Episode 12 video full Large 540p (02:18)
Welcome to the Worthy to Lead Podcast.
I know a lot of my listeners are, you know, having a tough time and really struggling with a lot of the challenges that we have going on in this world. A lot of stress, a lot of chaos, a lot of burnout. I know a lot of organizations are going through change. and and it's hard, you know, to not let that negativity seep down into your teams and into yourself. and so this series of stress reduction podcasts is really meant to help bring in different experts from different fields.
So that they can have new perspectives and figure out, you know, what are the tools that they can use to go from being in survival mode to really thriving and being resilient through all of this change. So I'm excited to have you here, Lynne, to join us to talk more about circadian rhythms and how getting our internal clocks aligned can really have a powerful impact on productivity and health. So I know that we're going to cover social jet lag, which is a super interesting thing I had never heard of before.
And how we combat that. you know, how to prioritize your peak energy hours, getting effective light exposure, especially when we're in office settings now, how to wind down your body for optimum sleep, and other amazing ideas for circadian rhythm support. So this is a fascinating topic. I know we have a lot to cover, so let's dive in.
So thank you for coming on and sharing your amazing research and insights. and to kick us off, I just want to start with the basics. so can you explain what circadian rhythms are and how they work? Absolutely. Yes, very good place to start. So most people think of sleep when they hear circadian rhythms, which is not inaccurate. It's certainly a big part of this, but circadian rhythms do so much more for our bodies.
So we are actually filled with it's like trillions of tiny clocks. Nearly every cell of our bodies has one of these biological clocks. And we evolved with these clocks ticking in coordination with each other as well as with the sun. So the 24 hour Earth day to prime our bodies to do the right things at the right times. So that's you know, our body, our med.
Metabolism system is primed and our digestive systems are primed to work at their best when they're expecting food to come in, for example. And our immune system is wired to be most protective of our physiology at certain times of day to fend off pathogens at certain times. And we're primed to sleep at certain times of day. So all those things, we can't do them all at once. All you know, we can't do all these things 24-7. So our bodies have kind of created this efficient system where things are like.
Optimized to work best at certain times. And because you know we live on this planet with a 24 hour day, our clocks are not precision timepieces. So they're not ticking at exactly 24 hours a day. And there's reasons for that biological that that scientists are hypothesizing. But the takeaway for us is that because they're not ticking precisely at 24 hours a day, that circa and circadian means around or about.
That means we need regular calibration from the environment to keep them ticking in tune with our Earth light dark cycle. And the primary cue for that is light. So it's the sun. So we need regular exposure to that to try to keep them reined in and ticking, ticking aligned with with the the sun. I think that that is so fascinating. Just the topic of we have trillions of
clocks in our body. Like the way this has been talked about over time, it just like really simple oversimplified maybe where we're like, we have a clock. We have an internal clock. And that clock does this or that and controls things. But what I think is so cool in your book is you dive deep into all the different kinds of clocks and how each of them needs to be calibrated to Yeah, it's fascinating. I mean the picture is getting more complicated as happens in science. But the ultimate takeaway again for us is
you know, relatively simple. I mean it's those similar cues, you know, trying to tie all these clocks together and in coordination. And we have we do have a master clock in the brain, which you might hear about. So there's kind of one clock somewhat leading the charge. So it's sending signals throughout the body. But we're also learning that like eating at different times of day can directly affect, you know, our
liver clock, for example. So so that's what's kind of pointing a lot of this science to practical applications. As we understand this, we understand how, you know, eating and light exposure and all these things can can affect our clocks. Yeah. So before we get too far, I do wanna share with readers, this is the book we're talking about. It's called The Inner Clock, Living in Sync with Our Circadian Rhythms. And it's so, so good.
I honestly couldn't put it down. And I I think you mentioned that you worked for like nearly three years gathering research for this, right? So just about, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean just a little bit of time. Just a little bit of time. Down a few yeah, deep rabbit holes. It's I mean, it's fascinating. I'm still fascinated by the topic. So yeah, so what what inspired this? Like what what fascinated you about this topic? You know, I think it really goes back
To growing up in Seattle. I mean, I wasn't conscious of this at the time, but we're really exposed to a lot of kind of the negative factors that affect our rhythms here particular. We're at a high latitude, which means the wintertime days get really short. I mean, it's not as bad as Alaska, but we're pretty north. And, you know, you hear about the Seattle gloom, which is real, it gets dark.
So I remember growing up just feeling kind of that seasonal effective disorder at play. And then like a lot of us, I grew up in middle school, high school, particularly high school, we started like 7 25 AM or something crazy early. So like there's not right. It's just not right. So several weeks of the year, you're going to school in the dark. You know? Yeah. And then if you have activities after school, like I, you know, if I played basketball, I wasn't leaving the gym till it was dark again. so you really didn't get daylight.
