among children because kids are increasingly spending so much of their time indoors in lessons, particularly in China. And also Singapore, there's a lot of these East Asian countries where there's this big boom in short-sightedness. And it's because we need to be exposed to a certain amount of bright light during the daytime for our eyes to develop properly and if you're indoors the whole time your eyeballs basically elongate and so you you're more likely to become short-sighted i mean the prevalence of myopia has reached about 90 percent in some of these countries it's really terrifying it really is terrifying um it's interesting for me that

from your experiment a couple years ago one of the things you as a family do now is you use modern technology to help replicate natural environments. So you've got these cool dimmer lights, you can move the red lights, red wavelength of light out, which sounds amazing. Yeah, get rid of the blue at night. Which is brilliant because that's presumably what we're going to evolve more and more to, is we're going to see all these companies actually start creating uh lighting solutions that make it easier for us to live in the modern world but also to try and replicate what's going on outside as much as possible but obviously we mentioned the Amish a couple of times here and you know I remember

reading this bit in the book and it's so interesting that you actually went and spent some time with the Amish. So the Amish are a community who, you know, still live from what I understand very much in a way that they have lived for many years. And I wonder if you could share your experience of living with the Amish, but also how did that come about? Yeah. Well, like I said, I was interested in, well, I was interested in this whole thing about electric light at night, first of all, and I wanted to find some communities that didn't have light at night. So there've been various studies suggesting that if you look at tribal societies in, say, Tanzania or Bolivia, that they go to bed earlier and wake up earlier than we do in the West.

But those are kind of well they're not equatorial countries but they're a lot closer to the equator than we are in britain say yeah um and also they live in very different conditions very very basic conditions and and so i was like i wonder if i can find a community or a society further north like more akin to North Americans or British people who live in kind of fairly comfortable conditions and more similar to we do, but who just don't have electricity. So I started like thinking about off-grid communities and that kind of thing and doing lots of searching in the sort of medical literature. And I came across a couple of studies by a researcher called Theodore Postolaki at the University of Maryland, who'd been looking at the Amish. I was like, oh, the Amish, huh, I don't know much about them. And he was very interested

in their light exposure. So actually, I remember I was in Norway when I finally managed to connect with Theodor over Skype. And we had this really fascinating conversation actually very late at night about light and the Amish. And I said, well, you know, I'm going to be coming to the US because some other things I did in the book would do some stuff like I met with an American submariner because they spend months without any exposure to sun. So I said, well, I'm going to be coming to the US. And I was thinking, I was reading your papers and thinking about going and staying with an Amish family to experience what it's like to live without artificial light. I found a couple of B&Bs and they said I can come and stay with them. And he said, yeah, but they're not like real Amish. You're not going to get the

authentic Amish experience because they're used to having visitors. They've been granted a kind of special dispensation by their community to be allowed to have visitors the whole thing about the Amish the whole reason they they live off grid is because they're trying to keep the outside world out they're trying to insulate themselves from the modern world so they're not opposed to electricity per se they do have like um rechargeable battery operated power tools in their in their workshops and stuff but they they don't want the they don't want artificial they don't want electricity to you know bring things like radio television the internet which they feel will they don't use

cars either why do they so i've heard that's because they don't want to fragment their communities and if people keep people close yeah yeah you know what i'm sorry to interrupt but it's it's interesting isn't it that we might consider them to be quite extreme relative to how we live yet you know we now are seeing in the science of literature the importance of community yeah the amish have community yeah we're now seeing the implications of these fragmented societies we're living in um that the stress the sort of uh health implications you know mental health problems are on the rise and again you're saying that in the Amish they've got what was it the lowest rate of seasonal disorder in anyasian population so although we may not myself but i say we are collected we may

