In this video, we talked about 22 strategies to optimize your circadian rhythms.

First of all, there are four major zeitgebers first circadian rhythm. Light is the single most important one, but there are some other, so movement, nutrition, and temperature.

We're going to talk about three of these in this section. And then believe it or not, I have even more than just 22 a of the strategies for you. Because we're also going to talk about more practical strategies in the sleep hygiene section. And in the nutrition module, you're also going to get several strategies there to use nutrition to further optimize your circadian rhythm. This is absolutely packed with strategies. I believe the total number is going to be somewhere around 35 or 40 total strategies. Now that doesn't mean that you have to implement all of those strategies, but there are certain tools, for example, in this presentation that I'm going to give you that only apply to people who have insomnia and severely messed up sleep. So those are things that you know, you may or may not need. And there are also aspects of this that you may just find inconvenient or that may not be right for you based on your schedule and your preferences.

And that's fine too. The one thing I do want to emphasize as always is just be aware that the more you do, the more of this stuff that you implement, the better your results will actually be.

22 STRATEGIES TO OPTIMIZE YOUR CIRCADIAN RHYTHM

1. Get Bright Light at The Beginning of The Day

The first one is one that we talked about in the free masterclass, but I'm going to give you some more details on how to do this well in this session. Get bright light at the beginning of the day within the first half an hour of the day. This is probably the single most or one of the top two certainly, uh, strategies to optimize your circadian rhythm. So bright light at the beginning of the day.

Remember the primary causes of Circadian Rhythm Disruption. We're not getting nearly enough of an energy mode signal in our circadian clock, eight during the daytime when we should be getting it, especially in the morning. And, uh, we're also getting way too much in the evenings. We're getting too much artificial light at night.

Here's what you need to do within the first half an hour after waking up, you need to do one of these two things.

You need to either get outdoors and get some sunlight in your face. If that's not possible for any reason, whether you're waking up before the sunrise is or you live in a place where, there just isn't good sunlight for a big chunk of the year, then this is what you need to do: use a bright light device. Carex (larger light with stand), Verilux (smaller light).

Either way, your goal is to do one of these two things, within the first half an hour after waking up. And ideally you want to do it for at least 10 minutes, but more like 20, 25, 30 minutes are obviously even better. One other thing I want to mention here is sunlight is actually ideal.

I'm not trying to get you to buy more devices trying to get you to spend more money. Sunlight is actually superior. If you can get sunlight, I highly recommend doing that. That's the free option and it's the better option.

One other thing I want to mention to you is, a lack of sunlight in the morning will also make you more susceptible to the circadian rhythm disrupting effects of artificial light at night. There's sort of a twofold benefit here where you're amplifying your circadian rhythm and you're getting an energy boost, you're boosting neurotransmitters in your brain as a result of that morning light exposure and you're simultaneously helping to protect yourself against the harmful effects of the artificial light exposure at night.

I want to talk about just a few studies and a few bits of research in relation to this.

One interesting fact is that there's research linking morning light exposure to body fatness and body leanness showing very clearly that morning light exposure, strong morning light exposure and earlier in the morning is associated with leaner bodies.

There's also research where they use bright light therapy and found big improvements in several hormones. Things like Leptin and Ghrelin, which are hormones that regulate appetite and metabolism and body fatness. So light is impacting on neurotransmitters. It's impacting on hormones that in that influence your mood that influence your energy levels, that influence even your body fatness. So light is a very, very powerful thing and most people just are simply not aware of it.

Now another study showed that obese women who were exposed to bright light for at least 45 minutes between the hours of 6:00 AM and 9:00 AM lost a significant amount of body fat and decreased appetite compared to the placebo group in just three weeks.

There's also research specifically showing that timing your morning light exposure in tandem with your breakfast and consuming certain kinds of foods, high in protein and high in tryptophan. We're going to talk more about that in the nutrition module, can significantly elevate your evening levels of Melatonin.

Remember that melatonin actually protects your mitochondria from damage and stabilizes them and helps them stay in energy mode. And obviously Melatonin helps improve our sleep quality and so much more.

Another study sought to find out if there's any difference between exposure to artificial light and they took a group of people and expose them to either six hours of artificial light or natural sunlight. And then measured various hormones, things like cortisol and Melatonin measured cognitive performance and subjective sleepiness or energy levels.

Here's what they found. People who had a natural sunlight, we're significantly more alert at the beginning of the evening, had more energy in other words and subjects who were exposed to artificial light. Were significantly sleepier at the end of the evening.

Another study used bright light therapy to treat a group of 49 people with seasonal affective disorder who had fatigue and various link varying levels of daytime sleepiness and depression. And here's what they found.

“Fatigue, excessive daytime sleepiness, and health-related quality of life improve in a similar way as depressed mood following treatment with bright light. The treatment was effective irrespective of the severity of the disorder, that is, for persons with SAD and subsyndromal SAD.”

Again, this is what you need to do. Get outside or get bright light therapy within the first 30 minutes of the day for at least 10 minutes and ideally closer to 20 or 30 minutes.

A few more details on this:

• Sources of light: Natural sunlight from being outdoors, dawn simulation devices, and lightboxes. • Intensity & wavelength requirements Getting outdoors or using a bright light box. • How far away from the light should you be? You want the light to be entering your eyes

indirectly.. The ideal distance away you’re your face is approximately 8-24 inches from the light source.

• What’s the right time of day to do light therapy? The best time is in the morning, at the time based on your MEQ score.

• How much light is the right dose? You ideally want to be outdoors on a bright sunny morning, or if that’s not possible, you want to go a lamp that emits light at 10,000 lux and use it for 30 minutes.

• How long before your circadian rhythm shifts? It will usually take 3-7 days for the effect to set in.

And one thing I want to mention here is, you know, so many people are dependent on coffee and caffeine to get their brain going.

2. Use Blue (and Green) Light Blocking Glasses

For millions of years, humans have been in line with the rise and fall of the sun. And now in the modern world we're out of sync with that. And one of the biggest aspects of that is that we are only meant to get significance amount, significant amounts of blue and green light during the daytime while the sun is up in an ancestral context, the only time our ancestors were getting blue lots and blue of blue and green wavelengths of light was during daytime.

You know, for example, looking at a blue sky. But when you see that blue sky that's visible blue wavelengths of light, they're entering, your eyes were not designed to get that after the sun goes down. So the problem is in the modern world, we have all of these artificial light sources that are emitting lots and lots of blue and green light that are giving our brain the daytime signal. It's time to be awake, alert, active, and energetic and disrupting that circadian clock and our brain chronically.

So one of the most powerful things that you can do is block blue and green wave lengths of light from entering your eyes after the sun goes down. And it doesn't have to be necessarily right after the sun goes down, but ideally at least two hours and that the minimum at least one hour before your bedtime you want to be blocking blue and green wave lengths of light.

Now the nice part of this is that we don't have to sort of block all light and we don't have to not use any of our electronics or anything like that. You can just wear glasses that specifically block the wave lengths of light that disturbed the circadian clock.

The only downside of blue blocking glasses is that it does require you to wear a pair of glasses. That's kind of a sort of goofy looking pair of glasses. And for a lot of people, this is, um, you know, this, this is something that is annoying, that is cumbersome, that they feel self-conscious about and that they feel their loved ones will look at them weird if they're wearing these glasses at night and it's not normal.

It's unfortunate that we live in a modern world where the normal habits are to do something that is fundamentally at odds with our biology and is chronically leading us towards poorer and poorer sleep, poor and poor mood, poorer and poorer brain function, poorer and poorer energy levels. Most people are doing that and they all sort of want a peer pressure you into also doing that.