And you know, I didn't feel great. I didn't think that, you know, no circadian rhythms had anything to do with it, but but I was I was dragging. And then I went to college in Minnesota, St. Olaf. And the winter days there, you know, as you know, are bitterly cold, but they're also often really bright. You get that clear sky, you get that snow on the ground reflecting the light. And
You know, maybe it was just because it was such a wonderful place, but I remember being so much happier and like You remember the cold fondly. The snow, you're just like, Thank goodness, all this light around me. This is great. Seriously. While the rest of us are like huddled up and like, get inside. Let's play, let's go s let's go train. Let's go throw snowballs. I know you did. I know you did. but it wasn't until
It was like nine years, eight or nine years ago now. I had moved back to Seattle as a freelance journalist and I'd gotten an invite to go to Safeco Field, which is what our the Seattle Mariners baseball field was called at the time, to check out some new lights they'd installed. So they put in new stadium lights, these LED lights. Very cool. And then they took us into the locker room to show us some other lights they had installed. And they had they'd put in these lights that you could adjust the
color of as well as the intensity of and they talked about how they were using them to help the players energize before the games and then after the games like turn the col turn the lights to like a warmer color and dimmer to calm them down to help them sleep and you know talking about how this would help their circadian rhythms and that's when it was like I started connecting the dots and just got fascinating and I could you know they're trying to do this for these Seattle players
Could circadian rhythms explain like my you know struggles throughout my life and you know, could this be something I could use? Or, you know, does this point to tools that could make me feel better? Maybe other people. Yeah. So that scientific curiosity was was absolutely activated by going in that locker room and you're like, hmm, okay, what's next? Yeah. So then you went on this crazy adventure. I'm just gonna call it crazy because you talked to over 240.
Different experts across a variety of professions and geographies. You spent time in a cold war era nuclear bunker without light for 10 days. you went to Alaska and you experienced what it was like to have 24 hours of sunlight. You visited Europe and investigated the history of light and its impact on architecture and design.
You slept in sunflower fields to observe biological clocks of sunflowers. I mean, this whole book is just full of these amazing little adventures and all the discoveries that came along with that and how all of that impacted your thinking around circadian rhythms. And so I just want to know, like, what was your favorite experience throughout that entire adventure? It's a it's a close call. I mean, it was the sunflower field was fun. I mean
It was a little creepy wandering around in a sunflower maze at three in the morning with my red light, like with your flashlight. Like I was in despair. A horror film. but but really it was I mean, it was probably the bunker. I mean that was that was quite the experience. So yeah, I did I'd spent ten nights underground, fifty feet underground. I had changed all the lights in there to a this really dim red light, which
is that's the the color known to not affect our circadian rhythms so much. And you know, taped over every clock there what possibly could be. And I decked myself out with all these devices to measure my different rhythms. So whether that's you know heart rate, my temperature, my glucose levels, you know, I was tracking my sleep. So all those things I had like just was accumulating mounds of data and also recording how I felt.
And for me, what was really the most profound probably data point or experience was, you know, noting how I felt during those 10 days. It was like halfway through, I just started feeling pretty crappy. Like, you know, that that extreme jet lag that you might get traveling halfway across the world, for example. I was starting to feel that, you know, just that like, I don't know, like hollow head feeling, you know, stomachs like messed up.
Just feeling off at different times of day, you know, struggling to sleep or like wanting to nap. It was just my body lost its rhythm. And then, but it w I didn't see any data until weeks later I had some scientists going through my data with me. And we found that about that time, my different clocks in my body had fallen out of sync. You know, they were coordinated at the start, and then all of a sudden they were just sh drifting and drifting at different rates. So they were no longer coordinated.
And even more probably important than that is they were dampened. So you could see, you know, originally you could see like this up and down, this rhythm of the day for the use for heart rate, temperature, whatever it might be. And then those they just got flattened. And this is what scientists are coordinating or are correlating with a lot of health issues. So it's both this like discordination as well as this dampening of rhythm. And that
You know, it's taken away our body's efficiency, ability to to do those right things at the right times. And I I felt that, you know, and I could see with that data. It just it was fascinating to to make that connection. To experience that with your own body. I remember you posting a video of yourself trying to juggle at I don't who you didn't even know what time of day it was. You didn't have a clock. No. You didn't you were just like
Loopy and you were like trying to juggle and it was like totally uncoordinated and you're like, this is gonna be crazy, but this is how exactly how my body's feeling right now. So if that happened for you after ten days of not getting enough light, like I guess from a health perspective, like what happens to us if our circadian rhythms are dampened or out of sync for too long? Yeah, a lot of things, fortunately. But also fortunately, because as we understand this.