look at them as living very different lives to us that we may not enjoy on many metrics they're doing pretty well aren't they yeah and i tell you what their dads are more involved in the child rearing as well so one way i really connected with this amish family so so what i'll tell you i'll finish my story so what happened was that I contacted this researcher, Theodore Postolake, and he said, you don't want to go and stay in an Amish B&B. I tell you what, I'll connect you with this woman, Hannah, who is my Amish liaison person. So he conducts a lot of, he doesn't just do light studies with the Amish, he also does genetic studies. And they have this medical center in, in Pennsylvania, um, in the middle of Amish land. Um, and they go out and they connect, collect blood samples and so on and study the genetics of Amish people. So he had, he works

with this Amish woman called Hannah and he said, I'll just ask her if she'd be prepared to have this British journalist come and stay with her family for the weekend. And I had to basically, he made a massive leap of trust in me because he said, you know, they're very sensitive about people's perceptions of them. And I need to have your words that you're just going to go there to interview them about their light and sleep. And you're not going to start asking them about schooling and all that kind of thing. And I said, no, I no I you know I'm just a bit like fixated on light and sleep I just want to find out about this so we set this up and um I went I flew out landed in New York and the next day uh Teodor Postolake's daughter who just graduated from high school picked me up in her dad's massive truck and drove me out to Pennsylvania.

And we picked Hannah up at a farmer's market on the way because the Amish are not allowed to drive cars, but they are allowed to accept lifts from other people. And when she saw this massive truck, she was really, her eyes lit up because she was like, it's Memorial Day weekend, which is like a bank holiday weekend. And there's loads of yard sales and you've just brought a massive truck so I can buy stuff and move stuff around. So that's what we did. So I went to bed that night and she said, what do you want to do while you're here? And I said, I literally want to stalk you. I just want to follow you around and see what you do over the course of these two or three days and ask you some questions and ask you know other people you interact with about their sleep and and their light exposure and she was like okay well tomorrow we're going yard sale shopping and we're going to

get up at the same time we usually do which is 4 30 is that okay with you and I went that's fine because I've just come from the UK so that's's about 9.30. I'll be wide awake. So I actually work well with my jet lag. But you know, we got up, they got up as they always do, had breakfast at sort of quarter to five and then went out and went to these yard sales, which, you know, car boot sales and the whole like Amish community were out and about at sort of five or six in the morning. It was, it was really strange, but lovely. It was really nice. And I met lots of people, interviewed lots of Amish people. What struck me was that they do still have chronotypes. You know, there are definitely still people who identify as night owls, but if you ask them, you know, well, when would you like to go to sleep? And when would you like to wake up? I remember there was

this woman called Katie Baylor, who's like yeah everyone thinks i'm so lazy because i just want to sleep in but i have to get up for my husband and i said when would you ideally go to bed she was like oh like 10 p.m i know it's so late like okay when would you like to get up 6 a.m so that's her definition of late according to her society yeah yeah which is really interesting I mean it's it just blows my mind hearing all this just the way different people live and you know did you oh no that's what I was going to say about the whole um acceptance within the family and how I managed to connect with this Amish family so Hannah was dead lovely and she was really you know friendly and I guess she's used to working with non-Amish people because she works with

Teo Postolake. But her husband was a lot more, at least at first, kind of like you could see him being kind of quite shy, quite like, I'm not sure what's going on here. Her daughter-in-law, especially, was really, she was just kind of, I remember being sat in the back of the truck with her on the way to this yard sale. And she was she wouldn't look at me she was really like on edge and who is this and what's she doing and who you know because they have no contact they have very little contact with people from outside their community so they were very mistrustful and the way i like the way we began to be friends and and really engage was when i you know i talked about the fact that um both me and my husband are freelance

journalists and we share joint childcare. So we both kind of work more or less a four-day week and we've always tried to share the childcare equally. And Ben, the husband in this relationship was like, well, that's what we do. I've always been really involved with my kids and and he was really fascinated he was really fascinated by this idea that my husband also kind of like pitched in and did his because his perception was that in the west it's not like that yeah yeah isn't that interesting because you wouldn't I don't think typically people would think that about the Amish they think well because the dads work very close to home you know they're quite in and out of the house all day so you know they have big families as well so they you know they're involved in their in their children's lives in a way that fathers in in our society often aren't and i think that

