#89: Morning Routines, Seasonal Wellness and Circadian Rhythm Lighting with Christi Collins
Morning routines and circadian rhythm lighting impact the trajectory of our days in many ways that we may not even realize. I sat down with wellness coach and quantum biology certified professional, Christi Collins, to discuss the importance of circadian rhythm lighting and morning routines. Christi shares tips for navigating the changes of seasons and how you can shift your morning routine over time in order to receive the full effects of circadian rhythm lighting for your body.
If you’re someone that has trouble sleeping and have tried all the options out there, you may want to consider your relationship with circadian rhythm lighting as a next step. Christi shares that the quality of our sleep is actually impacted by the quality of our morning routine and our access to circadian rhythm lighting. It is also impacted by our use of screens (TVs, computers, phones, etc). While screens aren’t going away in our lives, Christi shares tips for how to work with them and still protect your body from overuse. Tune into this conversation to learn more about how understanding your body’s circadian rhythm can improve your overall health.
What is circadian rhythm?
[Christi] Our bodies have this natural 24 hour rhythm. It's based on light and dark. Just like the Earth. The sun rises in the morning, sets at night. It has a very predictable 24 hour rhythm. So do we and it's just ingrained in our bodies that we flow with the earth. I like to think of it like an orchestra, in a way, where you've got like this orchestra, and you've got the conductor there, and she has the sheet music. She has the sheet music that tells her, okay, here's where, what we're going to do. And then there's all these musicians sitting there, and they're prepared. They're ready to go. They have their jobs, they know their music, and they're just waiting for the signal. Like, okay, the tubas are like, when do I come in? And then they're thinking, Okay, how fast are we playing? The conductor is sitting there reading the music, and lifts the wand and just they're off. So it’s this beautiful symphony. There all these parts and all these things that have to happen, but for they have to happen at the right time, and they have to happen in the right order and at the right speed, because if the tubas come in when the flute is supposed to be having the solo or they're playing to one section is playing too fast and the other section is playing too slow. It could be all the right components, but if they're not happening at the right time, at the right speed, it just is a mess, and it's going to sound awful.
In your body, it's the same thing. We have all these cells and all these organs and all these parts of the body that have their jobs, and they're ready and they're waiting and they're ready to go, and a lot of their jobs are based on time. If you were to look at a clock of a 24 hour day, there are certain things that happen at different times, like our muscles are not at their strongest at 3am, right? Because we don't need them while we're sleeping, so the muscles are resting and repairing while we're sleeping. We have certain hormones that come into play at certain times the day. Our blood sugar is doing different things at different times of the day. It's all part of the whole body. This whole thing is based on time.
The conductor in your body is actually in your brain. It's called the suprachiasmatic nucleus. I call it the SCN for short and it is basically the master clock in your brain. Think of the master clock in your brain like the conductor. It's there, ready, and it's like, okay, what time is it? I have to tell every cell in the body what to do, because every cell in the body has a clock as well. Think of all the cells in your body and all the organs like the musicians, and they're waiting for the master clock conductor to tell them what to do. So how does the conductor know in your brain what time it is, right? The orchestra conductor uses the sheet music, the master clock in your brain uses light, so the light that's coming in through your eyes has a direct connection to that master clock in your brain. And so whatever light you are seeing, that is what informs the master clock in your brain as to what time it is, and that's the information that it then uses to instruct all the cells in the body. Thyroid turn on. You know, cortisol, it's time for a gentle rise. Oh, it's night time. Cortisol, let's get you down. Let's get melatonin up. It's all directed by light.
The circadian rhythm is this flow that basically makes your body run. Just like the sun comes up and it's brighter in the day and it's darker at night. Those are the cues that your brain uses to run your entire body.
What’s so fun about it, what I found so freeing about learning this was that one piece made me feel so relieved, because I said, okay, that master clock in my brain knows what to do. I don't have to worry about when to get my thyroid going and when to get melatonin, where all I have to do is give it the right signals and it knows all the things to do. And that just was so that was such a relief to me. My job was simple.
