Easy Ways to Get More Natural Darkness;

switching to a natural day, and night:

A guide to shifting your hours back to something more like a natural day...

By Russell Johnston

First published October 3, 2006 – last revised December 30, 2006

You don't have to go the whole route (although it's healthier to do so.) You could restrict yourself to doing just a few simple things such as using a red light at night when you need to get up to go to the bathroom, improving your curtains so they block a bit more light, and keeping more consistent sleep hours. The quick guide to the easiest changes you can make is included in the Frequently Raised Objections article, to question 13: “What can I do that's really simple?”. If you decide to do just a little – come back here anyway and peruse this article for tips and hints about how to make your (darker) nights more convenient, productive and enjoyable. And if you find that making fairly small changes in your light lifestyle helps you, consider doing more.

What would it take to get back to a natural night, or something close to it? I'll admit, it's not trivial to adopt a nearly natural night – to do so will be a big shift in your life, but a very rewarding one that will secure a healthier and saner future for you – with more energy and a much better mood being added benefits (amongst others.) Beware, though: it's easy to cheat a little here and there, from time to time, and lose nearly the whole benefit. Just turning on an ordinary white light once for a minute during the night has a huge effect on us. Instead, it's best to admit that we humans were meant to experience about eleven hours of true, near total darkness every day, starting and ending at a precise time each day, and simply resolve to live that way. Judging by our hormone system, God never intended us to play video games until 3 A.M.

You may be tempted to institute half measures, or less – just using a night blindfold, plunging into near total darkness and not using even a small nightlight to get to the bathroom, but for much less than twelve hours, etc. This will give you real benefit, do seriously consider whether you can do more, and get still more benefit. Remember, that it may be years from now when the greatest difference will be really apparent between your doing a little to limit the light you're exposed to after sunset, or a lot. If I'm right about any of this, it may make the difference between your being ill then, or not. If you're sick already, it's just not advisable to do a little if there's any way you can go the whole nine yards and get an evolutionarily correct period of true darkness.

The rewards won't small for a switch. Good health is a whole lot more than just not being sick. Good health, the real thing, with natural amounts of the feel-good hormones dopamine and serotonin feels different (and better) every second than the way almost everyone in an industrial society feels now, on their best day. That having been said, if you want to do just a little, and maybe need convincing to do even that, you may wish to look at question 12 or so in the “Frequently Raised Objections” section for some discussion about how to do just a little, as well as this section.

Starting jitters:

I have to admit, when you first drop artificial light during the whole twelve hours of night, you may feel just a little like a drug addict who is antsy as hell and just wants one more hit of light... NOW! This will pass. This restlessness will be at it's worst only for a few days, and after three weeks (the usual time it takes to comfortably establish any new habit) you'll be about as happy sitting in the evening or parts of the night and early morning as you are now using artificial light (or more so.) Months in to it, you'll be surprised at how happy you are sitting around in the dark with such a good melatonin buzz on, thinking about this and that, maybe not even bothering to put on some music. However, if you want to go slowly, and since this is a large physical transition, or if you simply want to make it psychologically easier to make the change to real darkness at night and lots of it; take a week to make your nights truly dark, without making them much longer: then gradually extend your nights over another week or two until they are twelve hours long. Or maybe eleven if that's what you can manage. (as I mention elsewhere, I'm actually doing thirteen hours of darkness in the winter and eleven in summer.)

Night masks:

I've nothing in particular against blindfolds to place the eyes in more darkness during the night – these are usually sold as “sleep masks” or “relaxation masks” – and it's true that what we now know about the human clock (which we didn't know twenty years ago) does make special receptors in our eyes central to our daily clock. However, as night nurses know, merely shining a flashlight on the leg of a sleeping person at night can cause that leg to spasm, even if the sleeping patient never saw the light – we have many light-sensitive clocks all over our body, so just a mask kept on through the whole night without fail, although helpful, is really only a good start. To say that more precisely, we now know that our hormonal clock is peripherally distributed, and therefore light hitting the body during the night will also have unnatural effects whether our eyes are in darkness, or not. Unfortunately, getting a truly natural amount of darkness is a lot more involved than buying a sleep mask.