thing of having you know having and also you know they're like parents live two doors down and everyone's much it is a much closer community and i think i think that's right i think there are probably lessons we can learn from these communities about you know reflect on our own lives you mentioned there's a section in your book i can't remember where where you talk about how in some societies there's no term or word for insomnia yeah and i mean are the amish one of those that you came across i think that was i think that was it might be the hadza in t Tanzania yeah which are you know a tribe in in rural Tanzania. It reminds me of um I can't remember who gave this it was a I think it was a psychology professor when I was a either a medical student or a junior doctor I went to this really amazing talk by someone and he was

saying how these words that we take for granted like indigestion or heartburn or or gas said in some societies around the world they don't have words for them they just don't exist because you know they either don't experience them or their perception of it is completely different so they don't have a word for it and isn't it amazing how how language is so telling on this that in our culture we don't have a word for something, it's possibly because it's not an issue or is accepted as norm. And can you imagine if we didn't have a word for insomnia in English, given the way society is set up at the moment? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's mad, isn't it?

Absolutely, yeah. It's super fascinating. You touched on social jet lag. You've also just mentioned jet lag. And I really want to sort of go in here because i think it's super interesting for people many people of course not everyone have experienced jet lag at some point and you talk about how nasa and you know the space station are really drilled in on how you best manage jet lag because they've spent so much time and money

getting these astronauts ready. You know, you can't let something as simple as jet lag, you know, waste time or efficiencies, right? So I wonder if you could expand a bit on that. Yeah, jet lag or sleep deprivation, you know, they're well aware that there have been, you know, like the, you know, space shuttle disasters, related and it's not just it's not just space actually but a lot of big industrial disasters have been like linked to sleep deprivation or they've occurred in the middle of the night when people are you know working the night shift so they're really you know really like we need to do everything we can to make sure our um our astronauts are well rested don't have jet lag and are as alert as they possibly and as and are as i can't speak and i'm obviously not very social jet lag right there

as they possibly can be when they're on duty so yeah i mean on the on the international on the the u.s part of the international space station um nasa has refitted the lights to try and um to try and do just that to help its astronauts um cope with the fact that because space is a really weird environment and that the sun rises i can't remember how often i think it's every time today isn't it no it's more than that i think it's i think it rises every 90 minutes because you know it's a weird environment um so if you're kind of and if and it tends to be very dim on the inside of the international space station so if you are kind of like in this dim environment and then suddenly you get this like brilliant flash of light every every you know 90 minutes um that can really mess up your circadian rhythms and and leave your you know leave you in this kind of permanently desynchronized state so um

they have been doing a lot of work on trying to strengthen athletes rhythms so one thing they have is that when that when the when did i say athletes i mean astronauts yeah when the astronauts go to sleep they do so in these little kind of coffin like pods and in there they have these lights and they can they can um they can put them into different modes but they you know in the run up to sleep they put them on a kind of dim amber kind of setting to help them you know wind down and get ready for sleep. And then when they wake up first thing in the morning, whatever morning is up there, they put it on the like really bright wake up setting. But NASA also invests a lot in their astronauts when they're on the ground. And actually some of the same scientists who are involved in the research on astronauts and work with astronauts

also work very closely with professional athletes and sports teams to help them mitigate jet lag. That's huge, isn't it? And particularly in America where they've got the three time zones and the different teams playing other teams in the one time zone. And then there's been shown that jet lag

can really impair athletic performance. So, you know wish I wish that airlines would take this issue as seriously as as NASA and these these athletic teams. It's good isn't it a good thing whether when NASA are doing this research and they're changing light tones and textures for their astronauts in space at some point that's going to filter down i think it will i think it's happening very but very very slowly so you know one thing they do it you you can you can make jet lag go away a lot faster than it does normally by optimizing your light exposure so tell me about how do you make jet lag go away well it's a bit complicated but i'll do my best