Does your body need light when you wake up in the morning to know that it's time to start?
Yes. Whenever I have a question about, what should I do? When should I do it? I think about, okay, our bodies. Let's think about our bodies kind of back in Ma and Pa Engel's time, you know, or caveman time, like a time before all this electricity and screens and things, because the body hasn't really evolved past that. I mean, we're making do, but the body is designed to be living outside all the time. So we think about it that way. We think about, okay, so if I was living in a cave or in, you know, log cabin in the woods, when the sun came up, I would I would be awake, and I would be outside getting stuff done, and when the sun goes down, I'd probably be starting to get ready for bed, because I'm not going to sit up watching TV for six hours at night. There are very specific things the body needs. It needs specific sunlight signals during the day, and then it needs darkness after sunset. And so that's very sounds simple, but if we think about the modern world, it's like, what? How do you even do that?
The Impact of Circadian Rhythm Lighting
When it comes to light, there's this whole spectrum of light. There's the light that we can see, which kind of the colors of the rainbow, right? Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. And then there's light that we can't see, like we've got our ultraviolet a, ultraviolet B, we have infrared light, which we kind of feel as heat. All those different lights do different things. They communicate different things to the body. The one that's really kind of the linchpin around circadian rhythm is blue light. The blue light is blue light is just the color. Blue is just a certain wavelength each there are different lengths of light. So blue light is what happens if you go out in the morning at sunrise. Because that's like the first place that I started, was I started getting up for sunrise. It was not easy. I was a night owl, and I was like, I don't want to get up that early. But when I learned why it was so important, I was like, Okay, I'm going to do this.
When you go outside, like when I got up this morning, I went out a few minutes before sunrise, when you're out outside before sunrise, there's no blue light anywhere. There's a lot of red light. There's a lot of infrared light, but there's no blue light the moment of sunrise, which is just like if you had a horizon, and once the sun starts to peak up over the horizon, that's when blue light appears.
The sun brings blue light with it. At the moment of sunrise, sunrise, blue light appears. And there are little receptors in your eyes that are only there to pick up on blue light. When they detect blue light, they send that information to your brain, to the master clock in your brain, and your brain recognizes, oh, day is here. Okay, blue lights here. That means, let's get the day going. So it starts this whole beautiful it starts this lovely drip of cortisol in the morning, which is not a bad thing.
It's actually a good thing, because that helps to wake us up, gets us some energy, like gets us ready and moving for the day. It starts a lot of things. It starts basically your clock for the day. So even your sleep is impacted by seeing sunrise, because it's almost like it starts a countdown timer for sleep. There are all these beautiful things that happen, even at sunrise, the there's an axis that goes from your hypothalamus, where your master clock is, it goes to your pituitary, and then it goes down to your adrenals.
For us as women, that that connection from the blue light at sunrise is actually starting to make our sex hormones. It's starting to decide like, Okay, how much of our how much of our energy is going to be going towards making sex hormones versus just surviving today? You know, in kind of stress, there's a lot of different cascades that happen just from that blue light at sunrise. We want to get that blue light in our eyes, but from the sun, because the sun also has red and infrared and all these other colors that kind of create this beautiful mixture that the brain just knows what to do with it. Versus a phone, which, you know, this screen is also blue light, but it's, it's a totally different form. It's kind of like a full screen is like junk, blue light and sunlight is like the farmers market, you know, head of kale.
Phones are designed to have just a narrow band of blue light, but it doesn't have any of the other light to balance it out at all. It is the blue light from phones and screens is very harmful for the body, but the blue light in the daytime, from the sun is part of this beautiful mixture that we actually really need. Otherwise, we get sleepy. We get tired. So that's part, part of the reason why sunrise is so important, because it just kind of jump starts the whole day. It's, I like to tell people, it's like, imagine if you had a really full day of appointments and things you had to get to, and then. Imagine if your alarm didn't go off, and so you woke up and like the whole day was just thrown off because now you're late, you're scrambling. That's what happened. That's how your body feels if you miss sunrise.