You have to be the weird one that wears the glasses late at night because you are the one that actually understands that you're protecting your brain, you're protecting your mitochondria, you're enhancing your sleep, enhancing your energy levels and your mood.

There are two big problems with most blue blockers on the market.

1. They don't block green wave lengths of light and we now know there's lots of research now showing that green wave lengths of light also suppress melatonin and give that day time a signal to the brain. It's not just blue light

2. Most of the glasses on the market do not wrap around the eye socket

If you want a much more complete solution that you will really notice big benefits from in terms of enhancing your sleep, then you want this.

The best company that I found is safety blue.

(There's also another company called true dark that makes similar glasses. My main problems with the true dark was that the lens area

was very small and for me it felt like looking out of binoculars, it was really annoying to wear and I couldn't work, I couldn't watch movies and stuff like that.)

They are certainly high-quality glasses and they do fit some people's face well. But the SafetyBlues have a much bigger lens area and they have a, a flexible padded insert on the side that kind of molds to the shape of your face.

Is there research to show that these glasses actually work to do anything or do they just make you look goofy at night? Well, yes, there's actually lots of research showing that they do indeed work.

One study from the Psychiatric Hospital of the University of Basel, showed that blue blockers prevent the suppression of melatonin from using electronic devices and decrease vigilant attention and subjective alertness before bedtime.

In other words, they make you more sleepy and tired when you should be sleepy instead of awake and alert and active and energetic at night, right before bed, they help your body and your brain wind down into sleep mode and they help actually your brains secrete the Melatonin that is necessary for triggering your body into sleep.

Another study, and this is just to name a few of many studies.

In people with ADHD who suffer from insomnia, blue blocker glasses were extremely effective in reducing anxiety and improving sleep quality.

The average sleep quality index score decreased “from 11.15 to 4.54, dropping below the cut-off score of 5 for clinical insomnia.”

My top recommendation here is to get the SafetyBlue SleepSavior glasses. You can get 15% off when you use the code Ari2020

One last thing I want to mention on these is a, with the red tinted glasses, they do block more overall light because they're blocking that green light as well. So they will make it slightly harder for you if you want to do work late at night, you know in the last hour or two before bed.

3. Optimize Your Light Microenvironment For Your Circadian Rhythm

So there's five components to this.

Home lighting

I am a big, big fan of the old Edison style incandescent as being your predominant source of home lighting. During the daytime when the sun is up, it's totally fine if you want to use whatever type of home lighting you currently have and not have to worry about that at all. But what I'd suggest is that for after the sun goes down, you get some nice simple lamps that are with Edison style incandescent bulbs that you can put in a few key places in your house that you spend time in at night and keep it relatively dim lighting and the right spectrum of light, which is what those incandescence have relative to the fluorescence and the LEDs which have a lot more of the blue spectrum and they don't have the red and near infrared spectrum like the incandescent have.

Computer screens

A very simple, easy, and actually free solution is to use might light modulating software. Such as f.lux and Iris. There are also different software for your phone, tablets and other devices.

Bedroom and bathroom lighting

The bedroom and bathroom lighting are two key places that people often disrupt their circadian rhythm. Those two environments typically have fluorescence or led bulbs. Now keep in mind that just a few seconds of exposure to fluorescent or led lights without your blue blockers on is enough to significantly suppressed your Melatonin and disrupt your circadian rhythm.

What you want to do in these environments where you're spending time right before you go to bed, is you want to shift at least to a standard Edison style incandescent bulb. Even better is if you can get a red tinted incandescent bulb, and if you get a red tinted incandescent bulb. It'll take a little bit of getting used to initially if you're used to your bathroom and your bedroom being lit up very brightly, but and now to shift it to dim red light, but just that one little tweak, it'll cost you a few bucks to buy those bulbs. Just that one little tweak of adjusting that micro environment that you're spending a half an hour or an hour in before you go to bed in your bedroom and bathroom. If you adjust that microenvironment takes two minutes to actually do. And it has a very, very powerful effect on your circadian rhythm.

Light covers (duct tape)

Any little electronic device that has any kind of little light on it or a smoke detector in your room or any little even dot of light is enough to disturb your sleep

To recap: after sunset, you want to do a few different things.

• Adjust the lighting in your house to at least Edison style incandescent bulbs.

• You can even use candle lighting, whatever you prefer. Candle lighting is also great and you want to get the blue and green blocking glasses

• Software for your phone and your computer that automatically adjusts the blue output of light from those electronic devices.

These three strategies are absolutely critical after sunset. You don't need to wear the blue and green blocking glasses from the, the time, the exact time that the sun goes down. This is something that you can wear for one to two hours prior to bed. There may be a few hour gap between sunset and when you put those on. But these other things are really a good idea to do right after sunset.

Also, this gives you an idea of the different spectrums. In case you're having trouble visualizing what I'm talking about.

A standard led or fluorescent has most of the light output in the green and blue spectrums. As you can see here with an incandescent bulb, most of the light output is actually in the yellow, orange and red. And then getting up here into near infrared and what's called far infrared, which are actually invisible wavelengths of light.

You can see it's, it's much more shifted into predominantly these regions and that's really important and ideal for after sunset as opposed to these led and fluorescent style.

• Now if you want to have an idea of just how significant of an effect this is not just a tiny little effect. Research from the Lighting Research Center at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York observed that using an ipad at midnight or 1am caused a 8% and 23% (respectively) reduction in melatonin.

• Another study found a 2 hour postponement (and 90 minute shortening) of the nocturnal melatonin cycle after exposed to regular electric room light for 8 hours prior to bed.

• One study even found that if you’re fiddling with your phone the evening before an important sport event for just 30 minutes, this can influence significantly influence exercise performance the following morning.

• Exposure to regular room light during the normal hours of sleep reduces melatonin by over 50%, according to the numerous studies.

This is a very, very big deal, very significant effect.

You need to take care of these five different components of optimizing your micro environment for your circadian rhythm and make sure that after sunset you're doing these three things at the very least.

4. Nutrition for Optimal Circadian Rhythm It turns out that light is not the only factor that impacts and regulates our circadian rhythm. Believe it or not, nutrition, our food intake also has a profound impact on our circadian rhythm. Now, in particular, it's important to understand this layer of the story.

So we have a central clock in the brain and this is really the circadian that is the crux of the circadian rhythm. This is what we've mostly been talking about up until this point is this central clock in the super charismatic nucleus of the brain, and this is predominantly what's regulating most of the circadian processes. But it's important to also understand that we have a number of tissue specific clocks.

We actually have clocks in our organs. We have clocks in our muscle tissue, we have clocks in our skin, we have clocks in our eyes. We have all these basically circadian rhythms, sensitive factors in almost all of the tissues and organ systems of our bodies. So this is where food intake really comes into it in a big way. Food has a big impact on regulating a lot of these peripheral clocks that impact on metabolic health and hormonal health and so on.

Now these things are not separate. It's important to understand that these things are very much intertwined.

There is this central clock in the brain and the Super Carismatic Nucleus (SCN). And then we have these peripheral clocks in our fat tissues here. There they're showing in the GI tract as well as the liver. And what you want is you want to have the central clock plus all of the peripheral clocks really synchronized. You want them both to be sort of operating in the same time zone and very much in harmony with one another.

Illustrating this visually, you have this diagram here. So this is really what you want as a circadian alignment and this is showing that the central clock is very much aligned with the peripheral clocks. This

dash line here, they're, they're in the same rhythm of the rise and fall rhythm during the day and night. Here you have a dissociated central and peripheral clock so that you can see there they're on totally different rhythms here.

And this is the state that most people are in. Unfortunately.

