PhotoperiodEffect.com

12. It doesn't really matter if you are right, and the way we use artificial light is harming us. We can't change – at least not that much. We aren't about go back to medieval times, or caveman days, society have to move forward. The lifestyle changes now needed are just too immense for us to really benefit from this knowledge even if everything you say is true. So we should be looking to cope with this situation with more medications, genetic therapy, and things like that, which we're already concentrating on anyway. In the end, this is just an abstract point, not something that we can take action on.

Actually, very small changes will make an enormous difference. Red light doesn't trigger the deleterious effects, so we could make more use of red lights at night – we could go back to red LEDs for clocks and electronic equipment, for example, without any great loss.

The most important change we can all make is simply not to switch on white light when we get up in the middle of the night, because we can't sleep, or need to go to the bathroom. By using a red flashlight most of the damage we are now doing to ourselves, would be avoided. Red flashlights aren't sold as such, and just putting any old red plastic in front of the lens may not be the best idea, since it may transmit mostly red light, but also some other frequencies. But you have at least two possible choices. The first is to go to a hardware store and buy a cheap “2 function” battery-powered red LED bike light – here “2 function” means that if you press the button twice it will give a steady red light that covers roughly the same area as a flashlight. The second option is to buy a regular flashlight and then careful place a cut circle of “ruby lith” red plastic in front of the lens (this is a kind of red plastic available at art supply stores, which only allows red light to pass through it – it's usually sold in large sheets, however, which cost over ten dollars each. However, you'll find it useful for covering various small lights, stereo and DVD readouts etc, and thus turning them red, if you want to put in a little extra work.) I'd suggest buying two such flashlights so that if you misplace one, you can get your backup light, find the first one, return the backup to it's standard place and continue. Do have a standard spot by your bed where you always place the flashlight when it's not in your hand or clipped to your bedcolthes. Also, don't smoke after perhaps 2PM in the day, and never at night, because nicotine is a stimulant that increases the production of dopamine, as light does. Likewise for hard drugs (which also affect light pathways) and alcohol (which suppresses melatonin.) Of course, you also want to sleep in the dark, always – make sure your bedtime is consistent (else your clock won't have you ready to produce melatonin at the right times) and make your bedtime early enough so that you are never sleeping during morning light. After all, just being asleep isn't enough – you have to be in real darkness at the time.

That's pretty darn simple as lifestyle changes go. It will keep you in the modern world but eliminate most of the harm that artificial lights are now doing to you. If you're in the habit of reading at night when you're restless, substitute music, listening to TV channels through a VCR hooked up to your stereo, or listen to a talking book instead. Why is this simple change in our night-time habits so effective? Because even a momentary flash of white light not only shuts melatonin production off completely, but it then takes hours before the levels of melatonin can slowly climb back up to where they were when you touched that switch. In effect, you've ended your night as soon as you flip that switch as far as your pineal gland is concerned, even if it stays on for a second (even less, actually.) Until the pineal gland and the SCN, which is the part of the brain that drives it, get a whole lot smarter, use a pure red light to get around at night and you'll stay much healthier – strange as that may seem.

If you want to do more without changing your habits or enjoyments much, make sure it's really dark in your place at night: get better blackout curtains closer in to the windows, and deal with stray sources of light at night like clock and stereo LEDs, or the area around the edge of your bedroom door (say with black cardboard flaps.) Cover all non-red indicator lights and readouts with “ruby lith” plastic mentioned above just in case you're tempted to look at them during the night, and then make cardboard flaps that cover the readouts entirely when you don't need to see them. That might take a little work, but it will hardly cause the entire modern industrial economy to collapse.

Next, just make sure you get as much bright outdoor light during the day as you can, especially during the morning. We already know this helps chronic illnesses such as depression, and anxiety. It probably sounds a bit paradoxical to say this, but getting a dose of really bright light every day has been shown to helps us get to sleep earlier at night (which makes it more likely we won't scrimp on sleep, and means our sleep period will happen during the dark.) Exercise isn't a bad idea either, for various reasons, of course, but one of those reasons is that exercise too has been shown to help get us to sleep a little sooner in the evenings.

