The other weekend, at about 9am on a Saturday, I bounded into my bedroom singing nonsense and brandishing a cup of coffee. My dog happily followed, settling on the bed while my wife stared at me, bleary-eyed and slightly stunned. I carried on, singing my dog’s name over and over to the tune of Eleanor Rigby before she interrupted me.
“Why are you so… cheerful?”
Like almost every day since the start of the year, it was raining. It was cold. But I was resolutely, annoyingly joyful – all because of a recently acquired, low-effort habit.
As a health journalist, there’s one piece of advice that comes up with almost every expert I speak to – the importance of morning light. “It’s crucial,” gastroenterologist Will Bulsiewicz told me recently. I’m no stranger to this theory but admittedly have long kicked the idea down the road because – why would anyone volunteer to stand outside on a bitterly cold morning? But he insisted I gave the practice real thought. “I honestly believe that people will feel the difference if they start doing this within one day,” he said. “I would challenge the readers of your paper to try this for a week.”
So I figured I’d give it a proper try.
For the past four weeks I have been standing on my flat’s tiny balcony within the first hour of waking up, if not the first half hour. I’ve been resetting my circadian rhythm and waking at the same time every day (7am). I simply get up, drink a massive glass of water, take my iron supplement, and then emerge blearily onto my balcony while setting a five-minute timer.
Here, I do absolutely nothing. Sometimes I’ve spent the time planning my day and feeling very pleased with myself for the head start. More often than not, I just notice what’s happening around me. The weather, the temperature, the activity of birds. And I can feel the scales falling off my eyes. I mean this literally. Outside, I can feel my eyes widening – as though my eyelid, rusted and unfocused, is being newly oiled.
On some incredibly cold days I’ve had to aggressively layer up and, of course, the rain would make the experience a little less comfortable. But by the time I’m back inside and have shaken off the cold/wet/grey, I feel calm, awake and ready for the day.
The science supports this. “Light is the most powerful synchroniser of our body clock system, which influences sleep cycles as well as rhythms in many other bodily functions,” says Jonathan Johnston, professor of chronobiology and integrative physiology at the University of Surrey.
But the light specifically has to be natural light. Unlike the artificial light that accompanies so many early mornings, the human eye is built to be cued by the sun: we have photoreceptors in the retina which send signals to the brain when they detect natural light and start the physiological transition from night (resting) to day (active). “These cells in the eye are essential for entraining our physiology and synchronising our body clock to the light–dark cycle, which in turn supports all the activities we need to carry out,” explains Dr Nina Milosavljevic, lecturer in neuroscience at the University of Manchester
This is true even when it is grey and dreary outside, as is so often the case in the UK (especially recently). This January just gone has been particularly sodden – relentless clouds and downpours have made it one of the wettest on record. ”Even in overcast conditions, natural light exposure from being outdoors is often stronger than light exposure from indoor artificial lights,” Jonathan says. Nina agrees, adding: “Even on a really gloomy day, outdoor light is at least 10 times brighter than the typical light we experience indoors.” Speaking from Manchester, she notes that “even on a winter’s morning in the north-west of the UK, that outdoor light is still bright enough to have a positive impact on your physiology, your alertness and possibly your mood.”
So how can something as simple as light have so many knock-on effects? It’s all bound up in our circadian rhythms. Having access to light other than the sun is an evolutionarily recent phenomenon, and for the majority of humanity our physiological rhythms have been cued by the sun. So when the cells in our retina detect natural light, that signals to the brain to signal to the rest of the body that it is time to wake up. Melatonin (also known as the “sleep hormone“) is suppressed, while cortisol and serotonin are boosted to make us more alert.
The counterbalance to the positive effect of light on alertness in the morning is its impact on sleep in the evening. When morning light prompts a surge of energy, it starts a clock that will prompt us to wind down in the evenings with a synchronised release of melatonin. When your morning practice is repeated at roughly the same time each day, your body will quickly get into a rhythm of waking you and prompting you to rest without the need for alarms.
This, incidentally, is where the concept of social jet lag comes from: when our sleep and wake times vary drastically throughout the week, especially from weekday to weekend, it sets our body clock out of sync, resulting in drowsiness in the mornings and bad sleep at night.
Then there’s the iompact of morning light on mood. While Nina explains that we still don’t fully understand the precise mechanisms by which light boosts mood, and scientists are actively working to uncover them, “we know empirically that being exposed to brighter light, especially in the morning, makes us feel better”. It could be, for example, that all of the other physiological effects of natural light (energy, alertness, sleep and digestion) result in improvement in mood rather than being a direct effect.
Either way, Dr Theodore D Cosco, a psychologist and research fellow at the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, says the success of light as a mood alterer is reinforced by the successful use of light to help people manage Seasonal Affective Disorder.
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“People that have depressive symptoms associated with low light at a diagnosable level are using light as a fairly effective treatment, which indicates there’s a pretty good evidence base for it.”
In my case, I found that cheerfulness slowly crept into my life as a result of these early morning blasts of grey, uninspiring skies. Weekdays, even the most stressful, felt less intimidating, while weekends pulsed with possibilities. I felt content within myself in a way that felt almost illegal in January and the fact I couldn’t do anything I enjoyed didn’t threaten to ruin my day.
It wasn’t a miracle worker. It couldn’t win against the hormonal rhythms that made me weepy and lethargic in the run up to my period, for example. And it never stopped me sulking about having to negotiate the tube’s most spiteful mistress, the circle line. But even on those days it has had a remarkable impact on my mood. I wasn’t (quite as) worn out, I was less likely to get random sugar cravings to keep me awake come 3pm, and sleep, for the most part, was effortless.
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