That's pointing us to some solutions, right? But yeah, I mean, as I as I mentioned at the beginning, you know, our s our all our body systems have clocks and for good reason, because they're helping our body anticipate things and again be efficient and do those right things at the right times. So when we lose that, when those things are like triggered at the wrong time or they're just like hardly triggered at all, you know, that's pumping different hormones through our body.
It's you know, including probably what people hear about, you know, melatonin, right? That rise of melatonin is what sets off a cascade of things that helps us sleep. and then you know, insulin levels, for example, which are crucial to keeping our blood sugar levels steady. All these things just count on that anticipated rhythm. And when we don't have that, just a host of inefficiencies happening. And so scientists are tying that to increased risks of obesity, diabetes.
as well as you know cardiovascular disease, cancer, there's likely this bi-directional relationship with cognitive decline later in life. So Alzheimer's dementia. They're finding that it's probably both circadian disruption is increasing the speed at which that develops, as well as the condition itself is affecting circadian rhythms and making it, you know, difficult for people to live kind of a 24 hour
day. they're sleeping at all hours, for example. So just more and more these links are being found. And in an you know, and the scientists like, it makes sense because of the mechanisms by which our bodies, you know, rely on so metabolism is probably the biggest because, you know, that's we really do count on these hormones to come at certain times to to process our food and, you know, keep our insulin levels consistent and and those kind of things. So yeah. Yeah, that's that's serious stuff. And
You know, I think about all of the other advice that we get around, you know, trying to be healthy and get enough sleep and do all of these different things. But if the underlying foundation of circadian rhythms are off, we're not going to be able to fully get the benefit of all of those things that we're working so hard to do to preserve our health, right? Exactly. Yep. So
I mean, we're always looking to optimize our performance or, you know, be in optimum health, especially as leaders. And you know, we want to have focus, we want to have great attention and mental clarity in order to make good decisions. and in your book you talk about how each of us sort of have different power hours, if you will, based on our chronotype. And chronotypes are basically like the early larks, night owls, or
doves, which is I guess the middle category I've never heard of before, where most of us sort of fall in between. But we all kind of have these power hours. So I'm curious if you could talk a little bit more about that and then how do we best optimize those peak hours so we can be most efficient at work? Yeah, I find this like such a powerful tool and so much potential here. So yeah, I I tried to figure out my own throughout the process of writing the book. So it it really starts with figuring out
Yeah, your own chronotype and when your power hours might be. And that really takes, I mean, it kind of takes t time. It takes being away from obligations for a few days. Like if you can take a vacation, not set an alarm clock, let your body do its thing. Try to let your body fall into a natural rhythm of going to sleep, waking up, and then taking note of when during the day do I feel most alert?
When do I feel like I have got, you know, a pep in my step, like, you know, a little more physical energy? all these things tend to peak at different times of day. And once you kinda get a sense of that, you know, look at your daily schedule. Do you have wiggle room so you can align those peak hours with appropriate tasks? So for me, I discovered that, you know, kind of the late morning hours were
when I was most productive, most alert, most focused, and could bang out, you know, a couple pages of a book, for example, during those hours. Whereas mid afternoon, for a lot of us, I'm a dove. So for a lot of us mid afternoon, we tend to slump. And it's not just because we ate a big lunch. That's part of it. But it's also your circadian rhythm. It's just it's lowering your alertness at that time of day. So now I account I allot those hours for you know less brain intensive activities.
maybe that's doing the dishes or something. So yeah, so there's different times of day for these things. So kind of getting account of that. And then, you know, I don't depending on your work environment, if you're going into an office or you're working from home, just trying to like protect those hours of peak productivity, for example. Maybe turn off your phone, or if you're in an office, you know, put up a sign. I I met a woman in Denmark who's helping companies try to support.
their their workers, circating rhythms and power hours. Yeah. She she's using, she's kind of handed out these frogs, these colorful like plush frogs that people can put in their like office window or on their door that she says, basically says frog off. So like when you when you see that you don't bother that person, right? You let them do their do their thing lump hours. Right? So
So yeah, yeah, just trying to trying to take advantage. it doesn't sound like it's that hard to figure out your chronotype. Like I thought you had to use like apps or fancy tracking data, but it sounds like what you're telling me is just take a vacation and don't set an alarm clock and let your body do its thing and you'll know, you'll naturally know when your body wants to wake up, when it wants to go to sleep, when it wants to do something energetic, when it wants to relax.
And that that will just all sort of emerge. I you know, I think so. There are, you know, there are questionnaires out there. There's a Munich chronotype questionnaire, if you want to Google that, that you can you can run through, will give you kind of a guesstimate of your chronotype as well. But even with that, people can vary as to when during the day they peek in these different things. You know, there's a lot of individual variability. So so the best thing to do is just, yeah, pay attention, try to try to gauge your own. Yeah. Yeah.