well i'll tell you what to make this really practical in about three weeks i'm flying from manchester to la okay and my flight is at 1 p.m from manchester uk time and I arrive at 4pm LA time. Yeah okay so if you're flying from you said from Manchester to LA in the afternoon UK time there's two kind of things that matter. The first thing you will always need to be thinking about is what time is it according to your body clock. So when you're flying to LA, even though you're traveling to a different country, you're still, your body is still on British time. Okay. And there's the other thing you have to get your head around is that light in the evening and at night delays your clock or makes you more of a night owl. And light kind of soon after you wake up in the morning makes you more of an early bird. It advances the clock. So if you're flying west to America, say,

you want to delay your body clock. You want to become more of a night owl because evening in LA is the middle of the night in the UK so if you want to be able to stay up until like 10 at night you need to be more night owlish basically so basically I want to delay my body clock which means I need to limit light in the morning yeah and expose myself to more light in the evening according to where your body clock is right yeah so not on la time on uk time initially and then gradually as you adapt you need to kind of adapt your light exposure so you go you know i'm still on uk time but i want to delay my body clock what do i need to do to delay my body clock you need to be seeing light at night and in the evening uk time and

that's easy if you're flying to la because when you get off the plane it's going to be daytime in la so you're seeing light according to your body clock in the middle of the night so that's why going west is easier than going east because you naturally it's one reason why it's one reason yeah yeah and i don't know your view on blue light blocking glasses but i've always struggled with jet lag but I was all right on my last trip to the west coast of America because I can't remember what time my flight was but I think as soon as I got on the flight I put on these really harsh red blocking glasses I didn't watch the uh in-flight entertainment I think is the word and halfway into the flight when I thought it was around 7 8 a.m

in in LA I then started to take those glasses off and start to expose myself head of the curve so let's talk about coming back in the opposite direction but that actually works yeah yeah it properly works more than it ever done before and I thought it really does but I changed a couple of things as well like my caffeine intake and I thought okay it's one of these two things or a bit of both yeah but yeah let's talk about the other way so coming yeah so the other way is the real challenge and sorry they the glasses look red but they're blocking the blue light yeah like from the blue part of the spectrum exactly um and then when you're going in the opposite direction it's the opposite you're wanting to advance your body clock which means

you want to be and by now you'll be on la time so your body clock is la time and that means that you need to be seeing light from kind of 7am LA time onwards to advance your body clock and you need to be avoiding it really importantly in the night LA time. What's different about this for me is that it's a big shift in thinking so you're not thinking about your new body clock in your new time zone you're saying I'm going there but actually what is my existing body clock do I need to push it forward or push it back if I need to push it forward I do a and b if I want to push it back I do a and b but you do it on your existing body clock yes it's actually once you get your head around it's quite simple it is quite simple but

it's a bit you have to like change yeah you have to think about what time is my body on at the moment so when you're going back east when you're flying from LA to Manchester, you're trying to advance your body clock. And kind of typically what happens is people fly overnight. Well, I am flying overnight. I'm leaving at 6.30 in the evening and I arrive in Manchester at 12.30. So lunchtime. Okay.

So when I arrive at lunchtime in Manchester, actually LA is eight hours back, so it's going to be 4am in LA. Yeah, so it's the middle of the night in LA. So the last thing you want to be doing is getting off the flight in Manchester and suddenly seeing a load of bright light because it's the night time. You're trying to advance your body clock

and that's going to delay your body clock. So what you really want is to wear a pair of really dark wraparound sunglasses for that whole flight. And then especially when you get off the plane in Manchester and keep them on until your body clock reaches about 7am, then you can take them off and get as much light as possible because that will help you advance. Brilliant. If that makes sense. Yeah, love it. Yeah. So there's Stephen Lockley, who's one of these researchers who works with NASA astronauts and also these elite sports teams. And he did this for me as well, actually.

