
How does your light environment impact you?
Today I’m going to give you a brief introduction to why I believe your light environment is a hugely overlooked aspect of your life and why it is so important.
Many health influencers will demonise blue light. But just like any other wavelength of light, it plays a very important role in regulating your daily rhythm. Most people know blue light exposure at night disrupts your sleep. The way it does this is by suppressing melatonin production (sleepy hormone) which then leads to an increase in cortisol (stress hormone).
Does that mean it’s bad? No.
It is simply a part of the universal clock that nature has, over millions of years, tuned us to. Light that has a lot of blue, stimulates wakefulness. So during the day, this is good. At night, not so much.
This article goes into detail about the effects of blue light (good and bad) if you want to get into it.
That’s just one example of how one type of light can impact you. What about the rest?
It’s becoming more common knowledge that red/infrared light is beneficial for bodily processes like energy production, skin and tissue repair, and sleep. You might see things like red light therapy lamps and infrared saunas popping up all over the internet. Most of these probably don’t do what they say they do. Nevertheless, there are enough benefits (in this article for example) to conclude that red-light also plays an important role in regulating our biology.
You might already have heard this. That’s not what I’m here to tell you.
What I’m trying to tell you is this:
Light is the set of instructions that tells your body how to function. The light you’re exposed to at any given time tells your body how to conduct its many complex processes.
So?
So, your exposure to light or as it’s known to the nerds, electromagnetic radiation, impacts your body’s function at any given moment. This means anything that interrupts your body’s interaction with its natural light environment, disconnects you from your body’s natural response to that environment. For example, a tinted window or sunglasses.
The basic principle is this:
Your body needs to have as clear a connection to its environment as possible to know how to function in that environment.
“In nature nothing exists alone.”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
It is this principle that is responsible for the results we see when we manipulate our light environment.
But it goes beyond that. It is not just the individual wavelengths (colours) of light that tell our bodies how to behave but the balance of different frequencies at any given time – including the ones we can’t see. Radio and microwave frequencies from our smartphones and other electronic appliances affect the way our bodies work as well. It’s all information.
Hopefully, that makes sense.
What should you do with this information? You’ll find out in later posts, as well as a simplified explanation of why all this is the case. (Hint: it may involve a little quantum magic).
I’ll explain what I mean in Part 2.