So this was a study done by a well-known researcher named Sachatananda Panda, who's done a lot of work around time restricted feeding and circadian rhythm in particular is also written a recent book on the topic of Circadian Rhythm Enhancement, um, wonderful researcher, and this is one of the best studies that he's ever done that he's most known for.

Basically, they took a smartphone APP and monitored people's eating habits and just looked at how people actually ate in the real world. And here's what they found: unlike what people reported eating in their food questionnaires when they were asked about what they ate. What the researchers found is that the, the, the traditional three meal a day pattern was largely absent and that the least frequent eaters still eight, an average of 3.3 times per day. While the most frequent eaters aid an average of 10.5 times a day.

So this is one layer of the story of how that impacts our circadian rhythm. But there's more here. This is the most important part. What they actually found is that a huge chunk of the population, especially in

the United States, is consuming their food over the course of a 14-15-16 hour, even 17 hour feeding window. And what that means is the time from the first bite of the beginning of the day to the last bite of food at the end of the day. Now there are 24 hours in a day. So what you have in this scenario, which is the bulk of people have at least a 15 hour feeding window, um, you know, a huge chunk of the population. This is maybe, so here you have over 30% here you've got another 15% so you know, we're, we're getting with this, we're talking about 50% of people have longer than a 15 hour feeding window.

And then you know, it's more like 70% have over a 14 hour feeding window. So just consider the fact that there are only 24 hours in a day. And what this scenario means is, you know, if people are spending eight or nine hours a night in bed, what this means is that pretty much the only hours of the day that people are not eating are literally the hours that they are in bed.

The majority of people are eating almost from the moment they wake up until the moment they go to sleep. Now that doesn't mean they're eating constantly that entire time, but it's that length of time.

Now, we're going to talk about many reasons why this is important, but one of the key reasons that I want you to understand right now is that this length of eating window is similar to light in the sense of how it impacts your circadian rhythm.

So it would be the equivalent of having light for 16 hours a day and well into the evening. Let's say you start having light at 7:00 AM and you have light till 11:00 PM or 12:00 PM. And just as that light disrupts the circadian clock and we know there's lots of consequences of that.

The same thing happens here. When your food intake is going on during those hours. It also disrupts the circadian clock, especially the peripheral clocks.

So to sum up, the standard American diet is characterized by frequent eating for most of the day and well into the night. Given the discrepancies between self-reported and smartphone APP documented eating habits, it appears that most people don't even know that they are eating this way. They are unaware of the fact that they're feeding windows part of this long and how often they're eating throughout the day.

Real quick. It's important to understand that disrupts or getting rhythms have been shown to promote the chronic state of low grade inflammation, which helps to explain the link between circadian rhythm and virtually every degenerative disease afflicting the modern world.

We can see there's charts from studies that have diagrams like this where we see circadian rhythm, system disruption, sleep disruption, and then we look at how it affects the gut microbiome. We look at how affects cellular metabolism, hormonal regulation, how it affects the metabolism and fat tissue brain tissue, how it affects hunger hormones. And an energy regulating hormones. And you see, ultimately a lot of these things end up in chronically high blood sugar and insulin resistance, obesity and many, many other problems. So, not just obesity and diabetes, but also heart disease, cancer, psychiatric disorders, intestinal problems and neurodegenerative diseases have all been linked with poor circadian rhythm. And, food intake is a big part of the reason why, in addition to light exposure habits.

Now, if one aspect of this, you're getting clocked like the central buckets screwed up or the peripheral clocks get screwed up as a result of your eating habits, both starts feeding into one another and snowballing into health consequences like daily fatigue and lethargy, increasing our risk of developing fatigue syndromes like burnout syndrome, stress related exhaustion disorder, full blown in chronic fatigue syndrome or fibromyalgia.

So what specifically are some of the mechanisms here?

One aspect of this is how nutrition habits directly impact on circadian rhythm and Orexin levels in the brain. There's sort of a dual impact on Orexin. Nutrition can have both a direct impact on Orexin levels in immediate impact based on what you're consuming in that meal can either blunt or boosts orexin levels. We're going to talk more about that in the nutrition module.

There's also a circadian rhythm effect. Orexin is tied to the circadian rhythm. The degree to which your nutrition optimizes your circadian rhythm is also going to potentially is going to boost or lower your energy levels depending on whether your nutrition habits are optimizing or hindering your Circadian Rhythm Habits.

If you have optimal nutrition habits for circadian rhythm, it's going to lead to higher levels of energy and better sleep at night.

Also, having a strong circadian rhythm also increases the genetic expression of a compound called NAD+ at the Mitochondria level, which is an important regulator of a mitochondrial energy production.

So this is another key mechanism of how this works and disrupted circadian rhythm directly impacts on the enzymes that synthesize NAD+. So while there's a lot of hype right now around like supplements, like nicotine riboside and nicotine mononucleotide in their ability to increase NAD+. The truth is you can take all the supplements you want, but if your circadian rhythm is hindering the production of NAD+ you've got a big, big problem.

In addition, we also know that disrupted circadian rhythm, impairs autophagy and mitophogy, which is cellular cleanup and cleanup of damaged and dysfunctional cell parts and damaged and dysfunctional mitochondrial parts. And the regeneration of new healthy parts.

So what happens when you are impairing Circadian Rhythm? Well, autophagy and my toffee g, our circadian rhythm dependent processes, they occur during the night we period for the most part and they require you to be in a fasted state. So it's directly impacted by both Circadian Rhythm, and very specifically your nutrition habits, the ability of your cells to clean up the damage.

Now this is one of the key drivers of both the aging process, cellular damage to that drives, aging as well as some of the cellular damage that drives lower energy levels.

4 Major Factors That Influence How Nutrition Habits Impact

Circadian Rhythm There are four key factors, key practical strategies that I want you to do as far as optimizing your nutrition habits for optimizing your circadian rhythm.

These are:

• Optimizing your feeding and fasting windows

• Calorie timing during the day

• Meal timing

• Macro nutrient timing

Factor 1 – optimize your feeding and fasting window Your feeding window every day should be 12 hours or less. 12 hours is the maximum and ideally attribute a little bit shorter than that.

Again, we want to synchronize the peripheral clocks with this central clock.

There are numerous studies that have looked at time restricted feeding. I'm not talking about more extreme forms of time restricted feeding, (intermittent fasting), I'm talking about much less extreme time restricted feeding more in the neighborhood of eight to 12 hours, which is really not an unreasonable length of time. You can get three meals and a snack during that window. This is very important and we have lots of lines of evidence that indicate that this is one of the key factors that helps synchronizing our circadian rhythm. And we have lots of research showing that it impacts on metabolic health and hormonal health in various beneficial ways.

This is a study talking about the loss of 2% body fat in 10 weeks just from shortening the time between

breakfast and dinner by consuming dinner earlier breakfast a bit later. Also, one of the

things you want to do here is sync your feeding window to the daylight hours or as close to that as possible.

Here's another study talking about early time restricted feeding, improving insulin sensitivity and blood pressure and oxidative stress even without weight loss. So just by doing a time restricted feeding

protocol, even though it's not really a caloric deficit, it's improving all of these parameters here. The conclusions of this study said: “We demonstrate the first time in humans that early time restricted feeding, improves some aspects of cardiometabolic health and that the IF’s effects are not solely due to weight loss.”

Typical American eating patterns or something like this, 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM.(And, actually, it is more like 7:00 AM to 10:30 PM.) What this particular study did was they did a six hour (8:00 AM to 2:00 PM) feeding window, which is a bit extreme. But you could easily do something like 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM and that becomes much less extreme and much more doable. You could even do something like 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM or 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM. One of the things that I left out in the study that found that most Americans have feeding windows in the neighborhood of 14, 15, 16 hours is that they actually also did an intervention where they asked these people to simply change their feeding window to 10 to 11 hours. And just that alone, people reported weight loss, they imported, they reported improved sleep and they reported increased energy levels all from that very simple intervention.