Which brings up the next simple thing we can all do, without returning to a pre-technological era – stop sleeping in. Keep regular sleep habits, so that you can make sure that it's still dark (or nearly) when you wake up, every day. Doctors already advise everyone to keep to regular sleep hours and not make a habit of “catching up” on sleep on weekends, because the evidence that this is harmful is already in. By always waking in darkness, you make sure you're getting both darkness and melatonin during the whole period while you're asleep, which is a helpful start at getting and keeping yourself truly healthy, and more upbeat to boot. Just as importantly, make sure your hours of darkness are consistent, that the lights go off, and on, at precisely the same time every day. Consistently shutting the lights off at the same time at night seems to be especially important. [15834114]

If you want to return to nearly natural conditions, all you have to do in addition to the simple suggestions above, is to shut the lights off an hour or so earlier than you do now, maybe putter around under red light doing dishes or so on for a half-hour, and then listen to the news or to your favorite music, or a talking book in the dark for a further half-hour or more before you go to bed. If you have some matters to ponder, try to save that for evening and do your brain storming in the dark (you'll actually be at your most creative then.) In the morning, when you get up, again use red light for the first half-hour or so while you're going to the bathroom, starting to get breakfast ready, maybe even showering, etc. Truth is, almost all of us could do this much without really noticing a big difference in our lifestyle – except that we might actually enjoy ourselves more, since surveys show that most people report that music is their greatest source of pleasure. Better yet, doing just this much would return us to nearly natural conditions of light and dark.

However much you decide to do for your health, do read the section entitled “Switching to a natural day” for a lot more tips to help make the process easier, and more convenient.

There's also a big bonus to every one of these actions, no matter how simple they are to do. You'll find you are doing more and doing everything more efficiently during the day, because your mood will be better (serotonin, which antidepressants boost is made at night, and only during darkness), your mind less fatigued, and you will have more energy. Truly. This is because our energy engines, the mitochondria within every cell, are cleaned up and kept at peak efficiency by melatonin (again, this only happens during real darkness.)

Additionally, it obviously it makes sense for those who are already chronically ill to do even more. Being in the dark even for twelve hours a day isn't the most medical painful therapy or procedure one can think of. As it happens, my own health has been very poor. I experienced years of dramatically extended light use, starting in infancy (my father was an electrical engineer for a power company and always stayed up late to read. He also smoked during the night, in the next bedroom with doors left ajar, sufficiently illuminated by nearby streetlights that the question of giving children nightlights never occured. Therefore, in order to help myself heal, I've gone to the extreme (strange to call what humans experienced for millions of years an extreme, but there it is) of being in complete dark (“can't see your hand in front of your face” darkness) for twelve hours a day – thirteen in winter and eleven in summer. My health is improving steadily and substantially, and I've decided I want to see those improvements happen just about as quickly as possible, now. To cite a very specific chronic illness: if being in the dark more can prevent MS attacks or reduce their severity, even a little, then more darkness is an awfully small price to pay for that. In fact it's an awfully good bet that darkness can help MS patients this way, because we already know from medical studies that doing the opposite, namely smoking at night (which makes our bodies think it's day), greatly accelerates multiple sclerosis.

At the very least, modern hospitals would cease being places where it's almost impossible to escape higher levels of white light at night, which isn't helping patients to get well. (It's known that changes to hospital architecture can have a surprising effect on the recovery times of patients, but not just why, incidentally.) If you head to an emergency room in the middle of the night now, you will be under constant very high levels of white light that you won't be able to escape, even if you're just waiting for hours for a doctor to see you. Even given what all scientists now agree upon; which is that melatonin is an important hormone and that even brief exposures to white light seriously disrupt its production at night: nurses could be issued cheap red LED flashlights to use on their rounds at night (which might be switched to a narrowly focused white light to read charts), and the lights in hospital corridors could be timed to automatically shift to (less expensive) red LED light during the night. Only sheer habit, retained from a far more ignorant time, keeps us from doing this much - and who knows, it might please the ghost of Semmelweis.

Lastly, and I haven't mentioned this earlier because I greatly prefer natural solutions where they're available, you can take melatonin (always at take it just before the start of the night) in pill form, 3 mg per night. That will make some difference. Trouble is, darkness affects us in a lot of ways, and just taking melatonin can't do the whole job that being in the darkness does. So for what it's worth, my money is on the more natural solutions I've listed above. I have only taken a melatonin supplement when I'm quite ill, and don't advise that, since swallowing extra melatonin affects your own melatonin production (see objection 20 for reasons why not to take melatonin.) DO NOT TAKE MELATONIN INCONSISTENTLY. However, the older you are the more help supplemental melatonin may be, since (at least under modern conditions) our production of melatonin at night is believed to permanently decline with age (and decades of accumulated extra light exposure.) [16316470] Or maybe not [7562374] As the reply to objection 20 notes in more detail, there is ample reason for caution.