7-minute read · Rather listen? Skip to the podcast below↓
There’s a version of morning most of us know well. You wake up indoors. Turn on the lights. Make coffee. Check your phone. Move to a computer. Maybe get into a car, drive somewhere, and walk into another building.
Hours can pass before you really go outside. Then somewhere around two or three in the afternoon, your energy drops. You reach for another cup of coffee, something sweet, or the sheer force of your own determination to get through the rest of the day.
We call this managing our energy. But I’ve started wondering how much of modern energy management is really just getting better at overriding the body. Tired? Stimulate it. Restless? Push through. Wide awake at bedtime? Find a way to make yourself sleep. Dragging the next morning? Start again.
None of this makes us bad at taking care of ourselves. It makes us modern humans living in a world that's made it surprisingly easy to lose touch with some of the basic things our bodies still rely on: daylight, darkness, movement, rest, and our own rhythm.
While our lives have changed dramatically, our biology hasn’t changed nearly as fast. And one of the oldest signals the body is still listening for is light.
Your Body Is Still Reading the Day
We tend to think of light as something that helps us see. But your body treats it as far more than that. Light tells your internal clock where you are in the day: morning, afternoon, evening, night. Those signals help organize when you feel awake, when you begin getting sleepy, and when the body starts preparing for rest.
The interesting part is that your body doesn’t need you to understand any of this for it to be happening. It's reading the room anyway. And what it's reading is light.
Researchers who study light and human health have found a simple pattern underneath a lot of complicated science: our bodies generally do better with brighter days, darker evenings, and darkness while we sleep. Which sounds almost too obvious to mention until you think about how we actually live.
We wake up and go inside. We work inside. We often exercise inside. We spend some of the brightest hours of the day looking at the outdoors through glass, then keep our homes brightly lit long after the sun has disappeared.
Our days can be relatively dim. Our nights can be incredibly bright. And somewhere inside all of that, the body is still trying to work out what time it is.
One of my favorite studies on light took people away from their normal electric-light environment and sent them camping for a week. No need to worry, this isn't where I suggest you sell your house and move into a tent. Although Minnesota in February does occasionally make me question other life choices.
What happened in the study was simple. After a week of natural daylight during the day and real darkness at night, the participants' internal clocks shifted earlier and became much more closely aligned with sunrise and sunset.
Their bodies began preparing for a good night's rest around sunset and finished their biological sleep cycle before they woke up with the sunrise. People whose internal clocks normally ran later showed the biggest shift.
Nothing had been added. Rather, something had been restored. And I think that finding points to a much bigger conversation about health: how environment may be the most influential condition.
We tend to think wellness is mostly about the things we deliberately do to our bodies: what we eat, how much we exercise, whether we take vitamins, how many hours we sleep. But your body is also responding to the world you place it inside.
Light matters. Darkness matters. The room you're in matters.
There are signals in your environment your body receives all day long, ones that either contribute to a healthier, happier you or require something of you. Either way, your body is answering them, whether you are paying attention or not.
Sometimes better health isn’t about adding another foreign signal. It’s about giving the body more of the conditions it already knows how to respond to.
The Signal We Learned to Silence
This is where coffee enters the conversation. For the record, I love coffee. Nothing in this letter ends with me taking it away from you. Or myself. But coffee is interesting because it’s such a perfect example of how we’ve learned to manage the body.
Caffeine has real, well-established benefits. Research shows it can improve alertness, attention, reaction time, and even physical performance. But it doesn’t actually make a tired body rested. It temporarily quiets part of the biological message telling us we’re sleepy.
Useful? Absolutely. But is it the same thing as having more energy available? Not necessarily. And what we use to get through today can sometimes reach into tonight and even tomorrow.
In one controlled study, a substantial dose of caffeine taken even six hours before bed disrupted sleep. And a later review of the research found that how long caffeine reaches into your night depends a great deal on the dose and the way your body metabolizes it, which is why a single rule for everyone is hard to write.
The point isn’t that coffee is bad. The point is that sometimes we’re solving tiredness with more stimulation while overlooking the conditions that help create energy in the first place. And that loop can become very normal.