So if you're going to do it right, here's how to do it, without having to move back into a teepee far away in the wilderness (not that there's anything wrong with that – I suppose you could always telecommute):

Set a consistent, earlier bedtime:

If your bedtime wanders - that is, if the time the lights go off and you enter darkness keeps changing - your bodyclock won't be able to compensate quickly enough, so you won't be ready to make melatonin at the right times, and you'll get much less benefit from the dark. Consistency counts. Also make sure that you aren't sleeping in after dawn, ever, unless you have perfect blackout curtains up. Just being asleep doesn't count if you aren't in darkness because your body won't be producing melatonin; instead, it will already have switched to daytime functioning while you were asleep.

Get rid of light sources at night:

Remember that your television and the computer screen count as bright light sources with a lot of blue light – you have to turn them off too, not just the room lights, when your night starts. Remember that white light, even dim white light, contains all colors, including blue, so you want to banish it at night, as completely as you possibly can.

It's possible that putting a red transparent sheet of plastic over the screen would mean that using these devices in the dark didn't interfere with melatonin production, since it is similar in wavelength to firelight, but we just don't know; so it's probably best just to turn them off. I'll admit, I have now bought a sheet of pure red transparent plastic (ask for “ruby lith” at an art supply store and prepare to pay about ten bucks) to place over my television screen in the evening so that I can watch television in the dark for fifteen minutes or a half-hour or so after sunset, if I really want to (or in the morning just before lights-on) But I don't think I'll ever try watching red screen black and white TV in the middle of the night. As time goes on I'm happier in the dark and less inclined to try to vigorously distract myself. It seems likely that we have adapted fairly fully to some firelight (low frequency light without green, or especially, blue components, that is, red light) in the evening, since we've had fire for at least a few hundred thousand years. So maybe I could get away with another hour of red and black television in the evening. But even this isn't perfectly certain, and little research on just how low light levels can affect us at night has yet been done. Still, if you do decide to do this, try to make it only during a transitional period before you resign yourself to real darkness, and don't buy just any plastic, get the “ruby lith”. It's called that because it was once used in lithographic color printing, and it is a very pure red – valuable in this case because a cheaper sheet of transparent red plastic that looks quite red might also have some white light coming through, including high-frequency, short wavelength blue light, which is exactly what you don't want to put into your eyes after the lights go out.

For the same reason, candles probably can't be recommended. Although any sort of fire produces “warm light” which just means “without much blue”, modern paraffin is used precisely because it produces a much whiter light than do the embers of a fire.

Do buy yourself, a small battery-powered “two function” red LED bike light that gives a pure and steady red light if you press the switch twice. Don't buy the very cheapest $3 such light though – these give off much less light, and also, remarkably enough, strobe at a fairly high frequency (scan your eyes up and down rapidly while looking at a light in the distance at night and you'll see the light break up into dashes, rather than a continuous streak.) This flicker matters, at least a little, even if it isn't usually visible; because flicker in red light is much more likely to tire us or cause seizures than flicker in higher frequencies of light. Alternatively, use that ruby lith to made your favourite penlight into a red penlight – just be sure that no white light is leaking around the edges of the lens, etc. If you feel you must use a light at night for some special reason, a pure red light will not trigger the eye receptor-pineal-thyroid-brain pathway into thinking it's day again – although it's not all that restful, either. I use such a light sometimes: but only in the half-hour after lights out and the half-hour before lights on in the morning, and only as necessary, say to read a label or find a remote control. However as I become more organized, gathering my remote controls in a standard place before lights out for example, and being sure I've taken any medications, it is used more rarely. Early on, I used the red LED on my digital TV remote as a dim red light by flipping the remote over and pressing a number to light up the LED. Now that light too has a bit of cardboard taped over it (with Scotch tape that I can peel back if I need a very dim light.)

Buy some thick black “Bristol Board” as well as thinner black paper, from an art store if necessary, and hundred weight white paper, which is as thick as a copier can use. For tape, I used green Painter's tape for a little while, a gentler version of masking tape, to help cover light sources, but I do not recommend this, and have removed and replaced all of that tape now. Painter's tape is a profound asthma trigger and no doubt contains plenty of volatile organic compounds which aren't particularly healthy. It also is only designed for short term use. Left on long enough, the glue sticks to the surface and can be very difficult to remove. Now, I use packing tape, cut to the size needed. It peels off easily enough, if necessary. Combined with cardboard and scissors, you can cover other sources of light at night such as LED displays on stereos, electronic clocks etc. I generally put a broad hinge of tape along the top of a cardboard strip covering the LED display and then a small tab of tape below that is edged with cardboard so that this tab can be easily pulled up if I need to look at the display. I've taken to covering entertainment center displays, such as DVD or VCR displays thoroughly with ruby lith that stays on permanently, and then cardboard on top, in case I want to look at the display during the first half-hour of darkness. You may have to experiment a bit so that you cover the LED displays of your electronic equipment but don't cover up the infrared sensors that allow you to send orders to the devices. It isn't strictly necessary to do this, but even if you never use the devices at night, it may be more convenient to be able to use your remotes always, without having to flip up a cardboard cover first. Interestingly, you'll find that there's another, surprising way to both cover LEDs on DVD players, digital TV boxes, etc, and still be able to use your remote controls. A single layer of black flannel cloth will block visible light well, but not infrared light it seems. So having a flap of black flannel you can turn down over the front of electronic equipment will keep your room dark and still allow you to use your remote controls.

