Chronobiology and the Photoperiod Effect
- an Unfinished Science

Needless to say, what I've written here, and elsewhere at PhotoperiodEffect.com is just a first draft of the science to come. Even so, I'll interjet an apology for the fact that I'll have to fill in the majority of references to the scientific literature on my second pass at writing this. It's no small feat to assemble those citations, since I'm now working from a data source consisting of more than a thousand pages of my own notes containing quotes from perhaps 5,000 separate studies consistent with the Photoperiod Effect. Just organizing and finding specific references in that size of haystack will take some time. My largest problem in writing about the Photoperiod Effect is not that there is little relevant scientific data, rather, it is that there is far too much data scattered over too many disciplines to bear easy summary. Not to mention that every week brings new studies that point ever more closely to the conclusion that too much light is dramatically affecting our health, or are wholly consistent with these hypothesis, and rather mysterious otherwise.

I've mentioned that heeding the Photoperiod Effect by adopting a more natural night has been a great help to me, but don't expect to read more about that one anecdotal case that here; not when there there is so much good (and even startling) clinical, survey and laboratory research to cite instead. On the other hand, I do hope that my readers, who are witnessing a stunning and staggeringly expensive rise in the rates of diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and more around them; will approach with an open mind and soberly consider the empirical scientific research that's now available, whether it seems surprising or not. To much is at stake now for our societies, merely from the growing problem of obesity, not to be ready to consider new evidence and new ideas about what that evidence shows. Please be ready to imagine that this research might really say what it does in fact say: even although our society has long taken for granted the assumption, or perhaps superstition, that while everything else in nature (including gravity, we now know) can of course affect human health, light can't. This belief in the necessary harmlessness of light is dead wrong – mere superstition, a mountain of research now shows. With light at the control of so much of our hormone system, there's little that can't go wrong when we begin to manipulate our days and nights thoughtlessly. As I have said elsewhere, God has not child-proofed the universe, else we would not now be mired in a critical environmental crises that parallels the rise of chronic illness in uncomfortably close ways.

One final caveat. As I've mentioned there is a degree of interpretation in what I'm writing here; particularly when attempting to pinpoint the precise mechanisms involved in specific chronic illnesses. But such specific causal pathways don't really affect what you can do now to improve your health today and in the years to come. Nor do they matter to the essential point that so much research is now pointing to: overexposure to artificial light (TV, video games, bathroom lights, bright blue LEDs that are always on, cell phone screens, etc) is truly harming us, and has been for a long time, increasingly seriously.

Then why should I bother to try to illuminate the precise ways, the precise mechanisms, by which this is happening? Primarily because the history of science repeatedly demonstrates that very strong evidence isn't enough by itself to lead to acceptance of any idea, so long as no plausible, specific mechanism for the effect has been proposed. This is one reason why Newton's Theory of Gravity, for example, was disregarded by almost all scientists outside of England for most of a hundred years. No-one, including Newton could explain how gravity could mysteriously exert a force through distances in space, so without a clear mechanism by which this could happen, the vast majority of the world's scientists felt free to ignore his imaginings about gravity entirely. [FOOTNOTE: Many episodes from the checkered history of science could be cited in this regard, for example, Continental Drift, Global Warming, etc. I'm not trying to justify or attack this feature of human reasoning, only to adapt to it.] Therefore I will do my best to show just why we should expect the strong deleterious effects on our health from extended days that research continues to show.

Paradoxically, the greatest problem in pinpointing specific, detailed mechanisms by which the Photoperiod Effect causes or helps cause particular illnesses is not that we have a shortage of “pathways” by which this could happen: the difficulty is the reverse. Diverse studies now show that cutting our nights short causes so many distinct but profoundly harmful effects within our bodies that there is an embarrassingly large number of ways in which the Photoperiod Effect could be causing any given illness. In some cases, it seems likely that two or more separate harmful pathways stemming from a lack of darkness are in fact combining to cause that illness (this seems particularly likely in the case of multiple sclerosis, for example.) So, where precise mechanisms are concerned I will try to connect the dots as best I can; sometimes making painfully obvious (yet even then, often novel to the best of my knowledge) inferences, and at other times reasonable, but not necessary inferences from large numbers of diverse laboratory(basic), clinical, and epidemiological(population) research studies; all in order to propose quite specific possible mechanisms that are at least consistent with the evidence. It turns out that the evidence that's piled up, particularly in the last decade, about how our bodies really work, makes it rather easy to come up with possible ways in which artificial light and unnaturally long days could be making us ill. Along the way, ti will become apparent that we have a discouragingly large amount of evidence of specific many ways in which cutting our nights short could be harming us.

Still, if you don't wish to hear any form of speculation at all; if you're only interested in learning about what we strictly know now, empirically; and are determined to largely ignore any hypothesizing on my part: keep reading. Even from recently discovered facts and studies, you'll still learn enough to shock you. Ignore all my speculative moments and you'll still take away all the essential points recent research has uncovered. There's enough startling new medical research out in the last ten and twenty years to put anybody back on their heels, rethinking what they thought they knew about their lives and those of their neighbors. You'll find yourself doubting health and wellness beliefs you've been certain of all your life, and discovering proven truths about how our bodies work that were unimagined by anybody at all until just a few years ago. Granted, we all have other environmental factors to worry about in addition to light – such as plastics, hydrogenated foods, fewer vitamins in our food, food allergies, fat, stress, and more. But after this point, remember hat our ability to recover from those insults is profoundly compromised by hormonal dysfunction – something that artificial light has imposed on nearly all of us in the modern world. We can't deal as effectively with the other challenges to our health as we might, because our energy system – our vital metabolic system, is by now so heavily compromised that it cannot accomplish everything it should in a day.