Now, one thing worth mentioning here is eating just one meal per day. Going a bit too far in this direction. I would say yes at this point. When you start eating only one meal a day, basically every day, I would say that you start getting more negative effects than positive effects. You don't necessarily have to take this to an extreme. A feeding window of 9 hours of the day is definitely not extreme by any means. It's not that difficult. Once you get used to it, you'll find that it's really no big thing at all. But again, I would say that eating only meal a day eating, let's say a two-hour feeding window is taking it a bit too far and you're going to probably get more negative effects from that than positive over time. Certainly, okay to do this once in a while, but I don't recommend it as a daily eating pattern.

There's also several studies that have hinted at some potential problems with going down to just one meal a day, ‘ and then becoming that extreme with your time restricted feeding. And this study for example, is showing higher levels of blood sugar throughout the day in diabetics compared with three meals a day. And there are various studies that have hinted at reasons why going down to the extreme of one meal per day may not be ideal. This study is looking at the blood glucose response to meals and is showing that in people who are doing just one meal a day, you got to significantly increased a spike of blood sugar following the meal.

There are not many studies actually testing it, but I certainly know of lots of reports of people who have gone down to one meal a day and really found that their energy levels suffer over time. They may feel great initially from doing it, but over time it, it does tend to impair their energy levels.

So again, the key takeaway from this point is you want to have a six to 10 hour feeding window every day and you want to time the feeding window to coincide with the hours of daylight as much as possible.

Factor 2 – Calorie timing during the day Recommendation of this section skew more of your daily calories towards the earlier part of the day rather than the later part of the day, which is actually the opposite of the way most people eat. So it turns out that breakfast is absolutely needed for circadian rhythm regulation and to having higher energy levels and better sleep.

There are numerous, numerous lines of evidence that have accumulated testing this in various ways where they looked at: weight loss effects, metabolic health parameters, energy levels, impact on sleep, how much energy is burned off after the meal as a proxy for how effective or how well timed that meal was in how well it coincides with overall metabolic health and how likely it is to be stored as fat versus burned as energy.

This is one study from Tel Aviv University and they looked at 93 obese, these women, and they put them into two groups, either a big breakfast group or a big dinner group. It consumed basically the same exact overall amount of calories either way and the same foods. It's just whether they consumed for bulk of the daily calories at breakfast, where the bulk at dinner. Here's what they found. The women in the big breakfast group lost on average 17.8 pounds. The women in the big dinner group only lost 7.3 pounds. So huge difference in how much was lost and the big breakfast group had larger decreases in the insulin, blood sugar and triglyceride levels compared to the big dinner groups.

And this is extremely important considering they were both eating the exact same amount of calories and the exact same foods. It's just a matter of the timing. So this is a massive effect just from a difference in the timing of when you're consuming the food. Now there are many other studies in the same vein.

This is another one where they found the breakfast only group lost more weight than the dinner only group.

Here's another one.

That breakfast group lost more weight despite eating just as much as the dinner group.

Here's another one that found weight loss is greater you with people eating a big breakfast after 12 weeks. The big breakfast group lost on average 8.6 pounds, whereas the subjects eating a small breakfast and a large dinner last 7.2 pounds.

This study just came out in 2019 that I want to mention to you here where they looked at people's chronotype, whether they were more morning people or evening people and how timing the bulk of one's food intake in accordance with that.

So if you're more of an evening person timing more later in the day, if you're more of a morning person timing more earlier in the day they looked at how that may impact on fat loss and metabolic health. And basically they did find an effect from that. Meaning that it's more beneficial to consume more of your daily calories in conjunction; a little later in the day if you're more of a night owl a little earlier in the day, if you're more of a morning person. Now don't take this as meaning that if you're a night person, it's ideal to eat the bulk of your calories at 10:00 PM. That would unquestionably be a really bad idea. But what it does mean is if you're a night person, maybe have the bulk of your calories more lunchtime.

The studies consistently going to shifting more of your daily calories earlier in the day is beneficial for metabolic health, for fat loss, for energy levels and so on.

Also, this is one new study that just came out in April, 2019 and they found that skipping breakfast was profoundly associated with dying from cardiovascular events and all-cause mortality, the risk of dying from any cause.

Another one looked at a six year population based prospective cohort study, consuming more of the daily calorie and take a dinner predisposes to obesity and they conclude it consuming more of the daily energy and take a dinner is associated with increased risk of obesity, metabolic syndrome and a nonalcoholic fatty liver disease.

This is a 2018 study called the big breakfast study. Krono nutrition influence on energy expenditure of body weight. And they said, quote, a growing body of evidence highlights the importance of the biological clock as a modulator of energy, balance and metabolism.

The key takeaway here again, shift more of your daily food intake towards breakfast and away from dinner or later in the day.

Factor 3 – Optimize meal timing Meal timing impacts on the circadian rhythm. Now this is pretty straight forward, but basically the gist of it is that times meals and consistency of your meal timing plays a critical role in synchronizing your peripheral circadian clocks to the central clock.

I would say it also has relevance to basically everybody who is in a pattern where they have irregular mealtimes, where from day to day they're not eating their meals consistently at the same time. So that's really the bottom line takeaway here is that we know that the meal timing and when we eat and also when we eat, the majority of our calories all impacts our circadian functioning and our peripheral circadian clocks.

So what we want to do is optimize as many of these variables as possible. We want to first eat within a maximum of 12 hour feeding window, but more like six to 10 hours. We also want to shift as much of that feeding window is possible within the hours of daylight. We also want to shift more of our daily calorie intake towards the earlier part of the day.

And then the next layer of the story is we want to have very consistent mealtimes from day to day.

This was a nice article in NPR looking at how messing with our body clocks can raise alarms with our health. And they talk about how peripheral clocks are molecules in cells that respond to signals from the master clock and help control certain metabolic functions in those cells in that region or the bodies of clocks in the liver and pancreas are involved in controlling rises and falls in blood sugar levels. If these peripheral clocks fall out of sync with the master clock, it can result in problems with the person's metabolism problems.

So researchers know that exposure to light at the appropriate time and the use of Melatonin supplements can help the master clock in the brain adjust to new time zones.

And they said this is one of the researchers saying, “but light and Melatonin and probably have little direct effect on the metabolic rhythms that are controlled by the body's peripheral clocks.”

In other words, although a person may nudge his or her master clock towards new times on by getting exposure to light at the right time, not all the clocks in the person's body will catch up right away. The peripheral clocks that control blood sugar levels influence how much sugar is taken from the blood and how much is released back into the blood.

This has a profound effect on your blood sugar regulation, which also impacts on hormonal health and oxidative stress on the ability of your Mitochondria to produce energy. So there are widespread effects from this simple thing of how long is your feeding window? When are you eating the majority of your calories? How consistent are your meal times? All these things influence how well our peripheral clocks function. T

his is one study just to give you a small sampling of the research, looking at irregular meal times and they show Neil regularity appears to be associated with greater thermic effect feeding. which means how much energy the body burns off after the meal and Lower Glucose responses and lower spikes in blood sugar, which may favor weight management and metabolic health.

Here's another one. Decreased thermic effect of food after an irregular meal pattern. Again, same finding.

Also a side point: don't skip meals. This is obviously related, this is the other side of the point, but if you're skipping meals where you have long times between eating during the daytime, these factors kind of go against the regular meal eating habits.