Resetting Your Internal Body Clock
[Mary] You’re saying that first thing in the morning if you go outside and watch the sunrise it can reset your clock and your whole internal system.
[Christi] Exactly. it's resetting the clock and because we every day the sun comes up, we have to reset our clock every day. I mean, if we want our bodies to work, well, I think part of the reason we start feeling so awful in our 40s is because we've now had decades of accumulated non resetting of our circadian clock, and so the body is trying so hard to work with us, but eventually, over time, like You can only have so long where it's working, you know, like, if, if you started off a day and you were only half hour late, then the next day you were, like, 40 minutes late, and then the next day you were an hour late. At some point you're really just your whole schedule is shot.
[Mary] So you're saying it's the going out first thing in the morning is what resets everything. But if I'm not doing that and I'm just going out sometime during the day, like me personally, I go and take walks outside in nature a lot. They've been very helpful to me. But it's not the same thing, I suppose, is what you're saying. Because I'm well, unless maybe then my body is thinking my clock is starting at a different time.
[Christi] Most women get up, and this is what I used to do, too. Most women get up and they pick up their phone first thing or they turn on a lamp. It's just the world we live in, right? Yeah, let me just check whether it's let me check and see if school is canceled today for snow, or, Oh, let me just see if my mom texted me back, or oh, let me, you know we're just on our screens. And same thing with light bulbs. I know you're over in France, so I don't know what the light bulb situation is like there, but here in the US, they've banned incandescent so it's all led energy efficient light bulbs. And the problem with those is, what they've done is they've removed the red and the infrared to have just blue light in those light bulbs, as the red and the infrared creates heat, which makes the light bulb less energy efficient. So to make the bulb energy efficient, it's all just blue.
Every time we're turning on a light or looking at a screen in the morning before we get outside to see the sun, it's such intense blue light without anything else that it basically stresses the body. It starts jacking up the cortisol really high, instead of this nice little drip. Now we've got like a flood of cortisol, which is why we feel stressed and anxious in the morning. It’s confusing, because the color temperature of this screen, when your eye, it goes through your eyes to your brain, that tells your brain that it's noon outside in the middle of June. That's the that's the that's basically like the time that it tells so setting, okay, you're looking at it at 6am in December. Your brain now thinks it's noon in the middle of June. You woke up six hours late, and now you're like, Oh my gosh. The body's like, I gotta get going. It's very confusing to the body, because body is expecting to see a 6am sunrise light first.
A simple thing you can do is just not look at your phones and not turn on lights in the morning. And I have ways, if it's dark, I have ways that we can talk about later, like, how do you get through your house and not stumble over things.
For me, when I wake up a little bit before sunrise. It's light outside, you know, even though the sun hasn't actually started to rise yet. I just keep my lights off, and then I just go outside and just make outside light the first light I see. And even when I was first starting, it was, I couldn't even make it up for sunrise. It was too early. But I just started my simple way was, as soon as I woke up, the first thing I did was I walked outside, whether that was eight o'clock, seven o'clock, whether sunrise had happened or not. I said, I just want the first light in my eyes to be true, sunlight.
If people can't do sunrise yet, they can just start getting in the habit of just going outside and then come back inside and maybe turn on the light or do what they need to do. That's simple shift can make a big difference for the body.
[Mary] Do you sleep with your blinds open so then you have natural light coming in in the morning?
[Christi] The crazy thing is, once you start getting it for sunrise, your body will just start waking up before sunrise, even if your room was pitch black. For sleep at night, I actually want my room as dark as possible. I do not want to be able to see my hand if it's a couple inches in my face, but I still will wake up before sunrise, because now remember, if I get out sunrise, I'm setting my clock, and then if I'm going to sleep at a good time, I'm getting enough sleep, the body will just, it wants to wake up before sunrise, so it will eventually happen. You might just need to kind of maybe use an alarm for a little a little bit of time until that shift happens.
