Second of all , if you wake up before the sun is out , you can and probably should flip on artificial lights in your internal home environment or apartment or wherever you happen to live . If your goal is to be awake , if you wake up at four in the morning and you need to be awake , well , then turn on artificial lights once the sun is out . However , once the sun has risen , then you still want to get outside and view sunlight .
This is grounded in the core of our physiology . There are literally hundreds if not thousands of quality peer reviewed papers showing that light viewing early in the day is the most powerful stimulus for wakefulness throughout the day . And it has a powerful positive impact on your ability to fall and stay asleep at night .
So this is really the foundational power tool for ensuring a great night's sleep and for feeling more awake during the day . Second of all , if you wake up before the sun is out , you can and probably should flip on artificial lights in your internal home environment or apartment or wherever you happen to live . If your goal is to be awake , if you wake up at four in the morning and you need to be awake , well , then turn on artificial lights once the sun is out .
And if you're asking whether or not turning on artificial lights can replace sunlight at those hours . Unfortunately , the answer is no , unless you have a very special light , we'll talk about what kind of light , the bright artificial lights in your home environment are not , I repeat , are not going to be sufficiently bright to turn on the cortisol mechanism and the other wake up mechanisms that you need early in the day . The diabolical twist , however , is that those lights in your home or apartment or even on your phone are bright enough to disrupt your sleep if you look at them too late at night or in the middle of the night .
So there's this asymmetry in our retinal , our eye biology and in our brains biology , whereby early in the day , right around waking , you need a lot of light , a lot of photons , a lot of light energy and artificial lights generally just won't accomplish what you need them to accomplish . But at night , even a little bit of artificial light can really mess up your so called circadian , your 24 hour clocks and all these mechanisms that we're talking about . So if you wake up before the sun is out and it's still dark , please turn on as many bright artificial lights as you possibly can or need .
