A night routine that actually helps you sleep starts the moment you wake up in the morning.
I want to impress that upon you. You cannot have a night routine that you start two hours before bed. I’ll share more on that later.
But what I want to drill into you is that every action you take during the day sets the stage for your sleep (or lack thereof) that night.
A lot of sleep related blogs will tell you “stop using technology 2 hours before bedtime” not realizing that 10 photons of blue light can suppress melatonin by up to 4 hours. When you stare at a blue lit screen, most likely you’re staring into it for more than 15 seconds.
With that in mind, you’ve opened the floodgates of melatonin depletion. And we know that melatonin is the primary regulator of your circadian rhythm because of it’s relationship with the suprachiasmatic nucleus SCN.
What regulates your SCN?
Light.
So you can’t just “turn off technology two hours before bed” and then turn your blue lit LED or fluorescent lights on and expect to fall asleep every night.
It’s mind numbing to hear sleep coaches give advice like that when they clearly have not read the research.
A night routing that actually helps your circadian rhythms and sleep pattern starts in the morning.
Watching The Sunrise
I wrote an entire article called The 5 Amazing Health Benefits of Watching The Sunrise To Improve Sleep that I would highly recommend you read. Essentially when UVA, UVB, visible light, red light and infrared light enter into your pupil, it goes through the central retinal pathway to your SCN that’s in your hypothalamus gland in your brain.
Your SCN is the master clock in your body that every cell communicates with through biophotons of light emissions. The SCN communicates the time of day to each cell. Each cell then takes that information and reacts (releasing sleep hormones, detoxifying the lysosome, etc) accordingly.
If the right “time of day” information isn’t given (or the wrong timing signals are given) to your cells, then your circadian rhythm is broken.
How do you know if your circadian rhythm is broken?
You lie down to go to sleep and you can’t turn your brain off.
Watch the sunrise every morning so that you can fall asleep at night.
Getting Outside During The Day
A key concept that people must understand is that our eyes are more of a clock than they are a camera. Since we primarily use our eyes to see things, we think of our eyes as a camera. But what we don’t realize is that the specific wavelength, frequency and color temperature (along with irradiance) of light acts as a timing signal (clock) for our SCN.
If we have reading glasses, sunglasses or contacts we’re filtering God given light with man made products. We ought never to filter what God gives us with man made inventions. In the end, we will always lose.
This is why (for the most part) I don’t recommend wearing sunglasses when you’re outside.
Getting outside during the day preferably grounded with no shoes on or sunglasses on, helps to reset your internal clock to your immediate environment. This is how we embrace nature.
Get outside even for a few minutes multiple times per day to let sunshine into your eyes.
Doing this will serve you greatly when it comes time to go to sleep.
Blocking Blue Light
Getting full spectrum light from the sun is just one side of a two sided coin. The other side is to embrace darkness (or at least use very dim circadian light bulbs) when the sun sets. During the day I recommend installing special software on your computer to limit blue light being emitted from the screen. I set mine to 1850 kelvin during the day when I’m working in my office (with windows open of course). If I use my phone, it’s always red at night and mostly red if the sun is out.
During the day when inside I wear yellow blue blocking glasses, and when the sun sets, I change them to orange glasses to block out more blue and green wavelengths of light. Two hours before bed I put on my red glasses to block a full 100% of blue and green light (known to suppress melatonin secretion).
Block blue light for better sleep.
A Night Routine To Sleep For
As you probably already know, all the lights inside our home are red. Even though our lights inside are red, I still wear my blue blocking glasses. I also recommend doing my ultimate bath for relaxation that will increase your drowsiness and sleepiness before bed. At around 8:30pm is when I start taking melatonin and I never eat food after sunset.
If I’ve done my workouts outside, during the day, blocked blue light and watched the sunrise I don’t really need that much of a night routine for sleep.
By the time I get to bed, I’m so exhausted that now I normally fall asleep in under ten minutes.
It wasn’t always this way though. Back around the year 2000 I had serious sleep issues where I couldn’t fall asleep to save my life.
I’m thankful to have healed my mitochondria and permanently fixed my circadian rhythm.
Conclusion
I highly recommend adding these four tips into a night routine that works for you. You can do it and you can heal your insomnia naturally without drugs or over the counter sleep aids. It’s possible, you just have to put in the work to heal the thing that’s broken.
Questions:
- Do you watch the sunrise every morning?
- If not, why not?
- Do you block blue light during the day AND night?
- What results have you noticed?
Comment below!