What I love about that is I feel like it sort of combats this public shaming of people who might be night owls or who might tend towards being more productive at night or more efficient at night and not early in the morning. You know, like we're all sort of told, you need to be an early morning person. That's when you're most productive, that's how you get ahead, that's how you make more money, like all of those things, right? About this is the one way to be. And I think what I love about your book is you sort of talk about actually.
We're all on different schedules. And in order for you to be at your maximum, it's not about force yourself to be something you're not. It's about understanding how your body wants to operate and trying to get in sync with that as much as possible. Yes, absolutely. And I think, I mean, I probably a lot of your listeners will agree with this. It's, you know, there's only so much in your own power to some degree about like how you allocate your hours. So I think the more leaders hear this, you know, bosses out there, you it's a win-win if you can
Help your employees, you know, live best and work best according to their natural rhythms, you're gonna get more out of them. And they're gonna be sick, potentially sick less. So there's been studies in Europe that have found increases in productivity, fewer sick days used when you let people work by chronotype. So maybe that's coming in a little later to the office and then staying later, you know, kind of just shifting shifting schedules based on their personal chronotype.
And then, you know, there's workarounds, like if you have to have meetings, maybe have them right in the middle of the day when everybody overlaps, for example. Yeah, I I loved that recommendation. I was thinking a lot about that one. Just how much am I thinking about the diversity of kernotypes that we have on our team and what people need? And we're all in different time zones. So of course that makes it a little more complex. But if you focus on meetings towards the center of the day.
Like you said, it it makes it a lot easier for people to adapt and not force themselves to to be really far outside their their zone. Right. So I know another area that colleagues often deal with is jet lag. you know, going across time zones and continents and this, you know, in this global economy. we often can't avoid that. That's something that will happen. and so I was curious if you have any new or interesting strategies you can share.
that have been helpful for people to combat jet lag. Yeah. some of these, you know, might be somewhat well known, but there is more and more data backing them up. And there's some new kind of waste to me tricks scientists have pointed out. So I mean the first thing to really focus on, and and you may have heard this, is to, you know, acclimate before arrival, as I say.
So it's really preparing, you know, days ahead of a trip, especially if it's if you're crossing a lot of time zones, try to just slowly shift your body clocks a little bit. So if you're traveling, say east, so you're going to Europe, you know, for a few days beforehand, try to go to bed a little earlier. And so that means you can you can you have power to shift your rhythms by your exposure to light. So maybe you really try to get early, early morning light.
those days, which helps your clocks shift a little earlier and get you'll get taught your melatonin will start to rise a little earlier. And then yeah, at the end of the day, you want to try extra hard to darken your environment so that doesn't get in the way of your melatonin rising. So that'll shift your your rhythm a little earlier towards those, you know, Eastern time zones. and also, yeah, think about, you know, maybe trying to line up even your meal times a little earlier and so on. You know, prepare before you take to the air.
it's another turn to think way you can think about that. Okay. So my little tricks to remember prepare before you take to the air. Acclimate upon arrival. Once you arrive, really try to line up your your rhythms with the local time zone. Get light in the morning. You know, just try to expose yourself as much as possible. You know, get those nights dark. Eat at the times. The locals are eating, so eat your
more your breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the local time, despite whatever your body might be seeing at the time. You just you want it to shift a little bit. And hopefully you've done some preparations with your rhythm so it's not as drastic. but there is some caveats. So you also need to do some math. So depending on how far you've traveled, like I experienced unfortunately, while reporting the book, there things can backfire. So I crossed a lot of time zones to get to London for my trip. And
If you are exposed to light before essentially the midpoint of your sleep, which is when your core body temperature dips to its lowest, your body's gonna take that light to to s as a message that the sun hasn't actually set yet. Oops, you must have been confused. The sun is still up. And it's gonna shift earlier. Right? wow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So for example, I landed in London. I went out of the airport. It was the morning. It was bright. I was exposed to a lot of light.
My body clocks were still ticking like, you know, late late night, but not quite early morning yet. So it was they were ticking before my body had reached its core temperature minimum. So that had shift that actually likely shifted my clocks or like to the west. So rather than shifting to London time, they were probably shifting to LA time. but then light after that midpoint, after your core body temperature minimum, will advance your clocks. So that's what you want if you're traveling east.