He basically creates a kind of a sleep plan, a light plan. It's not just a sleep plan, it's a light plan, almost like a light prescription of when precisely you should be seeing light and when you should be avoiding light and when you should be taking melatonin and that kind of thing and he's just recently launched a an app there are various apps now that will tell you about when you should be seeing light and avoiding light um they're like the principles are quite simple once you get your head around it but like it does require a bit of thinking and some of it's quite counterintuitive like you don't you know that advice that you just live in your new time zone can sometimes really backfire and

just you know well I've sorted I've kind of I've kind of cracked after many years of trying going west yeah so now with your new advice I'm going to try and crack going east on my way back yeah well my friend Dickie's actually he's a guitarist in a sort of 1980s band Scritty Politty right and he um he was flying to Japan to um to do a Japan tour yeah and I it was when I was writing the book and I said I tell you what I'm gonna try and um I'm gonna try can I try and write you a jet lag plan based on what I've learned from, from Stephen Lockley. And I did it. And he said, he, he was like, you, you, I did it and it worked really well. And the rest of the bands were completely floored with jet lag and I was fine. So I think it does make it, and I've, I've definitely, since, since I learned all this, it's changed how I deal with jet lag and it does make it much better. You know, and this is the, you know, ultimately air travel's not going away.

We love it too much. We love exploring different parts of the world. Um, and it's kind of funny cause on the way out there, I always go out to work. So I'm very busy when I'm out there getting up early on my old times. It's not a problem. You can use caffeine and coffee to keep going and you can sort of get through the days. It's coming back. So I come home to family life and kids and work routines and it's sometimes you're flawed in the morning you know you're just not with it at all um so I think that's that's really interesting and I and I think when people read your book when they understand the principles it's not that tricky um to kind of figure it out but also you need a strong will right because

as we were saying earlier on in the podcast often we find the environment in which we're in too challenging to make behavior so a lot of people will go yeah but i'm just not gonna wear these kind of wacky glasses from 7am when i land to 3pm yeah i will i i would actually do that i have no shame i mean i was i was walking around the air cabin and going to the toilet with shades on and the air crew were a bit like what are you doing and I'm like well let me tell you about what's wrong with your plane but it's but they found it really fascinating you know because they really you know air crew completely have these issues with jet lag and they worry about this shift working thing and so when I explained it they were like oh that's really interesting yeah I understand why you're wearing

dark glasses to the toilet that's quite weird but, but now we understand. We actually have a lot of air crew listening to this podcast because I get lots of messages from cabin crew saying, oh, this and that. And they worry about their jobs. So if anyone is listening to this, they have a boss at Virgin or BA and they want to come on and talk on the podcast about this and how you can change lighting

to better serve your employees, basically, so that they can function better. There's less of risk to their health you know please get in touch we would be delighted to have that conversation because i think it's super well i was as well yeah i do and actually hospitals are starting to take this on board as well there's been a few really interesting studies looking at trying to improve the light environment in hospitals to strengthen patients circadian rhythms and try and help them recover faster look there's no question that you know we're having a bit of a joke about jet lag and glasses and stuff this is serious this is um this is super serious stuff because our society has moved on we do live in a 24-hour society

um some of the some of the people who help us the most in society you know ambulances firefighters shift workers nurses in hospitals or you know and ambulances, firefighters, shift workers, nurses in hospitals, or, you know, and the list goes on, porters in hospitals, actually, in many ways are putting their health at risk by doing these jobs. And I think as a progressive society, we need to start taking this seriously, we need to think about some solutions for these workers who are helping us, security staff, you know, it is quite tragic, tragic isn't it that these are the people in society who often are taking the brunt off this yeah yeah i think so and i think that works ongoing and i think the thing is we need shift workers we need shift work yeah you know we need like you say we need people society's moved on

now yeah yeah we can't really go back to and and it does enable us to be more productive if we can work shifts. But we need to find a way to help shift workers. There's some really interesting work going on again in America. Again, actually, so Stephen Lockley's at Harvard and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. There's also some really interesting research going on there about whether you could you know given that people have to work the night shift what can you do to mitigate the effects of that on people's health so they are looking at whether meal timing could try and whether meal timing could make it have a bit less of a negative impact on health so the idea here is that you know one problem with working the night

