Did you know that what you do in the morning will dictate how you sleep that night?

Most people don’t have a set of standards or a practice they follow in the morning that influences their sleep.

Most people don’t understand just how important the morning bedtime routine is.

A lot of people want to know about nighttime bed routines not realizing they missed the most important time of day when it comes to sleep.

The morning.

When it comes to sleeping at night, getting your morning dialed in, is more important than the evening.

Trying to get an evening sleep routing that works while violating morning sleep practices is like trying to get somebody to do your workouts for you. Some people have described it like eating whatever you’d like with the option of getting a tummy tuck surgery to get rid of the fat and excess skin.

If you get your morning sleep routine wrong, getting the night time sleep routine correct isn’t going to fix the errors you made in the morning.

The first thing I do when I wake up is think about how “what I do” will affect my sleep that night. If you want to be in alignment with nature and nature’s laws then you cannot violate them, ever.

Your mitochondria and circadian rhythm’s are intricately connected. Each cell in your body has anywhere from hundreds to thousands (in the case of ovary cells or neural cells) of mitochondria.

Think of that for a moment!

The average human adult has roughly 36 trillion cells. That’s 36,000,000,000,000 cells.

Multiply that by a few hundred or a few thousand and that’s the amount of mitochondria your body has. Mitochondria are what generate ATP adenosine triphosphate or energy.

For reference one beat of your hear requires a billion ATP from your mitochondria. And your heart beats on average 100,000 times per day. Multiply 100,000 times 1 billion.

Your body requires energy for every biological process to happen and energy ATP is generated in complex 4 (cytochrome c oxidase) of your mitochondria.

Your mitochondria are impacted by your biological rhythms. Your mitochondrial DNA comes from your mother, not your father. In complex 5 of your mitochondria is what’s called ATPase which is a spinning nanomotor that sends and receives a magnetic field, and it spins at 9,000 revolutions per minute.

Every single mitochondria (probably hundreds of trillions) in your body sends and receives a magnetic field.

Essentially it’s a radio signal and receiver.

What are they receiving?

They’re receiving what kind of environment you live in. The information they’re collecting is light, temperature, geolocation, elevation, season and more.

If I were to snap my fingers and immediately put you on the top of mount Everest, how would your body know what to do in that moment? Immediately it would know that it’s freezing cold and there’s very little oxygen.

How would it know that?

Your mitochondria.

Your mitochondria is tightly controlled to the environment you live in.

Since your mitochondria controls your circadian rhythm via light spectrums, what do you think happens when we look at a blue screen that has 6,500 kelvin color temperature? In short it causes a depletion of melatonin. And it starts sending signals to your SCN and pituitary to secrete specific hormones based on that color temperature.

The human body is a clock that needs to be set daily through connection to nature in all it’s forms.

What’s the problem with 6500 Kelvin blue light coming from or modern lighting and tech devices?

That color temperature contains zero yellow, orange and red light (that comes from the sun) for that time of day.

Essentially you’re telling your body that it’s 12pm in the middle of summer on the equator. But your body could be in December in Canada.

When morning sunrise hits your eyes with UVA and infrared light it has the exact color temperatures and wavelengths to turn on specific hormones (one of which is melatonin) that will control your circadian rhythm for that day.

Later that day, the color temperature of the sun may reach 6,500 kelvin at 12 or 1pm (depending on your geolocation and season). Now you’ve told your body at 6am that it’s 1pm in the middle of summer on the equator.

So what happens to the melatonin that should have been created by looking in the direction of the sun in the morning?

Nothing. It doesn’t get made.

On a side note for another article, melatonin isn’t just a sleep hormone, it’s the most powerful antioxidant and anticancer hormone  your body makes via sun exposure. I’ll talk about that at another time.

What happens to the other hormones that should have been made had you been outside when you woke up instead of looking at screen?

They don’t get made either.

You skipped the creation of those hormones when you looked at any screen when you woke up.

