Why Your House is Making you Sick and Tired

0:00 What if I were to tell you that one of the most dangerous things isn't necessarily food or stress or aging. It's actually the lighting inside your house. The lighting in your house might sound like a very trivial thing. And the reason why so many people don't even see this is because it's been normalized. Everyone uses it and it doesn't even feel dangerous at all. And this one single environmental mismatch. And when I talk about mismatches, I'm talking about comparing way back in the day when our environment was very very different compared to modern day. And out of all the mismatches, light is at the top of the list because light affects something called the circadian system. This has to

0:47 do with your mood, your metabolism, your hormones. And you could be eating fine and actually exercising and sleeping enough but still have a problem if your lighting isn't correct. Your circadian rhythm is a clock, okay? And it's controlled by light and dark signals, but you also have different clocks in different organs in the body. And they're all synced by this master clock in your brain. And so this circadian system is on a rhythm. And the most important thing about it is this one word right here, contrast, light and dark. Way back in the day, we were exposed to very bright light during the day and also when the sun set, we were exposed to darkness. And out of that, this system was created called the

1:34 circadian rhythm that we're still operating off of. But unfortunately, in the modern environment, we don't have this contrast anymore. But before I get into this very interesting subject, I first need to define a new word. You may know it or you may not. It's called lux. And lux has to do with how bright a light is. Even on your phone, you can actually get an app, a lux meter. And you can actually measure how much brightness from a light is hitting this surface right here or on your body if you hold it very closely. When we get into the outdoors and you're being exposed to the sun, depending on where you are and if there's clouds out, you might be exposed to 10,000 to up to a 100,000 lux. On an overcast day, that goes down

2:20 to 2,000 to 10,000. When you're indoors, it can go from 100 to 500, sometimes even more, depending on the lights that you're exposed to. At night time using your phone or watching your TV, that can be between 300 and a,000 lux. When you're outside and you're exposed to the moonlight, it's very tiny lux, 0.1. Okay, it's almost nothing. And then we have other things like your fireplace which is like 50 very very small amounts of lux. Because of the current modern-day lighting situation, we have created the absolute worst environment for our human brains that ever was. And we created this artificial environment where the days are very dim, but the nights are very bright. We also have filtered sunlight through glass because

3:06 glass is insulated with a gas that prevents UV and infrared. This lack of light signal tells the brain it's not daytime. Okay, that's the signal that our brains get. Then at night, we have overhead LEDs. In one of the rooms in my house, we actually have all these LED lights, very bright, very unnatural, and then you have TVs, phones, tablets, very strong signals that tell our brains to stay alert and stay awake. So during the morning part of the day, we don't have the signals to wake up. Yet at night, we do have the signals to wake up. So that's what I mean by contrast. Everything is kind of grayed out, kind of neutralized. There's no big huge difference between morning and night.

3:52 It's kind of the same, but usually at night, we have to turn the lights up because it gets dark outside. So this is creating not just a mild problem for our brain, it's creating a major problem for our brain. Even if you compare that to staying up late, it doesn't even compare. This lack of contrast is much more damaging to our circadian waves. Historically, humans have been outside in the bright light. Farmers are outside a great majority of the day. And even when we had winters, when the days were shorter and it got dark sooner, we still had campfires. We had fire at night, which is very nondisruptive. It's very low lux. So, modern day dark days,

4:38 bright lights, huge disruption. This affects melatonin release. Melatonin is a hormone that tells you it's time to go to sleep. I'm tired. And it helps you get to sleep. So, melatonin is either delayed or it's blunted. You have a problem with cortisol because cortisol is triggered by blue light. And you might lie in bed for 7 or 8 hours, but the depth of sleep is missing. When you go to bed at night, you go through four cycles of sleep from a superficial to a deeper sleep. Most people don't even get close to the capacity of what they really need with the deep restful sleep. This affects metabolism. It affects insulin. It affects blood sugar. But it really affects a person's mood, anxiety,