Smoke detector LEDs are tough customers to deal with, and very unfortunately, they now come in bright green. One day, these LEDs will have light sensors that allow them to fade out, or nearly entirely fade out, when the sensor detects that the room lights have gone out – in fact, this is likely to become a government requirement in future, otherwise, some less cautious individuals will be disconnecting their older style smoke detectors in order to get rid of the LEDs light, posing a public safety problem. Meanwhile, a penny taped over the LED on your smoke detector is a start, but a tube of black paper may be more efficient. Don't try to open the plastic case to disconnect the LED, some smoke detectors, those which detect ionization, contain a small source of radiation. Absolutely avoid buying smoke detectors with any color of LED other than red.

I found dealing with the red lighted switches on the power bar that goes to my television and stereo more problematic. The product that helped most with that is also found at a hardware store, aluminum tape. It's rather expensive, at ten dollars for a small roll, and difficult to work with, but light doesn't penetrate it at all. I first cut up a little cardboard to make a small box to fit over the switch, taped that together with painter's tape, then taped over the switch area with aluminum tape. No more light from that source. Of course, you'll have to unplug instead of turning off the power bar, but that's good practice in areas where lightning is possible, in any case. Nearby lightning strikes can destroy even equipment that's protected by breakers, if it isn't actually unplugged.

Take a strip of packing tape and tape down the trigger that turns on your fridge light – it's usually along the inside top of the door. Few kitchens are so dark you really need this light during the day, and sooner or later you'll open that fridge door at night (even if only to get a medicine that needs refrigeration) and get blasted by bright light in the middle of your dark period. A small strip of ordinary transparent tape won't do: it will come loose with time and blast you with light just when you least expect it.

A cork trimmed down to fit into the small eyeport in an apartment door will seal off light from that source, convenient since it's easily removed; or cardboard and tape, with a tab below so that you can lift the light block and see out when you need to during the day.

In some circumstances, you may wish to seal a door against light, but still let air in underneath. For a while, I did this successfully with a baffle built from a sheet of bristol board – a mobile U-crossection shape that I placed at the bottom of the door, and a strip of bristol board at the bottom of the door that went into the middle of the U.

Windows:

I don't recommend standard blackout linings as a way to block light more completely – they actually do allow some light through and they incorporate vinyl which will cause problems to anyone with asthma (at least.) “Doorskin”, a very thin, inexpensive plywood is an alternative, but glues used in its manufacture may also be a problem, albeit a much smaller problem. It can be cut to fit the window and then taped with packing tape or aluminum tape, or aluminum tape over packing tape. A double or triple thickness of black cotton twill or flannel, or a double sheet of mylar (metallicized plastic sold as “space blankets” for campers or outdoor survival) might be better choices, however, since these are more removable. You'll want to get the curtains right up against the window. The easiest way to do this is to cut a length of steel tubing that is just shorter than the window frame at the top, and to then use two thin wooden wedges or if you like, splints (which hardware stores sell) on each side to wedge it in place firmly, using a hammer on the back of the splints. You can then droop the blackout fabric over this new curtain rod. I've put a hook shaped from a clothes hanger to one side of the window, right up at the top, that holds the blackout curtain away from the window during the day.

The cheapest and quickest of these solutions is to use “emergency space blanket”s (very thin metallicized plastic mylar) which can be cut to fit and then and stretched across window spaces, held in place by small strips of packing tape at the corners. It's a good idea to reinforce the corners of the “space blanket” first with tape, so that you can easily remove the pieces of tape that hold it in place every day without tearing the fragile plastic sheet. You may have to use two layers taped together however, since some light does get through – and more light gets through at the edges. This may not the best solution, but it's certainly quick, easy and cheap.