Key take away is your meals at the same time each day. Now, if there are slight

variations, don't get stressed or neurotic about this, but you really want to try to standardize your meal times from day to day.

You really want to as much as possible, make your eating habits or regimen and have consistent meal times from day to day.

Factor 4 - Optimize your macronutrient intake during the day Basically, what this amounts to very simply without getting into all the nitty gritty details is if you shift more of your fat intake to the earlier part of the day.

So for example, you should more of your daily fat intake earlier in the day and, you should have more of your daily carbs to the evening. There are a variety of studies that have indicated that that pattern may give you a little boost in terms of the functioning of your peripheral clocks and your overall hormonal health and propensity to lose fat.

Protein should be relatively high in all the meals and you're going to learn more about that in the nutrition module. But you do want to have adequate intake of protein, but it's specifically the fat and the carbs that you want to focus on here to optimize your peripheral clocks.

So key takeaways here, emphasize protein in your breakfast and dinner and lunch. Shift more of your daily fat intake towards breakfast and more of your daily carbs to dinner.

So again, optimize your feeding and fasting windows. We ideally want a six to 10 hour feeding window during the day. If that seems extreme, you can start with more like 12 hours.

But ideally over time, we're looking to move to a 6 to 10 hour feeding window and we want those 6 to 10 hours as much as possible to coincide with the hours of daylight. We want to share more of our daily calorie intake earlier in the day instead of later in the day.

Smaller dinners, bigger breakfasts, and we want to optimize our meal timing with regular meals during the day, and we can optimize our fat and carb intake as well as a bonus strategy to potentially further amplify our metabolic health and Circadian Rhythm and Peripheral Circadian clocks. So these are the four key strategies to use nutrition to optimize your circadian rhythm.

5. Complete Darkness at Night This is absolutely critical. You want your bedroom to be completely dark. There's research showing that you have a noticeable decrease in brain function the following day just by having 10 Lux of light in your room. That's a tiny bit of light.

In contrast, the bright light therapy devices are 10,000 lux and that's a measure of, of overall light output or light intensity. A bright sunny day is 100,000 or 150,000 lux. So, we're talking about just the tiniest dim light in your room can significantly impair brain function in, in a noticeable way, just within the span of a few days.

There's also research showing that people who sleep with just a very, very dim light in their bedroom are at significantly higher risk of depression.

This is an interesting graph from Seth Roberts illustrating how well rested he felt when his bedroom was either slightly lighter or slightly darker.

And you can see this as his rating of restfulness. And this is during the period when he had a lighter bedroom. These were all the nights. Each data point is a night, you know, and uh, sort of morning after how well he slept that night.

And then this is when it's darker. And then he tested it again and went with the bedroom lighter. And you can see the average feeling of, of energy and well rested ness decreased dramatically and then darker again. You can see very significant effects just from this one factor.

How to black out your room. There's lots of different variations on the shapes and kinds of windows that a person may have in the room. There isn't always just one easy solution. But in general, the solution is find a way of getting blackout shades and blackout curtains and you may actually need two different things.

You may need some kind of shade or a curtain and then you know, over that you may need a second set of curtains on top of whatever the first thing is.

If blackout curtains isn’t a possiblility, you should consider an eye mask.

6. Fast For At Least 3 Hours Before Bed, and Preferably 4

This is something that relates to meal timing, and we're going to talk more about this in the nutrition module. But I will just say that this is critical for autophagy. Meal timing is a circadian Zeitgeber meaning it's sort of like light. If you were to consume food in the middle of the night, it's almost the equivalent of seeing a light in the middle of the night. It's something that's going to tell your circadian clock in the brain. It's time to be awake, alert, and active and energetic.

So having a space between your dinner and your last bite of food in the evening and, and your bedtime is critical for keeping your circadian rhythm optimally functioning and amplified. I in an ideal way.

It's also, as we talked about before, critical for the process of autophagy to take place, which is cellular recycling and repair of damaged cell parts damaged Mitochondria.

We're going to talk more about that and knew the nutrition module.

7. Pre-Bed Vagal Activation Before bed, what we want to do is stimulate the ventral vagus nerve. And this is something we talked about in, in masterclass number three. We're going to talk more about this in the brain module.

But right now what you need to know is basically this is part of the nervous system of your body and the autonomic nervous system that's critical for taking your brain and body out of stress mode, out of daytime mode and relaxing it, bringing the whole body into a state of relaxation and safety.

I'll also mention that stress literally stress, psychological stress and cortisol, which is a hormone that is secreted in higher amounts in response to psychological stress. Those two things, the stress itself is actually a circadian Zeitgeber. You've probably experienced being stressed and then having a really poor night of sleep while the stress itself disrupts your circadian rhythm and keeps you more in a wakeful state.

The more that you can de-stress your brain de-excite your brain through vagal activation, the more you can enhance your circadian rhythm.

We will talk more about this in the brain module.

Here's what I want you to do. This is a very powerful vagal Re-Charge Ritual that you can do before bed.

• One hour of no cognitive work before bed

• Do a little bit of massage or foam rolling, just gentle massage on different parts of your body

• Meditation, gentle yoga, stretching or Chi Kung

• Gargling

• A few minutes of belly breathing and then the secret smile meditation

• You can go into bed and do some reading or you can just go to bed right after the secret smile meditation

Vagal Re-Charge Rituals

1. Breathing practice to relax your body, which you can learn HERE. (Video Link)

2. Self-massage/foam rolling/myofascial release. I’ve recorded a video for you on how to

do this HERE.

3. Then find a song you love and have a blast singing it.

4. Then do the Secret Smile meditation, which you can get HERE. (Video Link)

8. Use Exercise To Entrain Your Circadian Rhythm

Now this is a quick one, but the basic idea is you want to time the bulk of your daily activities during the daylight hours. Activity is another circadian Zeitgeber, so it's basically giving your brain the signal. It's daytime, the time to be awake, active, alert and energetic.

1. Time The Bulk of Your Daily Activity During Daylight Hours. 2. Be Active During the Day, and Try to Workout During Daylight Hours. 3. Don’t Exercise a Few Hours Before Bed

Being active, standing up and moving your body a lot during the day is a signal to is a daytime signal, which is amplifying the circadian rhythm strategy.

9. Use Temperature To Optimize Your Circadian Rhythm

And this is something we're going to talk about more in depth in the sleep hygiene strategies.

Colder temperatures in the evening and at night are a trigger for your circadian rhythm or a trigger for sleepiness and warmer temperatures in the morning trigger wakefulness. Now, the natural cycle of the day is obviously such that in the outdoors it's much warmer during the daytime than it is in the evening. The problem is that in the modern world, most of us spend most of our time indoors in a climate-controlled environment. And for most people there, there are not big variations in the daytime temperature and evening temperature. We're often somewhere in the range of 67 to 74 during the daytime and we're often really still in that same range in the evening.

What you want to do ideally if you are spending most of your time indoors. Now, the ideal scenario I should say is spend more time outdoors during the daytime and warm your body up. And then allow your house temperature at night to be much lower and to be

more in line with what the outdoors are doing. But if you are in an indoor environment, you don't really have choice about that.

You can use this knowledge to program your thermostat accordingly so you want to be warmer during the day, you want to have a much more of a significant difference between the warmth, the warm temperature during the day and the evening temperature as you wind down for bed and as you are sleeping at night.

Thermostat strategy:

Use this knowledge and program your thermostat accordingly.

You want to be warmer during the day, and you want your house to get cooler 1-2 hours before you want to sleep.

You can also program it to start to warm up a half hour before you get up in the morning.