The Change of Seasons and Circadian Rhythm Lighting
[Mary] I've been more aware of this since I started living in France. I'm much more in touch with the seasons, and even from a food perspective, because they eat much more seasonally here and just life, even when I go for my walks, I'm close to a small farm, so I see the change of seasons even in, like, the wheat field or that kind of thing. And we live without air conditioning. There are a lot of things that remind me of the outside world more.
How do you see circadian rhythm lighting changing over seasons?
[Christi] The beautiful thing is, you don't have to actually see the sun. So it's if it could be snowing, foggy, cloudy, rainy, but the sun is still there, and the light still makes it in. So even if you can't physically, like a lot of people say, Oh, but I have a mountain in the way, or a building in the way. You don't have to see the sun. I don't see it 20 minutes until it gets like above this little set of trees. But the interesting thing is, I have this little app that measures the brightness of light inside versus outside, and I it doesn't even on the cloudiest, Foggiest of the day, it's going to be brighter outside than it is in your home with all your lights on. And I've tested this. I've tested this out. It's crazy how bright it is outside, which is really good, because in the morning, we need brightness to wake us up. So especially in the winter, as we're getting towards like less sunlight, strategically getting the right kinds of sunlight and the right timing is really important right now, because there is less of it. I will say that it's a little easier now in the fall than in the summer for and it really depends on where you live.
I live in North of Boston. In the summer, Sunrise might be at 5am and now before the time change, Sunrise was at 7:20am. Since the time changed, it's at 6:20am so the one thing I didn't even realize is with just how often, how quickly sunrise changes, based on where you live, if you're a higher latitude, you're going to have changes. Sometimes, every day, it might change by a minute or two.
The goal is to figure out, how do I just get outside, even just for a few minutes at sunrise to reset the clock. There are great benefits that happen in your health if you stay out longer. But for a busy woman who can't go outside for half an hour at sunrise, my request is just get outside for even 60 seconds. Breakfast is cooking. I'm just going to pop outside. Or what I do in the mornings is I just tend to my chickens. I go outside and I look towards the sun. I give the chickens their food and their water. I've been kind of wanting to come inside faster because it's getting colder, so I've been thinking of ways I can stay out longer. So I'm like, okay, every day this week, I'll take a different garden bed and just put it to sleep, clear out all the brush and stuff, and that'll give me an extra 10 minutes or so out at sunrise. You can go for a walk. You can do anything. You don't have to just stand there. You can go for a walk. You could rake the leaves. You could go to the mailbox. You could throw the ball for the dog. It's just being as long as you're outside. And then the other important thing too is no sunglasses, no glasses.
These are blue light blockers, because I'm trying to limit the harmful lights coming from the computer. If I'm outside, I haven't worn sunglasses now in over a year. Sunglasses and glasses and contacts are all they're going to block light. If we're outside and it's in the middle of the day, but we put sunglasses on, it makes everything darker. So that's telling the brain, that is the only way the brain knows what time it is, is through the eyes. So if we're putting on dark sunglasses now, the brain is like, wait a minute, it was just really bright, and now it's dark? Is it night time? I guess we'll start like getting everything ready for bedtime. And it even messes with things like our body's natural sunscreen, that our body produces its own sunscreen and sun filters. But if we wear sunglasses, that light signal gets messed up, and that's often why we get sunburned a lot too. There's just so much going on.
[Mary] I wear sunglasses like all the time because I have really light colored eyes. I've heard that when you when you have lighter eyes, you have more sensitivity. Maybe I'm just not used to it, but it's not comfortable to be outside without sunglasses a lot of the time.