Another idea is to buy long strips of velcro from a fabric store. These strips often have (at least) one self-adhesive side, which means you can outline the window with one half of the velcro, while sewing the matching half of the velcro all the way around the rim of a double thickness of black cotton twill, or one side white, one side black if you don't want to alarm your neighbors. This will then act as a very effective blackout curtain that's easy to remove. If you buy half the length of velcro with adhesive and half without you can sew only non-adhesive velcro to the fabric, which makes things easier.

Navigation:

To make navigation at night easier you may wish to buy glow in the dark stars from a dollar store or toystore and cut them into smaller pieces. Sandwich those between two layers of ruby lith so no white light can escape, and then attach them to corners in the room you might bump into, or places you will need to get to. If you have a wall corner that intrudes into the room, it might be an idea to tape three of these star-dots in a row there to orient yourself, and make sure you know when you're approaching that corner, as opposed to a table corner that doesn't extend all the way up and down. If you've done a good job of eliminating stray light sources at night, pasting some star-dots around may be a particularly good idea for the first three weeks or so, while you're just getting in the habit of being awake in the dark and before you have developed completely safe ways of walking around when it's completely dark.

Since it really isn't clear whether even small amounts of red light are a good idea, and I have a small apartment, I haven't done this personally. I've elected to have complete darkness for almost the whole twelve hours. If you do the same, here are a few tips to help – get used to point to point navigation along known edges and counters, with a network of known points, usually corners that you can reach without letting go of the previous point. If you bend down, bend down strictly with your legs or put your hand a few inches in front of your face before bending and keep it there as you bend down, don't lean your head forward as you go down, or your head might suddenly encounter something you didn't know was there.

Have two red flashlights so you have a backup. Keep your main one in a standard, fixed place near your bed that's very easy to find in the dark such as against the corner bedpost at the foot of your bed, or on the corner of a bedside table where you can easily find it even in the dark. Get in the strict habit of putting the red light back in its standard place every time you put it down – if you're using a bike light, that has a clip so that even if your bedclothes don't have a pocket you can clip it to yourself rather than put it down where you might forget it. Place your backup red flashlight somewhere else that's also easy to find – I've placed mine in a wall corner right beside the bathroom sink so that I can find it quickly without fumbling around at all. If you do absent-mindedly put your regular red light down and then get up and then get up without it, and can't easily find it again; go grab your backup and immediately search for your misplaced main light, find that, and then immediately replace your backup in it's special place; if you do this you won't ever be without red light when you need it, and won't ever be in the position of having to turn on a white light in the middle of the night for some important purpose, such as finding your meds.

Before you retire, put a clean cup in the corner of whatever sink you're likely to use to get a drink of water if you want one during the night, right inside the sink. That will make it easy to find, and you wouldn't ever send it tumbling off a counter while your hands are moving around trying to find it.

Take a look around the space you'll be in during the night and move knick-knacks and photos away from the edge of counters, cabinets, and shelves so that if you are feeling your way around a bit, you won't send them to the floor. You may also want to consider covering some sharp corners, at least for the first while. If you're buying funiture like tables, consider how sharp you want the corners to be. With a little time, collisions won't happen often, and you'll be moving around and safely carefully in the dark, but you do want to be cautious for a while.

Buy a good, fairly compact tape measure, and keep that by your bed next to the red light. In the middle of the night, you can unroll a few feet of the metal measuring tape and swing it back and forth in front of you in the darkness to “feel” your way forward without risking your own flesh. This will considerably speed up navigation in the dark, and make it much safer.

Tobacco and drugs:

An important note about getting enough dark: exposure to tobacco smoke, even very small amounts of second-hand smoke will undo the effects of darkness thoroughly. Nicotine acts as a hormone working on a light pathway (for dopamine) in the body's signalling system, so if you're breathing in any smoke, it's the equivalent of snapping on a bright light in the middle of the night. Alcohol late in the afternoon, before going to bed or in the dark is also strongly not recommended as it suppresses melatonin, another way of undoing the good effects of darkness. Ditto for almost any drug you can name – we use drugs to simulate light, and they all work on light pathways. Same them for the day, if you must use them. As for alchohol, it suppresses melatonin production and stays in the body for a while so you won't want to drink aftter, say, 2PM.

Since my apartment building includes heavy smokers, I've actually gone to the extreme of sealing my door with packing tape at night, again trimming the outer edges of the tape with light cardboard to make it easy to peel back the tape in the morning, reusing the tape for a month or two before it loses stickiness and has to be replaced. In fact, since I have a very heavy smoker in the apartment next door, I've had to cover the electrical outlets along that wall with a combination of cardboard and tape to keep smoke from filtering in, as well as taping around the pipes under the sink, and the hole in the wall where the heating pipes travel into the next apartment. Nicotine is such a potent light simulator that it's worth the effort.