So that's why early morning light is so helpful, but you have to be careful because if you've traveled so far that your body clocks are so far off, that can actually yeah, do they Yeah. So I was thinking about that scenario a little bit. And you had mentioned somewhere in your book that they have like different glasses you can buy now. Yes. Is that true? That will like shift the light color or tune the light color based on what you need if it's like nighttime or daytime. Can you talk a little bit about like
Like either, okay, there's fancy glasses, there's probably just regular sunglasses too, right? But like what can you do if you're traveling there and then you get exposed to sunlight? What should you do? Yeah. So for example, when I landed in London, had I thought this through or done the math, I should have put on blue light blocking glasses. Or sunglasses, you know, are good, but like ooh light blockers are even better because it's those blue wavelengths of light that are most powerful on our circadian rhythms. They are the the strongest signal.
that it's daytime because the daytime sky has a lot of blue wavelengths. So that's how we evolved. Really any light that's bright will do it too, but blue wavelengths in particular. So so yeah, there are people have probably seen those blue light blocking glasses now. Those that are most effective tend to look kind of yellow orange ish. There's also light there's also glasses now that will shine blue light directly into your eyes. yeah. That's just wild. How does that work? Yeah.
So I got a pair from a team in the Netherlands that had created these. And it's just this like tiny little beam that, you know, it's very concentrated blue light, which is the kind of strongest signal. And so for example, if you wake up in the morning, it's still dark out, but you want your clocks to know it's daytime, because you if you're too high, north latitude, for example, you can put these glasses on and it's signaling to your master clock in your brain.
That the sun is rising. It's day. Let's let's shift those clocks, you know, earlier to to acknowledge that. So fascinating. And it sounds like a lot of athletes like these kind of tech toys because when they're traveling a lot for games, they're trying to make up the difference between the jet leg and the the time time zone differences and they're able to use these little type mechanisms to help their body adjust so they can perform better. Exactly.
And it's worth noting here that light has multiple effects on our bodies, right? I mean, it helps obviously our visual systems see. It affects our circadian rhythms. It also has directly energizing effects on our body that's outside of the circadian system. So for all those reasons, like yeah, athletes will use them just to to get energy. and we can do that for our cognitive function too. We can kind of create more alertness by by getting that blue light.
So since you brought up blue light blocking glasses, I know there's a portion of the book where you talk about, you know, blue light blocking glasses are really helpful in some circumstances, but in others, they might actually be doing harm because they're doing the opposite of what we want, which is we want to get blue light. can you talk a little bit about, you know, blue light glasses and how we should think about using them or think about anything that's blue light coded technology?
just so just to make sure that our body is getting what it needs. Yeah, I would, you know, be beware of glasses that yeah, boast that blue light blocking capability if they're something you need to wear all day. Because during the day, you don't want anything blocking your access to those blue photons, which are really helpful. I mean, there's caveats there, like if you're outside a lot during the day, the coating on an eyeglass, especially if it doesn't
create a yellow tint, it's not blocking that much. So you're still getting some. But if you're like a lot of us and are indoors, you know, ninety plus percent of the time is what the figure is for on average that we we spend indoors. And you're not getting outside much, especially in the wintertime when your commute to and from work is in the dark, then yeah, it can, you know, it can cut down on like the minimum small amount of photons you get anyway. And that, you know, that's not helpful.
But at night they are helpful because you don't want those blue wavelengths to get to you. So basically during the day, our circadian rhythm needs the blue light. It's super important to kick start those clocks to do the things that they need to do during the day. And then at night we really don't want them. So like if we're in an office, for example.
And we're just under typical lights that most offices would have. like are we getting enough blue light from those office lights? Can you talk about like yeah. And and then and then we've got these blue light glasses on protecting us from our screens. What is actually happening? Yeah, I think this is the biggest roadblock for us in keeping our rhythms happy, is our indoor lifestyle.
So the artificial lights we have in offices, they provide a fraction of the light that you would get outdoors. We evolved outdoors with that natural full spectrum sunlight. Even on a cloudy day, the light that we get outdoors is orders of magnitude brighter than what we get indoors. And the wavelengths are also, you know, we would get that full spectrum. Indoors, like our technologies evolved, right, from incandescent lights, you know, we got
fluorescence, now a lot of LEDs. The standard LED that we have now is has a bit more of the blue wavelengths of light, but it's still a lot less and is also missing a lot of other wavelengths that are important, including violet light. We're finding the impacts of that. And it's just a lot dimmer. It's our the the issue is that our visual system is working separately from our circadian system. And our visual system does not need as much light to paint our world. So
It could seem bright to us, but our circadian system is just not getting the memo. It's not learning, it's not getting the signal that it's daytime. And that's the problem. So it's not, it's really about that that contrast between day and night. So it's if it's not getting that signal that it's daytime, and at night we're still blasting the same artificial lights indoors, it's just kind of dampening that whole thing, which in effect dampens all of our rhythms. So
So the advice that scientists are passing along now is, you know, during the day, if you can get close to a window, way better. Outdoors is the best. The closer you are to the window, next best. And then if you are stuck in the middle of an office or a basement during a workday, the key is to, you know, if you can get outside for just five minutes at a time here and there, if you can get outside on your lunch break, that's hugely helpful.