shift apart from being exposed to light in the middle of the night, is that you tend to eat in the middle of the night as well. And so, you know, like I said earlier, meal timing can also affect the timing of your clocks in all your organs and tissues. maybe if you avoid eating overnight and snacking overnight even if you have to stay up all night and work the night shift that's going to have less of an impact on your on your rhythms and cause less havoc and desynchrony than if you're both seeing light at the wrong time staying up overnight and and also eating and and you know just perpetuating this desynchrony i mean i think this works going to be ongoing i think the field is accelerating it has to and as more and more research comes out perhaps we can continue this conversation at some point yeah i'd love to yeah because it really is fascinating you've written a brilliant brilliant book i can't recommend it enough i think people will learn a lot and they'll find

it very fascinating and interesting as they read it as a sort of final thought from me um i can't help but think that you know your, your book's about the sun, right? It's a brilliant title, Chasing the Sun. But in many ways, you know, this is reflective of how as humans living in, you know, as humans living these modern lives, we've lost our connection to the natural world you know the sun is one part of that we've also lost connection to our food supply we've lost connection to so many more things than just the sun i think the sun almost epitomizes it but yeah but it's just reflective of of you know you mentioned before about these different seasons and how we we almost try to override these seasons i think you mentioned in your your story you met some people in Scandinavia who you know they hibernate

in the winter they don't go out much they don't feel like socializing but they embrace it yeah right they embrace it and recognize that actually you know we've got different seasons so maybe our behavior should be different in different seasons maybe we shouldn't try and override nature and make sure you know even to the point of you know eating ripe fruits and blueberries in the summer yet we're still having it with our christmas pudding now because we can buy blueberries from kenya in december you know it goes far beyond sunlight for me sunlight of course is important but i think we've lost our connection to the natural world yes Yes, I agree. And the way we, you know, we were talking earlier about, you know, family connections and community. I think that's also a massive change in the modern world.

And I think it matters. All of this matters. It really does matter. This podcast, as you well know, is called Feel Better, Live More. better, live more. I genuinely believe from talking to people, from what I've seen in my practice for nearly 20 years, is that when people feel better in themselves, they get more out of their life. And I think your research and your book, you know, very clearly demonstrates that. So I wonder if you could leave my listeners with a few tips, some actionable tips, hopefully inspire them, hopefully at the end of a

conversation that i i think they're going to have found fascinating um to go and make some of these changes into their lives so so what are some of your top tips that you think are practical for most people okay i think the first one would be to try and dim your evenings and brighten your days um that doesn't as i said it doesn't mean that you have to completely abolish artificial light at night. But you can do simple things like turn off the overhead ceiling lights, switch to kind of dimmer table lamps, those kind of things. Make sure that you, if you're using screens, that you try and put them on night mode, but also double check that the screen is dimmer at night. And it should look a bit redder, ideally. But bear in mind that that won't completely reduce all the blue spectrum light that you're exposed to. So you do also need to try and put it off put it off definitely like in the immediate run up to run up to bed and again you know this is a kind of a holistic approach as well you know if you're if you're kind of like checking work emails just before bed i certainly find this you know i i then

like can't go to sleep because i'm i'm thinking about work um so so try and avoid bright and particularly blue spectrum lights and and often the light doesn't look blue it kind of looks whitey uh like bright white so just try and kind of go for that kind of more orangey softer warm lighting and keep it dim and kind of cozy kind of romantic lighting is what you should be aspiring to in the evenings and in the daytime just to you know you i realize that i'm really lucky i'm a freelance journalist i can kind of choose my work hours i can you know i can go for walks around the block when i feel like it apart from the whole deadline thing um but um I think there are little things you can do to just boost your light exposure you