Know anybody that has cancer right now? Do you know anybody who has sleep issues or hormone issues?

Just about everybody I would say.

This is primarily caused by looking (or being exposed to via photoreceptors in your skin) at the wrong wavelengths of light at the wrong time of day, creating “circadian mismatches“.

What does all this mean and how do I make sure that my indoor light environment matches my outdoor light environment?

Here are some rules I live by…

• Never look at any screen when I first get out of bed.
• Try to avoid skin or eye exposures to LED or fluorescent bulbs in the morning. If you must at least wear blue light glasses.
• Immediately open any windows in my bedroom. For context I don’t open my eyes until I open the window. I want that first light that hits my eye to be from nature. Always.
• Get outside as soon as possible and spend as much time as possible outside, in the morning.
• Never miss a sunrise ever again.

To enhance your biology it’s ideal to avoid wearing shoes and get your bare feet on the ground for as long as possible. If you cannot do that, don’t sweat it.

The other important thing to note, is that when you’re outside in the morning sun (still works if it’s cloudy) avoid wearing contacts or glasses of any kind.

Contacts and sunglasses block or alter specific frequencies of the sun that your body needs to create these hormones via direct exposure on the central retinal pathway to the pituitary and the suprachiasmatic nucleus.

How Long Should I Be Exposed To Morning Sunlight?

As long as you can. Since you will not burn, there’s really no upper limit. The longer you can spend outside in the morning the better. Even if you can only be outside for a minute, that’s still much better than nothing. Your mitochondria will be able to set its daily circadian rhythm in seconds. Think about the Everest analogy. It would only take seconds for your body to react to the temperature and lack of oxygen.

Your body is smart. It knows.

What If I Can’t Get Outside?

If you cannot get outside, open a window and get sunlight through an open window. Sunlight through a window is dangerous. It creates an improper proportion of UVA to UVB light which alters hormone production and as a result alters circadian rhythm timing through SCN.

If you absolutely have to look at a screen before you get outside, then I recommend wearing a pair of blue blocking glasses and setting your phone to an orange screen (yes you need to do both).

Remember, technology is not a friend to biology. It’s your enemy. The best thing you can do is to mitigate the damage it causes. I think of cell phones as biological weapons, because they are. They ruin health though all of the mechanisms discussed in this article.

You have to think about your phone, laptop or other devices as weapons against your health. If you use them (and I do) you have to know when and how to use them so they do not cause mitochondrial damage.

The Takeaways

• When you wake up, avoid looking at screens
• Avoid man made artificial light exposure to the best of your ability
• Get outside as quickly as possible and spend as much time as you can there
• If you have to look a screen before going outside, wear blue blocking glasses or install this software
• Spend as much time as you can (even 30 seconds is okay) in the morning sun

What Will I Notice?

Over time as your biology gets adapted to your environment, you’ll notice that you’ll start feeling tired earlier on in the night. You’ll notice an ability to go to sleep quicker. You’ll notice sleeping deeper.

The more connected your biology is to your immediate outdoor environment, the better your health will be, the more energy you’ll have and the better you’ll sleep each night.

Sleep is the most important thing you can do to not only improve your health but increase your energy levels, longevity and disease prevention.

One final thing to note is that I didn’t cover in this article how to mitigate the light you’re exposed to during the daytime. This is almost as important as what you do in the morning. I’ll discuss this in another article.

Remember, this light piece is more important than the food we eat and anything else we do for our insomnia. We are light beings that are tied to our environment via light.

Embrace the light during the day and embrace darkness after the sun sets.

I’m sure you have lots of questions about particular situations and how to do this for your own life.

Conclusion

1. What is your “morning” bedtime routine?
2. How many days per week do you watch the sunrise with no shoes on?
3. Did you know how important light is to our circadian rhythm?
4. How do you manage your light environment?

Comment below and I’ll do my best to reply.