One little counter intuitive tip here. If you heat yourself up in the late evening. So do a hot bath or a hot shower or a sauna about two hours or 90 minutes, maybe 60 minutes before bedtime, and then you allow your body to cool off rapidly after that, that that drop. So even though you heated your body, that the act of getting out of the hot environment and then allowing your body to cool rapidly is actually a very powerful signal to help create this effective triggering your body into sleep mode. It's that rapid cooling response that triggers sleep.

10. Start Your Day With Movement

(paired with sunlight)

Start your day with movement and ideally do the movement outdoors and parrot with sun exposure. During that morning sun exposure that you're getting that bright light in your eyes within the first half an hour of the day. If you pair that with movement (such as: gentle movement, stretching, yoga, Chi Kong, etc.) The simple act of physical movement will amplify circadian rhythm even more.

There is a compound called cyclic amp and it's an important cellular signaling molecule that helps reset the circadian rhythm and tell the brain that it's daytime. It's synergizes with light, with temperature, and with food intake.

If you can include movement in that, now you're amplifying the circadian rhythm effect of the light. And the other strategies even more. Again, the best way to increase cyclic AMP is through exercise and physical movement.

If you're severely fatigued, you can just do very, very gentle movement or very light exercise or stretching. You could do something like Chi Kong or yoga or just some gentle stretching. And if you're healthy and fit enough and energetic enough to tolerate it, you can also potentially do your exercise routine at that time or just do a few minutes of some, some more intense physical exercise. And that will help the effect very, very powerfully.

11. Use Sound To Entrain Circadian Rhythm It's long been known that various sounds and auditory cues can exert circadian rhythm and training effects in many, many different animals. For example, domestic cats there are studies on those and how sparrows and squirrel monkeys, different birds can have their circadian rhythms and trained by the sounds of other birds.

It turns out that also humans can be influenced by the sounds of different animals and, and most predominantly, most likely, our brains and our circadian clocks are influenced by the sounds of songbirds singing because it's very common for humans to live in environments where we would have heard those sounds. Our ancestors would have heard those sounds for millions of years as they were waking up in the morning, which is when the songbirds typically themselves wake up and start to make these sounds.

There's actually research showing that the sounds of different songbirds can influence human circadian rhythms. I would recommend using this as a strategy to enhance your own circadian rhythm.

It is very likely, and this is somewhat speculative, not proven yet, or not tested yet, I should say. It's very likely that human circadian rhythms are also influenced by human noises and human language. If you're in an environment where you are hearing other people speak, so for example, while you're trying to go to sleep and there's other people that you can hear speaking that is likely to disturb your own circadian rhythm in a way that creates a little bit of a daytime signal at the time to be awake, alert, and active and energetic. I'll also mention as a side note that if you're trying to work and be productive during the daytime and there's music playing that has human voice and human language unit that distracts your brain.

So it is very likely that the human language, if, if our brain is trying to process that, that is sort of a day time, time to be awake, alert, active and energetic signal to the brain. Ideally you want to cover any of those sounds up and we're going to talk about strategies to do that.

In this context here, you can actually use this research to your advantage so you can put the sounds of songbirds on your phone or your alarm clock, to help facilitate that process. And because voice and language and speaking yourself, whether you're hearing it or speaking it, but especially speaking, it is also in a factor that influences circadian rhythm. You can also potentially use this to your advantage by I what I recommend most strongly is singing a song, right after you wake up.

This is part of the recharge ritual that I had taught you previously in the masterclass.

If you can sing a song, not only is that likely to help enhance your circadian rhythm, but it's also, as I showed you before, one of the most powerful ways to stimulate your, your Vagus nerve and stimulate the ventral Vegas system to bring your brain into a state of safety and relaxation.

I highly recommend singing.

So you can wake up with the soothing noise of songbirds, then shift into music that energizes you and sing with it.

And then at night you can also keep this strategy in mind. As far as noise and human language, you want to keep the volume of any noise, computer noise conversation relatively low. For example, watching movies where people are yelling at each other and action movies and things are blowing up, is going to be fairly stimulating and maybe for more reasons than just the noise and language factor. (But certainly that is part of the equation.) So, being in a calm environment without a lot of talking, without a lot of human language is likely to help facilitate this process of transitioning you into sleep mode as well.

12. Know Your Chronotype and Optimize Accordingly

What is the ideal timing of your light exposure and your wake up time? And your bedtime? Well, it depends on your chronotype. And this is essentially a measure of whether you're more naturally a morning person or a night person. There are lots of nuances you could potentially get into, but that's the basic gist of what a chronotype is, more of a night person or more of a day person and that's when you are mentally, physically and behaviorally at your best each day.

Now, there's actually a standardized questionnaire that has been scientifically verified to be accurate for this very purpose. The Horne Östberg questionnaire, which will give you an accurate profile. It's scientifically validated of where you fall on the chronotype spectrum. Here is the link for you guys to use to take that questionnaire.

Once you find this information, it will tell you when your natural peak, melatonin, and when the optimal time is for you to do your morning light shower. So it'll tell you all of those things.

This is kind of an illustration of what chronotype looks like.

Some people are more of a regular person or more of a morning person or more of a night person or a night owl. (Regular doesn't mean this is the right way or anything like that. It's just what they're calling somebody who's sort of in between a morning person and a night person.)

This is another illustration that is basically showing that your MEQ scores on this test, your MEQ morning, evening,

MEQ score correlates with your optimal wake time and your optimal time for doing your morning light shower. Whether that sunlight or using the bright light therapy device.

If you’re naturally a late chronotype and you’re one of those people that has been that way all your life, then there are a few things you should consider:

• Asking your boss if he is okay with you taking a slightly different schedule • Becoming your own boss • Avoiding smoking and drinking • Shift your circadian rhythm to be more conducive to your workday

13. You’re Probably Not Really a Night Owl, and It’s Probably Hurting You That

You Think You Are The vast majority of people who think they're night owls are actually not really night owls. They are just people who have become night owls as a result of the modern environment full of people living more mostly indoor lives and getting lots of artificial light at night that shifts us all into a, a later circadian rhythm than the one we actually should be in based on the rise and fall at the sun in the location were living.

Also there's research showing, for example, in adolescents and teenagers, the social life's schedule and in college also the social life schedule, the fact that people typically go out at 9:30 and 10:00 PM and stay out till midnight or 2:00 AM. That pattern of social engagement, which is also a circadian Zeitgeber. It's also the social engagement itself is actually something that is giving a daytime signal to your brain. So all of that, the

social sort of environment that we live in, the fact that it's common for people to have this late night social life, that also shifts us all into more of a night owl rhythm.

As I talked about in masterclass one, if you think you're a night owl, you're probably not. And the reason why is basically just the, the modern environment has shifted you into that. Now how do we know that? Well, you're probably not actually a night owl and it's really more that the modern environment has just shifted you into more of a night owl rhythm. Now how do I know that? Well, there's research showing that you can basically take a bunch of night owls, people who normally go to bed at midnight or 1:00 AM or 2:00 AM and you basically just send them on a camping trip for a few days.

You deprive them of artificial light and you just send them into nature where the only light sources are the sun and the moon and the stars and firelight and you get rid of their phones and computers and indoor house lighting and TVs and all of that stuff.

All of the sudden, within a span of a few days, these people start going to bed at 10:00 PM and waking up at 6:00 AM. That is their natural rhythm, that their bodies now assumed literally within a matter of just a few days of going without the artificial light.

So that is more of the natural rhythm that the body is supposed to be in. And what people don't realize is that you're paying a price chronically in terms of a mild state of jet lag, which is affecting your mood and your energy levels and your sleep by being in a later rhythm, basically a later time zone than the one that you should be in.