[Christi] That makes sense because you've been wearing them for a long time. I have a lot of some of my friends and my clients have really, really light eyes. I always recommend for people, and this works really well, is start with naked eyes in the early morning. Don't go out at noon on a bright, sunny day and expect it not to be uncomfortable, but just start in the early morning when it's nice and, you know, gentle and just slowly work up a little bit at a time. And if you're out in the midday, maybe going in the shade or wearing a hat for a little while, just and just like you would wean off coffee, like just weaning off the sunglasses, it's going to make a big difference. And I have yet to meet anybody that hasn't been able to wean off the sunglasses. Don’t try anything that makes you nervous.,
[Mary] Maybe my curiosity is going to outweigh my nervousness and then I can try it out in the morning, I think that will be fine, first thing in the morning, when I get up, because it's gray, it's like, not bright or anything. It's for later in the day.
[Christi] Even if you just say I'm just going to do it for 10 seconds at first, right? This doesn't have to be like crazy, like I'm going cold turkey. Do you be 10 seconds? Let me go in the shade. Take off the glasses. How do I feel? Oh, I need to put them back on. Okay, so put them back on the next day. Let me try 10 seconds or five seconds, and just like bite size, little things, think of it like the whole next year to wean myself off my sunglasses. And if you start now when the light, because in the winter, the sun does not get right up overhead anymore. It's much lower. It's much calmer. So yeah, this is a perfect time of year to start that. And by summer, I think you might be surprised.
Evening Routines and Circadian Rhythm Lighting
[Mary] What does circadian rhythm lighting look like related to evening routines?
[Christi] The interesting thing for me is I kept trying to willpower myself to bed earlier. I kept trying to say I just want to become an Early To Bed person, because I knew it would be better than staying up till midnight or one o'clock. And I just couldn't do it. So for me, getting up for Sunrise was the thing that helped, because then, then I started realizing, Oh, I'm actually tired. I'm tired at 8-30 – 9:00 o'clock.
I kind of did it backwards. And some people you know that you. I have found, especially with night owls, that seems to work the best, because it's seems to be hard for night owls to give up their late nights.
I had a friend who was like, I will never get up early. She wouldn't get up till 10. We knew we'd never get her on a zoom before 10 and she did my sunrise challenge, which is this the seven day challenge. And I remember I saw that she bought it, and I thought, she's going to hate this. She would get up for sunrise, and then she go home, go back in and go to bed. That's how hard it was for her for a while. But it started making her tired earlier at night. And I said, this is good, Janelle. This is exactly what happened to me. And I said, What time are you going to bed? She's like, well, I'm still going to bed at my normal time. I said, wait, if you’re going to bed at 2am and waking up for a six o'clock sunrise, no wonder you're tired. You need to start going to bed earlier.
One of the things we did was actually another morning thing, because sleep really does start with the morning. Sunrise is the first signal we need, and then we need to go out. We get to go out. About an hour later, about an hour after sunrise, there's something really cool that happens. So at sunrise, that's when blue light appears for the first time, that sets off this whole cascade, and then about an hour after is called UVA rise, which is ultraviolet a rise. And all that means is that that's the moment of the day when ultraviolet a light appears for the first time in the sky. And how that affects our sleep is that ultraviolet a interacts with it interacts with our eyes in a way that actually takes amino acids and changes them into other things.
One of the things that happens at about an hour after sunrise is you take tryptophan, and tryptophan gets changed into serotonin. Now the good part about that is it helps us feel good and calm and stuff for the day. So it helps with anxiety. But then that serotonin later is converted into the melatonin that you use to sleep. Sunrise is kind of kicking off that sleep clock, and then UVA is kicking off the production timing of the melatonin that the pineal gland uses to help us calm down and get ready for bed.