5:24 depression. I mean, I've had patients who ate perfectly, exercised consistently, but they didn't sleep well, and that's the thing that stopped them from losing weight. There's also a lot of data on this. I'm going to put some research down below. Brighter nighttime light exposure and risk for type 2 diabetes. When you're outside during the day in the sun, getting the bright light, this is what your body needs. And even your blood sugars will be better just from that. Regardless of what you eat, it's going to help your blood sugar to a certain degree. Whereas evening bright lights worsen your blood sugar. And then on top of that, at night, what do people do? They snack. They graze. Terrible, deadly combination. So, in other words, light can have a huge impact on your

6:10 metabolism. Now, if you've ever visited someone in the ICU or you yourself been in an ICU, you notice that they always keep the lights on like 24/7 and they kind of come in and check on the person every couple hours. I know I was there one time and literally all night long they're waking me up checking on me and literally I had the light on. It's a terrible environment for recovery. There's something called ICU acquired delirium as a circadian rhythm disorder. Now, certain hospitals are starting to use dynamic lighting. Hopefully, all of them will get on board, but it's a big issue. When the darkness disappears, your brain destabilizes. And if you really want to see a situation where that night is removed completely, look

6:57 at institutions that have 247 lighting prisons. You talk about severe sleep deprivation, mood disorders that come from that. This is why constant or chronic lighting is considered psychologically harmful. The brain desperately needs night darkness just as much as it needs light in the sun. Humans have evolved with a lot of contrast and in modern day that's pretty much gone. This is called an ancestral mismatch. I have a free download that I want to give to you. This free download is my daily routine in a checklist. This is a routine that I use every day to feel like I'm 18 years old even though I'm 60 years old. And I want to give it to you for free. And so there's a little link down below. Click it and definitely

7:43 download that. So the fix for this is not a supplement. It's not discipline. It's not even an environmental correction. Rule number one, make your days aggressively bright. Get outside before noon and expose yourself to sun. I'm not talking about being burned, but just get out there and get more sun. And I would also be hesitant about wearing sunglasses because you need some of that light to get into the eye. And I'm not talking about looking into the sun, but just maybe to the side. It's okay to squint. If you're not squinting, then you're doing it wrong. But some of that light needs to get inside the eye, okay? From an angle, okay? Not directly right into the retina. But even cloudy days

8:30 will work because you are going to be getting certain amounts of light through clouds. Not to the same lux, but you'll get something. Number two, make night genuinely dark. No overhead lights. Just turn the overhead lights off. You might want to get a couple lights around your room that are like soft and like amber. Make your screens dim, especially 3 hours before you go to bed. Now, if you have a fireplace, realize that you're going to get very small amounts of lux. Rule number three, fix both ends of this contrast scale. You want the first part of your day to have bright light. Okay? Now, certain times of the year when it's cold out, you're going to be inside. So,

9:15 in that case, get a bright fullsp spectrum light box or something above your computer. I have one and I have that turned on in the first part of the day so you can actually get some bright light. It's going to send a signal to your eyes and tell your body to wake up. And then at night, what I do is I replace my light bulbs with incandescent lights, which is much better. It's very low lux and they're kind of dimmed and they're really hard to get nowadays, but if you can find them, that'd be great. Just realize modern disease is not just created by what we eat, but it's also other things, too. And light is right there at the top of the list. Make sure when you go in your room that you don't have these little lights around, and

10:02 maybe you might have a charger with a light on it. Cover up those lights. This is probably the lowest hanging fruit, the easiest thing to do to create the biggest impact on not just how long you sleep, but the quality of sleep, how deep you sleep, how you feel, your mood, how you feel when you wake up, your metabolism, your hormones, your cognitive function. Because the lack of contrast creates the opposite effect. Now, since I'm talking about light, I did an interview with this doctor on light that is literally mind-blowing. The benefit of sunlight. If you haven't seen that, you have to watch it. I put that video up right here. Check it out.