You don't really need that much daylight. I mean like a half an hour throughout the day can go a long ways, for example. and then as our technology is getting better, we're able to create LED lights that are more closely mimicking daylight. There's still nothing compared to the real thing, but we're getting better. We're in scientists are incorporating more wavelengths of light. They're finding ways to make it intense without blinding us, because indoors it's yeah, it's just it just seems so bright sometimes when it's yeah.
It does. Well, and and sometimes when you're outside, you're just like, this is really intense light. Like I have to put sunglasses on, like it's too bright. But but it doesn't you're saying it doesn't take much. Like thirty minutes, an hour a day, something like that. Yes, exactly. And I mean that doesn't sound like much, yet so many of us don't get that. I am it's totally guilty. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
I remember you mentioned in your book how you did an experiment in your own house just about the placement of your desk and you started like standing next to a windowsill and it was however many thousands of lumens coming from the sun and then you took a few steps back and then it went way down and then you turned sideways to face your desk and then it went down and then you scooted into your desk and it was like microscopically tiny. Yeah. So
Talk about just like what are some simple things we can do? You mentioned sit close to a window, but what else can we do to just make sure that we maximize whatever that little light exposure is that we get from windows? Yeah. Yeah, this was a little mind-blowing to me. There's these tiny tweaks can go so far. so yeah, again, the closer you are to a window, but the better. Cause as you as you step back from a window, it there's like an exponential drop in how much.
How many photons are making its way in? And this also depends on your windows. A lot of like modern energy efficient windows are blocking a lot of the crucial wavelengths of light. They're letting some in, but it's it's dampening it, similar to like a blue light blocking glass. So another factor, maybe don't overthink that, because that's probably out of your control. but for me, so I I yeah, I did I pulled my desk like closer. So I have a window here, my desk is in front of me.
I pulled the desk this way so that more of the window was in front of my line of sight. Because before it was like here and now it's more here. So I have an angle of some daylight coming in if that makes any sense. So it's like directly from the window to your eye. Directly from the window to the eye. Because I'm, you know, I'm sideways or is this parallel to the window here? but yeah, I'm getting some light in. So I was like a foot back and my
Readings from my spectrometer, which were measuring how much light I was getting, shot up. So just like that small change. And then, you know, I got a keyboard trace to pull that. I'm like doing everything I can to kind of pull myself close into towards the middle of the room with more window in front of me. And, you know, nudging myself a little closer to the window. And then throughout the day, just, you know, letting myself procrastinate a little bit by just, you know, looking out the window. And getting you.
Yeah, you gave that a a specific name, right? Like this is no longer just bird watching. This is getting circadian snacks. Yep, yeah. A source of mine, Lisa Heishong, amazing woman. she she g she she cla she deserves acclaim for that term. But yeah, I'm like I'm getting a circadian snack right now. Yeah. I love it. I love it. And there was a a point where you mentioned that even just getting an hour of exposure to sunlight or at least
40 lux of blue light has more impact than the caffeine from a 16 ounce coffee. There's, yep, yep. That blows my mind. Right. Yeah, there was a it was a small study, but yeah, I mean there's, you know, by l biology to back it up. That that can be just as energizing, if not more, to get that light. So instead of that afternoon coffee, you know, maybe go out for a walk.
Or get close to that window. Yeah. Yeah. So people are gonna hate me for asking you this, but what about coffee? Is coffee a circadian friend or a circadian enemy? All right, so kind of an enemy, but I still drink it. So take that for what you want. The world can go on. The world can go on. I just limit my coffee now to the morning to two cups.
stop by eleven or noon, no more afternoon coffee. And the reason for that is, you know, maybe not a shock if we like step back and think about it, but caffeine stays in our system a long time. The half life is something like five hours, five, six hours. So that means if you have a coffee at like four PM, a little pick me up, you know at ten PM or when you're thinking about going to bed, that's like half of that is still in circulation in your body and it's impacting your ability to fall asleep. So yeah, if you
If you want quality sleep and don't want to mess up your rhythms, I would just try to limit it to early in the day so your body has time to break it down before you go to bed and minimize its impact. And maybe not maybe not two vente coffees. You know, when I say two coffees I'm talking gallons. Yeah. okay, okay. Well that's that's a relief. I I thought it was gonna go the other way. And I mean, yeah, some scientists might and all coffee
Yeah. Yeah. I I can't do it. I can't do it. that's good to hear. That's good to hear. so let's shift gears for a second and just talk about the opposite of light, which is darkness and its value for sleep. So, you know, I think about a lot of us, we get a lot of disrupted sleep. Or maybe we stay up really late and we're cramming away in front of the laptop, trying to finish a project or a paper or something that we need to get done.
and and hit those deadlines, but our sleep is just kinda the the last thing, right? Like we'll we'll just put in whatever the hours are in front of the computer and go to bed at different times all the time or stay up really late during the weekends. So what are those late night cram sessions, whether it's in front of a computer, in front of a T V screen, what is that doing to our circadian rhythms? Yeah, it's not helpful.