I told her to go out for round two of sunlight, eat your breakfast outside an hour later, get about 15 or 20 minutes out there so that you get that signal, so that will start helping your body make melatonin a little earlier. So that's one thing we did for her. And then the second thing I said, You gotta get some blue blockers. And she didn't want to get blue blockers, because I just, you know, got rid of my glasses. I don't want to have to wear them again. And I said just try it and see. We had her just get a pair of these orange, blue blockers. They're like, 40 bucks. And I said, put them on at sunset and just wear them like once the sun goes down. And why is that important? Because when the sun goes down, when it sets, blue light disappears. So blue light appears. At sunrise, it's there all day. That's what the brain uses to know what time it is throughout the whole day, every time you go outside. And then at sunset, blue light, it's gone. If we were living in caveman times, as soon as the sun sets, the brain gets a clear signal night time is coming, and so that's signal to start all the nighttime tasks. But because we're on screens and phones, and you know, we're driving with headlights and where we turn on our light bulbs at night, we have to kind of just artificially block that blue light. And that's what the orange lens blue blockers do. If you wear these, there is no blue light going into your eyes, so there's no blue light going to your brain, and so it just helps the body start the sleep countdown. For me, they made a massive difference in being able to sleep well. For my son, it got rid of his headaches immediately. You can still go about life. If I go to a hockey I wear my orange blue lockers and if I'm out and about. I don’t wear them if I’m driving. That's where you'd get a pair of yellows. The oranges are a little too dark to drive in. But if I'm just home, once the sun goes down, I pop my oranges on.
It's really important this time of the year too, because we, if we think about it, too, you know, we all get sick more, where our mood is, where everything gets worse in the winter. I really want people to understand this is not just like, oh, this is a nice to have. The way I explain it to my boys is that we're literally poisoning ourselves with artificial light at night. And there are a bunch of podcasts where they unpack this from a scientific and a medical level, like blue light at night after sunset is causing cancer, it causes diabetes, it causes it causes weight gain, it causes hormonal problems, it causes stress and anxiety. There are so many things that that it's causing, and we just don't even know, because we can't see it physically, right? It's so important to block that at night. And since none of us want to just live according to candlelight or go to bed at six pm, when it's the middle of winter, the glasses are such an easy fix.
Sun Lamps and Circadian Rhythm Lighting
[Mary] I know a lot of the northern European countries, for example, have sun lamps, or some kind of lamps that give off more natural light, I guess. It's supposed to mimic the sun mainly for mental health reasons because it's so dark. What do you think about that type of lighting for managing your circadian rhythm?
[Christi] Yeah, I know it's tough. When you're in the northern latitudes, it is hard, and there's some people who feel so much better with the lights. Nothing replaces the sun. You do have to be careful, because sometimes the lights can be very different. We have some lights where it's just a UVB lamp, and you can actually do damage to your skin if you turn that on and your stay under it for or stay with it for too long, because just UVB by itself, without all of the other the red, the infrared to balance it out, can be really strong for the skin. I do like red lights in the winter time.
When it starts getting darker and I can't bear my skin to the sun as much, I will use a red light panel. I always tell people to be really cautious about some of the other ones. And you really do need to look at just what is the light spectrum, because sometimes they can do good and sometimes they're not. Same thing with light blue light blockers. There's a million blue light blocker glasses out there, and some like the clear ones, the cheap ones from Amazon, the ones I started with, they do block some blue light, but they block the wrong wavelengths. So you’re blocking blue light, but you're not blocking the harmful stuff coming from your screen. So it's like, what's the point? You're getting ones that are actually blocking those wavelengths.
For people who are in northern latitudes, what I actually really encourage them to do is maximize as much sun as you can during the day. You know, get out for sunrise, get out for sunset, get out during the day. But then darkness is also incredibly healing. My thing that I've come to see when you were talking about seasonal living is that Mother Nature never takes away something without giving us something just as healing in return. And there is such healing power with cold and darkness in the winter, because, think about it. In in the winter, when it's dark, what do we do when it's dark? We're supposed to be sleeping, and when we're sleeping, that's when melatonin really ramps up the repair the it's going through and cleaning out old dead cells. It's repairing cells. It's detoxing us. So if we can actually sleep more in the winter, we can that's it's kind of like summer is our vitamin D time and then winter is our melatonin time. So I would rather people go to bed earlier, get lots of sleep in the winter and max out their light during the day.