know like walk to work cycle to work go for a walk around the block it doesn't have to take huge amounts of time um but you know you're also getting some exercise you're also getting up from your desk you're often like just breaking you know just having a little bit of time. But you know, you're also getting some exercise, you're also getting up from your desk, you're often like just breaking, you know, just having a little bit of time to reflect on what you've been doing. If it's a nice day, not obviously, if it's raining, it's more challenging. But you know, eat your lunch in the park, invite your friends for or your colleagues to, you know, take a walk around the block and discuss that issue that you're kind of working on together while walking. So you're getting exercise and light. And I think the other main message is

about regularity. You know, it is hard and I struggle with this as well, but where possible, try and keep a more regular schedule. So try and go to bed at more or less the same time every night. Obviously, sometimes that's not going to happen, but just try to do it as much as possible. And get up at the same time each morning. And try to avoid eating at night and drinking alcohol. And that's challenging as well. But I think, you know, when you start doing it, you'll realize you feel better when you live like that. Yeah, Lynn when there's some

brilliant tips there a lot of quite simple tips there which um i i find fascinating that i can talk to a variety of different experts on a variety of different topics and often some of the tips are quite similar and i find that fascinating because the science can be incredibly complex but actually some of the practical take-homes are very straightforward and I really hope that that's inspiring and empowering for people. Linda thanks for making the journey up here today thanks for your time thanks for coming and maybe we'll continue this at some point in the future. I would love to thank you for having me. No worries. I'd love to. Thank you for having me.

No worries. That concludes today's episode of the Feel Better Live More podcast. What did you think? Were you aware of the importance of natural light? As always, really do think about one thing that you can take from today's conversation and apply into your own life. How are you going to ensure that you have more natural light in the day and less artificial light in the evening? And how are you going to implement more regularity

into your own sleep-wake cycle? As always, please do let Linda and I know what you thought of today's conversation and what tips you are going to try and implement by getting in touch on social media, Instagram, Facebook, And if you can, especially on Twitter, please do use the hashtag FBLM so that I can easily find your comments. The show notes page for this episode is drchatterjee.com forward slash 77. So do go there

to read some interesting articles related to what we discussed on the podcast today. to read some interesting articles related to what we discussed on the podcast today. A lot of what was discussed today revolved around the importance of natural light for many aspects of our health, especially our sleep. Now I wrote about this topic in detail in my first book, The Full Pillar Plan, but also in my latest one, The Stress Solution. In addition, there is a special section for night shift workers in The stress solution with practical tips to help deal with some of the struggles that people who work shifts often have. Both of my books, The Four Pillar Plan and The Stress Solution are available to buy all over the world in paperback, ebook or as audiobooks, which I am narrating. So if you are interested and want to support this podcast, please do go and pick up a copy. Remember, from the start of this new season of the podcast,

I am trying to video every single conversation. Many of you I know prefer video conversations, but also many of you have told me that you have friends and family that don't do audio podcasts, but do like video conversations, please do either go to my Facebook page or to my YouTube channel to watch these conversations. Please also do go and subscribe to my YouTube channel. I'm creating a lot of other educational videos around health, which you can only see on my YouTube channel. You can go to drchatterjee.com forward slash YouTube to go straight there. Now, if you enjoy my weekly shows, please do consider supporting them

by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, whichever platform you listen to podcasts on. You can also help me spread the word by taking a screenshot right now and sharing with your friends and family on your social media channels, or you can do it the old fashioned way and simply tell your friends and family about the show. As always, I really do appreciate your support. As I mentioned in the introduction, I am looking

to expand my team at the moment. So if you think you have a skill set that would be useful, please do email on info at drchastity.com. I'm particularly interested in people with social media experience and expertise. A big thank you to Richard Hughes for editing and for Dr. Chastity for producing this week's podcast. That is it for today. I hope you have a fabulous week. Make sure you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back very shortly with my latest episodes. Remember, you are the architects of your own health. Making lifestyle changes always worth it because when you feel better, you live more. I'll see you next time. Thank you.