Light Is The First Medicine

The first thing I do each morning is find the sun (often hidden behind clouds in the UK). Before the screen, before coffee, before anything else. I'll either crack open a window to get a good dose or head out to a spot outside. Goal is just the sky.

Ideally I'd find some grass to stand in, currently I don't have that immediate option. It doesn't matter, though... what matters is the light.

This helps orient and get me energised for the day.  And what's cool is your eye contains a set of receptors most people have never heard of: intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells. They don't help you see. They exist for one purpose, to find the morning sky. They detect the specific spectrum of natural light present in the first hours after sunrise and send a direct signal to a small cluster of neurons called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, the body's master clock. Woah!  That's cool.  

Getting that unfiltered day light is fundamental.  It tells the body what time it is, and because it is after waking up you've primed your body to set the timing for everything else it needs to do to fall in to place the rest of the day.  Your cortisol will know when to rise.  Melatonin knows when it suppress.  Your body temperature will be where it needs to be and you're focus will be much higher in these first few hours after waking.  

It turns out that light is the original zeitgeber. The word comes from German: zeit, time; geber, giver. Your body has been using it to keep time for hundreds of thousands of years, long before any supplement, any device, any morning routine existed.

In our "modern" world we have a new problem.  Many of us might not have access to unfiltered light.  You might not even be able to open your window in your building.  Because of these constraints many of us spend the first hour of the day indoors, under artificial light that doesn't carry the right spectrum. When this happens your master clock gets a weak signal.  Your system is not primed and so everything else for the rest of the day is starting at a deficit and shifts accordingly.

Ten minutes outside (or at the very least sitting in the sun on the other side of an open window) in the morning is not a wellness habit. It is the body receiving the signal it was built to receive.

What does your first light of the day look like?