I'm certainly, you know, I was more guilty of it before. I'm trying to be better, but it's hard in our modern life, you know, to avoid all these things. But yeah, the later you are in front of a screen, getting blue light, just keeping your mind activated, you know, the more your circadian rhythm, your melatonin levels are it's gonna shift. You know, it's gonna throw that off.
And so I mean there's a couple layers here. So that yeah, it's avoiding that that light at night. If you get that light at night, it's you know it's likely gonna keep you awake longer. And because it keeps you awake longer, that means you're gonna probably sleep in later if you have the option to, or you're gonna not get enough sleep. And but if you sleep in later, you're gonna miss that morning light, which is so crucial to reset your rhythms. And you know, you can create this snowball effect where you just kind of stay up later and later. Because interesting point here, on average.
Most of our rhythms are a little longer than 24 hours, which means we naturally want to drift. If we're not getting recalibrated on the regular, our bodies are going to naturally drift later and later and later. So a lot of us are night owls or we think we're night owls when we may not actually be night owls. We're just our behavior has caused us to shift. So blue light and night, staying awake late. definitely not helpful. Another key piece here is the consistency of our sleep schedule.
So you mentioned social jet lag early on. social jet lag is really that difference between when we go to bed during our like work days, school days, and then on the weekends when we're trying to like maybe catch up or have a life. if that, you know, if there's a big difference there, that's it's basically giving our clocks whiplash. It's giving ourselves a jet lag because we're essentially, you know, traveling across time zones on the weekend and back again. so that's that's throwing some disruption into our our clock.
cycles as well. So yeah, staying up late if it, you know, inconsistent. You're essentially giving your body jet lag, you're not you're not able to really optimize your rhythms. It's interesting too how you talk about it's a snowball effect. And so that one day of missing it kind of leads to the next day and the next day and the next day. And that it it can drift over time. It's not just like, I'll make it up on the weekend. I'll just sleep in an extra so many hours on the weekend. It'll all be fine.
Like there's a certain period of time where your body needs to actually recalibrate over time to get back to where it wants to be, right? So that the habit of of over time chronically staying up late, having that exposure to blue light, is is actually shifting your body kind of in negative ways, right? Yep. No, exactly. Exactly. so yeah, that's where it's yeah, really important to try to rein it back in with the light. And another
F another tool that can be used, which sometimes is overused, is melatonin supplements. But if you do take them two, three hours before your bedtime, that can actually help kind of pull your rhythm back a bit. Rather than if you take them at bedtime, you're actually potentially making it even worse on yourself because I can push your your bedtime later because it's supposed to really be time to when your melatonin naturally rises, which is two or three hours before bed.
Before bed. Okay. So when you think about like most important changes that can help us really improve our sleep and get optimum sleep, can you just talk through just some of the top things that you see making the biggest difference? So melatonin would be a great one if you're really off, right? Yeah. to to help start pulling you back. But what what other things? Yeah. so I'm just thinking about like my sleep routine would be so yeah, trying to cut the lights two, three hours before bed, turning down the thermostat as well. Like we
We're primed to sleep best, like mid sixties Fahrenheit. So it's really again again, going back that contrast in your days. I mean, just think about if you're camping, for example, like the light, the brightness, then at night it gets really dark. Maybe you just have like a candle or a campfire. it's getting cooler too, right? Actually, I break it down to the three things. So that's the contrast, right? Bright days, dark nights, you know, contrast your temperature rhythms. The the second is to constrict.
And there I'm talking about your meals and your the calories that you're throwing into your body. The science is really building that we should be constricting those hours to, I mean, the shorter the better. But some scientists I talked to says suggest that kind of the sweet spot would be ten hours during the day. And shift it on the earlier side. Your body is more ready, able to handle incoming calories earlier in the day than later in the day. So if you can
Restrict that to like 10 hours? Awesome. Biggest thing is to cut off any incoming any incoming calories, including a beverage, so a sip of wine or anything, to like three hours before bed. At that point, you should really not have anything coming in because that's gonna derail your rhythms, your sleep as well. and then finally consistency. So contrast, constrict consistency. So consistency again is that trying to go to bed and get up.
The same time every day, trying to eat your meals at the same time every day, trying to exercise at the same time every day. That'll keep your clocks okay, you know, anticipating things that are happening at the right time. You have the three C's. That's that's so easy to remember. I love it. Okay, so
Just last question here. In your book you mentioned lots of cool products. Like you talk about how you use like electric candles at night instead of like bright overhead lights or different sunlamps or different you've experimented with lots of things and glasses and and whatnot. I'm just curious like what are some of your favorite circadian rhythm approved products or or where could people go to find out more if they're kind of interested in introducing different things like this and experimenting with them? Yeah.