You’re tired, so you add caffeine to get through the day. Then you aren’t quite ready for sleep when bedtime arrives, so you take a dose of your favorite nighttime supplement, drink a tea, throw in some blue light blockers to compensate before bed. And you wake up tired and say, “More coffee, please!”
At some point it’s worth asking: Do we have an energy problem, or has the body simply been asked to compensate for too much?
We do this in more ways than light and caffeine. We tell our bodies to wake up with an alarm, stay alert, eat when the meeting ends, sit another hour, then keep going, and finally go to sleep so we can do it all over again.
Of course life requires some of this. We have jobs, children, deadlines, flights, illnesses, changes in season, and all kinds of circumstances that aren’t going to politely reorganize themselves around our biology.
The goal isn’t to build a life where your body is never inconvenienced. Maybe the goal is simply to stop making your body do all of the adapting.
That feels like a more intelligent way to think about health. Not, how can I make my body cooperate with everything I want to do? But occasionally, how can I cooperate with my body so it can do what it's designed to do?
That’s a different relationship.
What Condition Is Missing?
Instead of immediately asking what we can take, buy, eliminate, track, or optimize, we can sometimes start with something much simpler: What condition is missing?
Is it sleep, movement, daylight, darkness, food, rest, recovery, or something in our environment? None of those things are particularly exciting. Most don’t come with an app. And yet our health is being built inside these ordinary, everyday conditions.
There’s even evidence that our pattern of light exposure may help us become healthier beyond sleep. In a large study of more than 86,000 adults, people who experienced more light during the day tended to have better mental-health outcomes, while greater nighttime light exposure was associated with higher risk across several psychiatric conditions.
That doesn’t mean daylight caused those differences in mental health. The study wasn’t designed to prove that. But it does add another piece to a larger picture.
Our bodies seem to benefit when days actually look like days and nights actually look like nights.
There’s something wonderfully uncomplicated about that. Our bodies haven’t forgotten what daylight is. We’ve just become very good at trying to live without it.
Work With the Body You Have
Maybe this is one of the places modern wellness has become more complicated than it needs to be. We spend enormous amounts of time and money trying to improve our energy with supplements, devices, routines, tracking, coffee, and more coffee.
Some of those things can be useful. But becoming the CEO of your energy doesn’t always mean finding another way to create more energy. Sometimes it means understanding the conditions that allow your body to do what it already knows how to do.
Daylight is one of those conditions.
What does that actually feel like? Less dramatic than you might think.
In the afternoon, you may still have a little less energy, but it feels more like a dip than complete exhaustion. Evening may begin arriving in your body before the clock tells you it's time for bed, and sleep starts to feel less like something you have to make happen and more like a natural transition you look forward to.
You don't suddenly become optimized, perfectly rested, or endlessly energetic. You simply spend less of the day trying to convince your body to do something it isn't quite ready to do. And there's a kind of ease that comes from that.
I’m not going to give you an exact number of minutes to stand outside in the morning. The research is far more nuanced than most of those online prescriptions make it sound, and real life changes with seasons, geography, schedules, and individual bodies.
Instead, try a simpler approach: Let your days be brighter and your evenings become darker.
It can be as ordinary as stepping outside a little earlier than usual. Opening the blinds to see the natural light. Taking a short walk or sitting near a window. Let your body receive a clearer signal that the day has started.
And when evening comes, let evening actually come. Turn off the lights you don’t need. Lower the brightness. Give your body some contrast between the day you just lived and the night you’re asking it to enter.
You don’t have to optimize any of it. Simply work with your body instead of asking it to work around you.
We’ve become very sophisticated at overriding ourselves. But maybe part of becoming healthier is getting equally good at building a relationship of cooperation with our bodies.
Because your body isn’t something you have to manage around your life. It’s the place your life is happening.
INFORMED BY Research on daily light exposure, sleep, body-clock timing, caffeine, and mental health from PLOS Biology, Current Biology, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, Sleep Medicine Reviews, and Nature Mental Health. View sources → |