[Mary] I love what you said about the earth. Yes, that's so true, because we're always given something and then in the winter, I mean, we're preparing then for spring and rebirth again. Obviously everything is a cycle.
[Christi] We as women need a little bit of time just to chill out. You know, it's like summer and spring, we're going, going, going, and then sometimes it's just really nice to have some time where, like, I could just go take a bath tonight and go to bed at eight or at 8:30 and that is okay. I don't need to stay up till 10. I don't need to be doing, doing, doing, doing, all night long. I look at winter now as a rejuvenation time, and I try to keep it as dark as possible, because I feel like, okay, why would I fight that? There's obviously healing power in it.
Examples of Morning and Evening Routines While Considering Circadian Rhythm Lighting
Can you summarize what a healthy morning routine and a healthy evening routine look like when you want to consider optimizing with circadian rhythm lighting?
[Christi] I can tell you what I do. It’s pretty simple, and it can be adjusted. I'll give you what I do, and then I'll give you an example, maybe somebody who's more on the go, because I have the benefit of being able to kind of stay home and where I work from home and then people who are it's different if you have a job and you're commuting and things like that.
For me I get up and I go outside for sunrise. I try to get out a little bit before, because that's when the light is the most beautiful, usually, and you get those pretty colors. I'll go out, and I try to be barefoot as much as long as I possibly can. Even in the winter when it snows, I carve out a little spot in the snow so that my feet can go there. And it's good, because we need to be touching the earth. Just like we get electrons from the sun, which give us information and energy, we get those electrons from the earth too. So always trying to plug in. The other thing it does is it really helps the body know, okay, this is where I am on the planet. This is where I am on the earth. It's very calming.
I go outside, I'll usually just stand with my feet barefoot for a few minutes and just kind of take some deep breaths and look, look towards the sun, even though I can't see it yet. Then I put on my shoes, and I go to the chicken coop, and I attend to the chickens. I throw the ball for the dog for a few minutes and just generally, outside for a little bit of time. Some days it's five minutes, some days it's half an hour. In the summer, I might be out the whole first hour of sunrise because it's beautiful and so, and then I just come back inside, I make my breakfast. I try to eat breakfast early in the day. From a circadian perspective, that's important, because food is like a secondary circadian marker for the body. So sometimes, if we can't use light, we can still use food and temperature to kind of help the body see what time of day it is. I like to eat at UVA rise, about that hour after sunrise. I don't like to go too much longer, because I really want my body to know, oh, we have food today. We're safe. We don't like thinking back to caveman time. I don't want my body thinking there's scarcity, right, from a hormonal weight, weight perspective. So I take my breakfast outside and I just eat it outside on a chair. That way I get UVA light in my eyes, which is so important for hormones, for the sleep later that night, there's so much that UVA light does in that first bit of time. I just eat my breakfast so I can kind of multitask, and then that's it. Then I go on with my day. I do all my other things, but those are my things, sunrise, breakfast, UVA time.
Then throughout the day, I just pop out. I created a little habit whenever I go pee, because I'm always try and hydrate. So when I go pee, I just pop outside for like 60 seconds. I call it like my little time keeper. So I go outside so that I can look around my eyes, can realize, okay, let's get the light into the brain. My brain's like, okay, it's now 1030 in the morning, or I want it to know what time it is throughout the day. So I just, I just use that bathroom break as a little trigger. But people can use anything, you know, you could go fill up your water and just pop outside, or, if you're getting in the car a lot, you could just take a second to just kind of stand outside for 30 seconds and look, you know, towards the sun. So, and that's what I do a lot, during the middle of the day, and then around sunset. Now that it's getting darker earlier, I've started setting alarm because it just, it just hits you so fast these days. So I set an alarm and I try and get out for a little sunset walk. Some days I make it. Some days I don't, but I just try and get out for sunset so my eyes can tell my brain it's starting to get dark. You know, it's like night time is starting to come. And a cool thing about sunset time is it, it actually makes your eyes a little less sensitive to artificial light at night if you see the sunset. So I try to be out around that time, and then I try to eat dinner as as close to sunset as I. Can that gets trickier in the winter as it gets Yeah, that is my goal as I just move my dinner earlier. Because the goal is really that my goal is to be moving and eating while the sun is up and to be resting and like not seeing light when the sun is down. That's just my general goal for my circa
[Mary] You're basically just trying to live in a natural way with the earth and with the sun.