What this research actually showed is, the time spent outdoors during the day and night restored a natural sleep cycle, turning even night owls into early risers. And they also said all eight participants steadily shifted towards a sleep schedule that more closely mirrored the setting and rising of the sun. The campers slept for roughly the same amount of time each night as before, but fell asleep two hours earlier and a woke without alarm clocks two hours earlier as well.

What I want to get across is basically that your optimal bedtime and wake time is probably at least one hour, but maybe up to two or three hours earlier than you think it is. Especially if you're a night owl. It is very, very likely that your optimal bedtime is potentially two or three hours earlier than when you're going to bed.

So keep that in mind. This simple strategy is just this one thing. If you were just to optimize your circadian rhythm, your light exposure habits or artificial light at night habits and optimize your micro environment using the strategies we've talked about. And then just decide that you're going to start going to bed one hour or one and a half hours earlier than you do now. And waking up one hour or one and a half hours earlier than you do now. That one thing alone will probably massively deepen your sleep and give you much, much more energy during the day.

Just this one strategy can be very, very powerful for a lot of people who are self-identified night owls.

Go take that MEQ score test. Unfortunately it can't always see through if somebody really believes that they are a night owl and they've just always been that way and they're going to answer the questions in such a way where they're saying their optimal sleep time is 2:00 AM and they're optimal wake time is 10:30 AM. If you're answering the questions that way and you've never tried any other rhythm, you may not, you know, necessarily three c through this.

But what I would ask you to try is at least for a couple weeks, if you can shift your bedtime at least one hour earlier, especially if you are someone who's going to bed, you know, in the wee hours of the morning. If you can shift your bedtime and wake time one hour earlier, just try it for a week or two and see if you notice benefits cause my hunches that you will likely notice a lot of benefits from doing that.

14. Stand More During the Day and Sit Less I kind of alluded to this when we talked about movement in the earlier strategy, but sitting and laying down are essentially relaxation signals and nighttime rest mode, sleep mode signals to the brain. The more that you're stationary, the more that you're sitting in, the more that you're laying down, the more that you're giving that nighttime signal to the circadian clock in your brain if you're standing up.

And the more that you're moving when standing up, the more that you're going to enhance that daytime signal.

So if you can get a standing desk, if you can introduce more movement into your day, these types of things will definitely enhance and amplify the all the other circadian rhythm strategies that we're talking about.

Here's another graph from Seth Roberts where he was doing some self experimentation and tracking the effects.

He's tracking basically his probability of early awakening, the probability of not sleeping through the night, uh, and trying to stand much more during the daytime. On the left is day zero and this is day 100 of when he's standing a many more hours during the day of standing time as opposed to sitting time and

the probability of waking up during the night, for example, waking up at 2:00 AM or 4:00 AM goes down dramatically in direct proportion to the amount of standing during the day.

And I would also add the more movement and activity that you can introduce into the day, the better.

15. More Light During the Day Time (throughout the day)

In addition to that morning light exposure, we also want more overall light throughout the day. Now this is a really overlooked cause of circadian rhythm disruption, but people don't realize that being indoors in an office environment, in a home environment has extremely dim lighting compared to outdoor lighting.

This is how to think about it. For millions of years, up until the last hundred or so years, human activity has paralleled the rise and fall of the sun. And we've mostly spent most of our day outdoors. Humans used to be outdoors for pretty much the whole day in the sun, in the brightness of outdoor light. And now we're massively deficient in that outdoor light during the day.

We're getting way too little and we're getting way too much light in the evening from all of our artificial light sources.

There's one deficiency here and one toxicity, one excess of light. The fix is very simple. We need much more light during the day and less light at night and we need to optimize the spectrum of light that we're getting at night as well.

One really fascinating study where they did with a bunch of astronauts.

They basically did a simulated space mission where they kept them in this chamber that you see in this image here for I believe, something like 520 days. They basically just looked at the effects of the astronauts. They were trying to see what it would be like to send these astronauts up into space where they would be locked in a similar chamber like this for that length of time.

And what they found was massive fatigue, massive declines and brain function, depression, anxiety, mood issues, massive sleep problems, all of those things just by being in a dimly lit indoor environment and being disconnected from outdoor bright light.

And there's lots of research to show exactly how this works.

We know that more light during the day directly impacts on neurotransmitters in the brain, like serotonin and dopamine, things that affect orexin and by the way, things that affect energy levels and mood and motivation and sleep and whether you're depressed or whether you're happy and so on. We know that light has very direct inputs on those things. It's just that the modern world is really not conducive to the health of our neurotransmitters and our hormones and our circadian rhythm according to professor of chronobiology. And that's the study of basically all of this, basically the effect of circadian rhythm on our biology.

Professor of chronobiology Till Ronneberg said:

“the amount of light in most offices is laughable. You would be lucky to get 400 lux [a unit of measurement of the intensity of light] at a bright vertical office window during the day, whereas outside on a

cloudy day in summer you would experience more like 10,000 lux. If it’s a blue sky, you could get as much as 150,000 lux.”

Now, if that light that you're getting is influencing neurotransmitters in your brain and influencing your circadian clock and influencing melatonin, which protects your mitochondria and has all these other effects, what, what does it do chronically when you are —on a daily basis for year after year—not getting nearly the amount of light that you should be getting. Well, of course that adds up.

There's also studies where they're, they're examining hormones in people who work in an office without natural sunlight without a window, and they found increased stress hormones and increased risk of depression.

On the other hand, having a window in one's office, just a window as you, as you're working, led to a 33% reduction in cortisol, better rhythm for melatonin and reduced risk of psychiatric disorders and depression.

Hopefully you're getting just how important light exposure is to our health and to our hormones and our neurotransmitters and most people are just totally unaware of all of this research.

The researchers concluded that the "study demonstrated that not only may light pollution affect human physiology but also lack of exposure to natural light is related to high levels of cortisol and lower levels of melatonin at night, and these, in turn, are related to depressive

symptoms and poor quality of sleep."

Also, one more layer to the story that I want to mention. Light during the day is critical for Serotonin levels in your brain.

Lots of light means more serotonin. In fact, you know, seasonal affective disorder. And when people live in an environment where they're not getting nearly enough light for a period of time, one of the key mediators of those depressive symptoms and low energy levels is lack of serotonin.

More light leads to more serotonin. Why is that important? Well beyond the effects and mood and energy levels. There's also effects because Serotonin is actually stimulating meltonin production and the more serotonin that you can build up through light exposure, the more melatonin you will have at night. So light during the day is giving you this sort of double whammy. You're getting the benefits of the light in that moment in terms of your mood and your energy and building up the right neurotransmitters in the brain. But that is also translating into an effect in the evening on the same day because you will have a stronger melatonin surge as a result of that, lots of, as a result of all that light that you got earlier in the day.

Now, one more aspect to this that I want to mention. There's also research showing that the more light you get during the day, the less sensitive that your brain will be to artificial light at night.

The more bright light exposure you can get, an outdoor time that you can get during the day, the better you will sleep at night and the more Melatonin your brain will have. And the more serotonin it will have.

16. Red/Near-Infrared Light One or Two Hours Before Bed

It turns out that that it can actually boost melatonin secretion by the body. And there's research showing that the red and near-infrared wavelengths can get into the eyes and potentially enhance circadian rhythm and bolster melatonin production. That's a key distinction here because in all the previous examples, we're talking about light suppressing melatonin levels. In this case, certain wavelengths of light red and near infrared light can actually enhance melatonin production.

There's even some research showing that right near infrared light on the skin, on your body, using, for example, red in your infrared light device, like we're going to talk about can actually boost what's called non-pineal production of melatonin.

