How to Feel Energized & Sleep Better With One Morning Activity | Dr. Andrew Huberman

- I wake up in the morning

and I want to reach for my phone,

but I know that even

if I were to crank up the brightness

on that phone screen,

it's not bright enough

to trigger that cortisol spike,

and for me to be at my most alert

and focused throughout the day

and to optimize my sleep at night.

So what I do is I get out of bed

and I go outside,

and if it's a bright, clear day,

and the sun is low in the sky,

or the sun is starting to get overhead,

what we call low solar angle,

then I know I'm getting outside at the right time.

If there's cloud cover

and I can't see the sun,

I also know I'm doing a good thing

because it turns out especially on cloudy days,

you want to get outside

and get as much light energy

or photons in your eyes.

But let's say it's a very clear day

and I can see where the sun is,

I do not need to stare directly into the sun.

If it's very low in the sky,

I might do that

because it's not going to be

very painful to my eyes.

However, if the sun is a little bit brighter

and a little bit higher in the sky,

sometimes it could be painful to look at.

So the way to get this sunlight viewing

early in the day

is to look toward the sun.

If it's too bright to look at directly,

well then don't do that.

You just look toward it,

but not directly at it.

It's absolutely fine to blink.

In fact, I encourage you to blink

whenever you feel the impulse to blink.

Never look at any light, sunlight or otherwise

that's so bright that it's painful to look at

'cause you can damage your eyes.

But for this morning sunlight viewing,

it's best to not wear sunglasses.

That's right, to not wear sunglasses

at least for this morning sunlight viewing.

It is absolutely fine

to wear eyeglasses or contact lenses,

so-called corrective lenses.

In fact, those will serve you well

in this practice or this tool

because they will focus the light

onto your neural retina and onto those

melanopsin intrinsically photosensitive ganglion cells.

If your eyeglasses or contact lenses

have UV protection, that's okay.

There's so many different wavelengths of light

coming from the sun

and they are bright enough

that they will trigger the mechanisms

that you want triggered

at this early time of day.

So try and get outside,

ideally within the first five minutes

of waking or maybe it's 15 minutes,

but certainly within the first hour after waking.

I want to share with you three critical things

about this tool of morning sunlight viewing.

First of all, this is not some woo biology thing.

This is grounded in the core of our physiology.

There are literally hundreds,

if not thousands of quality peer reviewed papers

showing that light viewing early in the day

is the most powerful stimulus

for wakefulness throughout the day

and it has a powerful, positive impact

on your ability to fall

and stay asleep at night.

So this is really the foundational power tool

for ensuring a great night's sleep

and for feeling more awake during the day.

Second of all, if you wake up

before the sun is out,

you can and probably should flip on artificial lights

in your internal home environment

or apartment or wherever you happen to live,

if your goal is to be awake, right?

If you wake up at four

in the morning and you need to be awake,

well then turn on artificial lights.

Once the sun is out however,

once the sun has risen,

then you still want to get

outside and view sunlight.

Some of you will wake up

before the sun comes out.

And if you're asking whether or not

turning on artificial lights

can replace sunlight at those hours,

unfortunately the answer is no.

Unless you have a very special light,

we'll talk about what kind of light,

the bright artificial lights

in your home environment are not,

I repeat, are not going to be sufficiently bright

to turn on the cortisol mechanism

and the other wake up mechanisms

that you need early in the day.

The diabolical twist however

is that those lights in your home or apartment,

or even on your phone

are bright enough to disrupt your sleep

if you look at them too late at night

or in the middle of the night.

So there's this asymmetry in our retinal,

our eye biology and in our brain's biology

whereby early in the day,

right around waking, you need a lot of light,

a lot of photons,

a lot of light energy

and artificial lights generally just won't accomplish

what you need them to accomplish.

But at night, even a little bit

of artificial light can really mess up

your so-called circadian, your 24-hour clocks

and all these mechanisms that we're talking about.

So if you wake up before the sun is out

and it's still dark,

please turn on as many bright artificial lights

as you possibly can or need,

but then get outside

once the sun is out.

On cloudy days, you especially need to get outside.

I repeat, on cloudy days, overcast days,

you especially need to get outside and get sunlight.

You just need to get more of it.

Now, how much light

and how much light viewing do you need?

This is going to vary depending

on person and place,

literally where you live on earth,

whether or not there's a lot of tree cover,

whether or not you're somebody

who has sensitive eyes

or less sensitive eyes.

It's really impossible for me to give

an absolute prescriptive,

but we can give some general guidelines.

In general, on a clear day,

meaning no cloud cover or minimal cloud cover,

you want to get this sunlight exposure

to your eyes for about five minutes or so,

could be three minutes one day,

it could be seven minutes the next day,

about five minutes.

On a day where there's cloud cover,

so the sun is just peeking through the clouds

or it's more dense cloud cover,

you want to get about 10 minutes

of sunlight exposure to your eyes early in the day.

And on days that are really densely overcast

or maybe even are rainy,

you're going to want to get as much

as 20 or 30 minutes of sunlight exposure.

Another key thing is,

do not forget about just don't try

and get this sunlight exposure

through a windshield of a car or a window,

whether or not it's tinted or otherwise.

It takes far too long.

It's simply not going to trigger

the relevant mechanisms,

you would be standing there all day

trying to get enough light

into your eyes from the morning sunlight.

And by then, the sun will have already moved

from low solar angle to overhead

and it simply won't work for all sorts

of mechanisms related to

your circadian rhythm functions.

So just don't try and do it

through a windshield, sunglasses or a window.

It's just not going to work.

Get outside.

If the weather is really bad

or for whatever reason, safety reasons,

you cannot get outside,

well then I suppose, try and get near a window.

That would be the last, last resort,

but you really want to get outside

to get the sunlight exposure.

[upbeat music]