So a couple things. If you if you really want to try some of the high-tech stuff, including maybe a sunlamp for the winter time, I would go to there's a website called Center for Environmental Therapeutics, or there's a group that's called that. They have a website, and there they have vetted some products. So you can find some sunlamps and a few other things. I think they have blue light blocking glasses there as well. Things that scientists have vetted. But
Just in general, you know, these things don't have to be that high tech. You know, it's I bought, you know, for thirty dollars, maybe like twelve fake candles that you mentioned that, you know, I just you know, I turn on at night that give a nice glow to my place, help me see. I, you know, you don't really need that much light to see at night. Your eyes have it have evolved to adapt to light and dark pretty well. So you can see pretty well.
And it's really about so cutting off like the overhead lights at night, trying to use table lamps, try to use light bulbs that are on the warmer side rather than that stark, you know, white blue color. and yeah, just cutting the lights, you know, save energy at night. And then, you know, during the day, just try to get as much light as you can, you know, and daylighting is the best. and then you can maybe seek out some of those light bulbs that have more intensity and you know, more of that white blue.
wavelength. And you mentioned like some of these tunable tun tunable LEDs, that's what you call they're available like everywhere, right? Right. Right. At at most stores now. You just have to look for something that's tunable so you can see if it has like the amber and the blue and different tones. Exactly. Yep. And that's, you know, right now it's still kind of a wild west of of that technology. And, you know, companies will throw out claims. But in general, like
The idea works and you know, I think eventually in the next two years we're gonna get more standards and more regulation on it. So, you know, we can kinda trust the products a little better. But in general, like yeah, just using those basic concepts of of the warmer at night and brighter during the day, you're not gonna go wrong with seeking out products aligned.
One thing I liked that you mentioned, and maybe it was one of the studies that you shared, was like just turning off the overhead lights and just turning on small lamps or s like candles or or things like that. Like we all have them around the house. Maybe we just don't think about making a shift and turning off like a bright bathroom light and just putting in like a really dim nightlight or something like that. but it's something that we can all do. It's very simple and doesn't cost a lot of money.
No, and you yeah, you touch on a huge point. I think one of the easiest things you can do is that bathroom night light. 'Cause if you walk into a bathroom, flip on that overhead light at three AM when you have to go to the bathroom, that s I mean, scientists are sh finding that that could really really affect your rhythms and really affect your sleep. So yeah, I bought, you know, ten dollars a little plug in, dimmable amber colored nightlight in my bathroom. And yeah. I highly recommend that. Yeah.
and then you also mentioned some like you've tried some different apps. Are there any apps that you like that can help you monitor your circadian rhythm or help you understand when to get the right light, that kind of stuff? If people are struggling with figuring it out? There are more and more apps out there all the time. I I do have one called Rise that kind of taps into your sleep data because I have a Fitbit and you know there's apps now that we know are polling data. and that kind of shows it's
predicting your rhythms throughout the day. So it kind of helps, you know, helps me time productivity again. And again, that kind of aligns with what I've personally found about like those late morning hours being my most alert. So yeah, that's one to try. You know, I would just I would Google, keep keep an eye out, because there's so many now. And I know, you know, Fitbit Aura Ring has incorporated more circadian rhythm data into their their algorithms. And they probably provide some of that kind of
prediction as well. Amazing. And I would anticipate more of the same. I think it's yeah, it's a it's a trend. We're getting more of that data. But again, take it with a grain of salt too. I mean, none of these things are are precise, but they they do help you kind of see trends over time. And I found it helpful. Yeah. And it sounds like our body is really the best intuition. Like being able to to listen to yourself and to notice and to pay attention to what is happening.
In your productivity and your energy throughout the day. Instead of just blowing past it and like slurping 10 cups of coffee or dr downing a bunch of energy drinks, like just allowing ourselves to notice what our body needs. Yeah. Exactly. So okay. if my listeners want to hear more about you or more from you, where can they find you? Yeah, it's it's probably best is my website. So LynnePeeples.com. I've got links for the book and
my social media and other other media. So yeah. Find me. Awesome. I'm just gonna pull this up one more time. So definitely encourage everyone to check out Lynne's book, The Inner Clock. And you can find that on Amazon. I also listened to it on Audible while I was driving, which was fantastic. it's it's pretty much everywhere in every bookstore now. this has been so fun
you are so brilliant, my friend, and I love hearing all of your stories and adventures as you went on this circadian journey. So thank you so much. No, it's been a pleasure chatting with you.
yes. Love your podcast. This is fabulous. Thank you.