It turns out that some other cells in our body may also be able to produce melatonin and red and near-infrared light may stimulate that as well. Now what's the sort of relevance to this from an evolutionary context? Or how does this make sense?

The sun as it's going down shifts more into the red spectrum. T that exposure as the sun is going down to more of a red dominant light, helps to enhance our circadian rhythm and helps to actually signal the production of melatonin.

A firelight and candlelight also have significant amounts of red and near infrared light. Our ancestors sat around a fire for thousands and thousands of years and our brains evolved to detect certain wave lengths from that fire light as being relevant to the sleep cycle and to actually enhance melatonin secretion.

I'll also mention the Edison style and candescent bulbs again here because they mimic the spectrum of firelight and candlelight and they have lots of red and near infrared light in them that can give you some, some of this melatonin enhancing circadian rhythm boosting effect.

17. Dawn Simulator Instead of Traditional Alarm Clock

We're going to talk more about this in the sleep habits module, but instead of a traditional alarm clock that wakes you up with sound abruptly, I strongly recommend, I cannot recommend this enough to get a dawn simulator that slowly gets lighter and lighter actually wakes you up via light and it does it instead of doing it abruptly.

It wakes you up over a specific period of time that ensures that your brain actually wakes up in the way that it's designed to wake up.

And this is really important because of sleep cycles.

There's research showing that if you are woken up abruptly before sleep cycle has finished, that disturbs mood and energy levels and brain function. When you're waking up with an alarm clock that just wakes you up at a specific time with a sound that forces you to wake up, that wakes you up regardless of whatever your sleep cycle is doing. And that's not good. What a dawn simulator does is it slowly gets lighter and brighter over a prolonged period of time. And the way that works with your biology is that your brain and your eyes are designed to get more receptive to light coming through your eyelids and getting into your eyes and your brain.

So in other words, the bright light is not going to wake you up in the middle of your sleep cycle. It's only going to wake you up as your brain is completing its sleep cycle naturally. This is the right way to wake up the biologically harmonious way to wake your body up if you need to wake up with an alarm clock.

Here is my recommended dawn simulator Philips HF3520 Wake-Up Light With Colored Sunrise Simulation, White

18. Pistachios Pistachios are a wonderful circadian rhythm supporting food. There's research looking at the melatonin content of different foods and they've analyzed hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands of different foods in terms of their melatonin content. And lots of different foods have some amount of melatonin.

Plants use Melatonin in some of the same ways that we do that humans do. It's a powerful antioxidant compound that helps protect their selves. Pistachios are packed with melatonin.

I mean they have hundreds and hundreds of times greater amounts of Melatonin and then almost all other foods. You can actually get a physiologically relevant dose of Melatonin by eating just a few pistachios. You can get from a handful of pistachios, a dose of Melatonin that is equal to what your brain produces, your pineal gland, your body produces a every night before bed.

I highly recommend incorporating pistachios into your dinner and your last meal of the evening to significantly amplify the amount of melatonin in your body.

And melatonin is a critically important compound for stabilizing and protecting our mitochondria, protecting them from damage, allowing them to stay in energy mode and it actually penetrates into the mitochondria. It's one of the very few compounds that penetrates into the mitochondria and protects them from damage.

One final thing I'll mention here is synthetic Melatonin when you take it in supplemental form, when you take it in significant doses seems to have some negative side effects the next day for many people. And if you take it in really small doses, it doesn't, but I don't recommend taking supplemental Melatonin on an ongoing basis for that reason that it seems to oftentimes make people groggy the next day or has other effects that can even disturb your sleep in some people. Pistachios in my experience do not have the same negative side effects as synthetic supplemental melatonin.

19. Use Mental and Physical Energy Each Day

This is a subtle thing that a lot of people are really not aware of. But if you are living a life where you don't really have a lot of mental or physical demands on you during the day, that is another way to kind of blunt your circadian rhythm.

So if you think of it in terms of the same context as light exposure, so let's say you were in a very dim room, you know, dim indoor lighting indoors, very little bright light coming into that room during the daytime, you spent all day in there and then at night you also had lots of artificial light in there.

You’ve got TVs and computers and cell phones and indoor lighting and you know all these sources of artificial light. Well, there's really no differential between daytime and nighttime as far as your circadian rhythm is concerned. In a similar way, if you spend most of your day without any demands on you or with very low demands, mentally and physically. And then at night you're also supposed to be in a situation where you also have very low demands on your brain and your physical body. You want to be physically resting and you want your brain to be resting.

Having higher demands on your brain and body during the day creates that differential. You're using up energy during the day and that allows your brain to go more deeply into rest and regeneration mode and sleep mode at night. This is another circadian amplifying factor.

This is a subtle factor not a lot of people are aware of. I believe it's a very powerful factor and for a lot of people also who don't exercise regularly, they may find on a day where they did exercise that they were way sleepier earlier in the evening, then they would be and they slept way deeper. Well these things are not a coincidence. There's a relationship between using your brain and using your physical body to burn energy during the day, making them work hard and then them feeling a need to go into sleep and regeneration mode at night. So, uh, this is a subtle factor that is a big factor for many, many people.

20. Wake Therapy This is not a strategy that I'm recommending to everyone. This is a strategy that I would only recommend to people who have been dealing with a severe insomnia.

The task here is to stay awake all night, to not allow yourself to sleep at all. And you can do that for one night or in some cases, some people might advise you to do it for even two or three nights. Then you get into a situation where now your body really, really wants to sleep and it becomes easy for you to sleep. And this, by doing this, it can act as a sort of reset button for the system.

There are a lot of studies showing that this absolutely works. It's one of the most powerful interventions. They've used it for people with insomnia. They've also used it as a treatment for depression, very effective for both insomnia and depression. Again, this is the big guns not recommending this for everybody.

One other final note on this is if you want to do more than one night of sleep deprivation and you want to go up to two or three, that might be something you want to do in conjunction with your sleep specialist or sleep doctor overseeing that process.

21. Triple Chronotherapy Basically this is a combination of wake therapy, morning bright light therapy and what's called sleep advance therapy, which is basically just going to bed at an earlier time than you would normally several hours earlier.

The way that this would typically be done is two or three nights of sleep deprivation in tandem with morning bright light therapy.

And then when you finally do go to sleep, you go to sleep at something like 6:00 PM or 7:00 PM and now you're re training a much better rhythm. This is basically like the same concept as wake therapy, just with a few other steps added to it.

If you pair this, I mean the same basic concept of triple chronotherapy, you can add other layers to this as well. So you can do the sleep deprivation therapy and the bright light therapy and look at some of the movement strategies and some of the meal timing strategies and many of the other 22 strategies that we're covering in this video. And the more things that you can layer into it as you're doing the wake therapy, the more effective that reset button is going to be.

22. Have a Specific, Consistent Sleep and Wake Time

This is a simple, almost common-sense suggestion. Something that's so simple that you might have a tendency to overlook it. It's not sexy, it's not fancy. However, I will tell you that my friend, the sleep doctor, Dr. Michael Breus believes that this is the single most powerful thing a person can do for their circadian rhythm.

Just have a very specific and consistent sleep and wake time that you stick to. You don't have from night to night and from weekdays to weekends, you don't have big variations in what time you're going to bed and what time you're waking up. Having that specific consistent time that you are absolutely committed to and really honoring that every single night with consistency, this one strategy alone can be transformative for many people in terms of improving their sleep quality and improving their energy levels during the day.

These are the 22 strategies. I hope you guys have enjoyed this. I hope you're excited to implement this stuff again. You don't have to implement every single one of these 22 things. Uh, but always remember that the more you do, the more you implement, and the more consistently that you do it, the better your results will be.