[Christi] Yes, exactly. It's so simple, right? People think it’s hard, but it can be so simple. Then what I do is I will put my orange blue blockers on at sunset, and then I just wear those. I do a couple other things, with my screens. I turn my phone screen from this to red, because I do not want to be looking at a bright screen. I have something that turns the flicker off on the screen and turns it red, and then I always have filters on my computers to keep the blue light down too.
You would laugh if you came by our house, because, you know, we have red light bulbs and we have, we have basically blue light free light bulbs in the house now, and so we don't use any overhead lights anymore. We just turn on the accent lights as few as possible, because we're trying to keep it as dark as we can, but still be able to see. My goal is just to keep things calm and quiet and dark. And I still watch Netflix, you know, I still watch things, but I've always got my blue blockers on. Then I try as best as I can at night to get the room as dark as possible to go to sleep.
[Mary] What I love the most is that it's simple and powerful. I really like to talk about things that can be simple in ways to help people. And I like that you said, even about the sunglasses to not try to quit cold turkey. Wherever people are with it is okay. If people want to try it, that's great.
Earlier this week, I had a session with an energy I work with someone on brain body work, and she does energy stuff, and I learned some body exercises, and she told me that she goes outside first thing in the morning every morning for five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, whatever it is. Just as soon as she gets up, she just puts her coat on and she goes outside. We didn't talk about light and all the things so this conversation is obviously in more detail. I'm hearing both of these things in the same week, and it's so interesting.
The other day, I actually did that. I went outside first thing in the morning and just stood out there for a few minutes. I think it's a beautiful thing that you've shared and opened my eyes to the body’s clock, and how you can basically reset it every day to live with the Earth, which sounds so beautiful and makes so much sense, because we're so impacted by all of these things.
[Christi] If I could just redesign hospitals, schools, office buildings, and homes, I just think how many things we could be doing differently. If we shifted the lighting, I see the kids going to school before sunrise. If everyone had a mandatory UVA rise break at work for everyone to go outside. We could have outdoor work spaces. I take my work outside. Now I chop vegetables outside.
I always tell women, some women get very feel stressed like, Oh, I didn't know this. And now I have to make up for all this lost time. I really don't want anyone to feel that way. I want you to really feel excited about, oh, wow, this is the opportunity for me to start doing very simple things. And like I said, the science is so complicated behind all of this, and why it all works, and how the amino acids change, and this gets cleaved into this, but it doesn't really matter.
When in doubt, just go outside. Take off your glasses. Take off your sunglasses. Make sure your contacts aren't in. Get your skin and your eyes bared as much as you can, and try and keep it dark at night and just start there. So much can happen from that.
Conclusion
Morning routines and circadian rhythm lighting can have a big impact on your day and on how your body functions. You can learn more about Christi Collins by visiting her website.
If you’d like to connect further about your personal development journey, please feel free to reach out. I'm on LinkedIn and Instagram. I'm also on Voxer at @MaryClavieres.
If you want support with where you are right now, I'd be honored to work with you. You’re invited to check out my Human Design readings so that you can learn more about your own energy and how you operate. This tool is a powerful building block that will allow you to live life with less stress and more peace. From there, you can also learn about Voxer coaching, which is great for people that are on the go and want real time, customized support and guidance. It’s about meeting you where you are right now and what you're going through. You can message me on Voxer (@ maryclavieres) if you’d like to chat or if you have any questions.
Thank you so much for being here. I so appreciate your time and your presence, spending it here with me, and I'll speak to you next week.
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