A word about chocolate: sleep experts already recommend that you not eat chocolate (or drink caffeine) after 2 P.M., and I recommend the same, since these can affect your body clock if only by revving you up just when you should be winding down. In addition to this, however, chocolate is a frequent cause of reflux, which is more likely at night, and reason enough to limit chocolate intake to early times in the day.

What you can do at night:

Music is something that's very compatible with darkness, once those LEDs are properly covered up. Have your CDs, etc, set up so that you can listen to favorite music at night without fumbling around too much. Don't turn on any kind of light, red or not, to do anything as trivial as selecting a particular album, instead preselect the CDs you want to listen to before lights out.

It's also a good idea to connect your stereo speakers and amplifier up to your VCR (or DVD recorder or TIVO or other hard drive recorder) so that you can listen to television channels without having the television itself on. You may already have done this so that you can listen in stereo to television shows or movies. The VCR (or other recording device) contains it's own TV tuner circuitry, making it possible to listen to TV channels with the TV off. If you have a digital box or cable signal, feed that signal into the VCR and from there into your TV, so that when you turn the TV monitor off at night, everything else is still working: and then you can listen to any cable or satellite channel you wish, whether an ordinary television channel or digital music channel, in the dark.

A good rocking chair that rocks easily and smoothly (and quietly!) is useful at night too. I don't know why it's so comforting to be able to rock in the dark while I listen to favorite music at night (maybe it keeps the lymph glands pumping for all I know) but it is a considerable comfort. My rocking chair gets a lot of use around my place after the lights go out, and I don't seem to tire of it. Thank you Ben Franklin (he invented rocking chairs.)

You'll likely find that you will soon stop sleeping for eight straight hours. Historically, [@@footnote], before artificial lighting, no-one did. It seems we're actually meant to sleep in two shifts with an hour or two of stirring about or wakefulness between them. Only after factory jobs and artificially extended days under gas light and electric light caused us to try to compress our sleep into a much shorter period of darkness did we begin to sleep straight through the night. Just remember not to turn on any lights (even red ones perhaps) during the times you're awake!

I do often shower in the mornings before I turn the lights on, but then, I have a pole from floor to ceiling beside my shower, which was put there to help me get in and out of the tub a few years ago when my muscles were less reliable. You may want to put something similar in place so that you can safely avoid slipping in the dark. Falls in the shower are a significant cause of accidental injury. Everyone can pour themselves a relaxing hot bath in the early part of their night, however, and luxuriate in that while listening to an I-pod or other battery-powered radio or cheap portable CD player or something. Needless to say, don't be listening to anything that has to be plugged in, unless it has a remote control, and you may want to buy something cheap to listen to that won't set you back much if you drop it into the tub.

Meditation is also recommended, and I've been known to chop some vegetables in the dark or do dishes from time to time as well – if blind people can do it, so can the rest of us, with a little practice.

I must say, however, that the longer I've gone experiencing a natural night, the less bored I am with it, and the less inclined I am to bother to put in a CD and listen to music in the night. There's something very pleasant, and very relaxing about being with your own thoughts, soaked in melatonin and other night hormones, in the dark.

Writing at night:

You'll do some good thinking at night and you'll probably want to take those thoughts down somehow. One way is to use a small tape recorder, but since I find my notes tend to pile up at times, I jot down notes in the dark. I don't turn on a light, I have paper where I can get it, and a pen, and clipboard. I use foolscap paper because it's cheap and has holes that tell me which side of the paper I'm writing on. I place a finger at the beginning of the line I've started to write and keep it there as I keep writing with the other hand. When I need to start a new line I move the finger down and start the new line there, so that my writing doesn't overlap. Generally I use large print, making each letter as precise as I can.

Shifting your hours around:

If you're like me, adopting a twelve hour night may mean changing when you get up and turn on the lights as well as when you shut them off. If you've let your hours become quite extended or gotten in the habit of staying up into the morning hours at times, the shift back may be large enough to qualify as jet lag. One of the consequences of jet lag can be reflux, so you may wish to raise the head of your bed several inches or a foot off the floor to help with that at night. On the other hand you may find a steady bedtime and regular timing of lights on and off reset your clock as it affects your gut, and banishs reflux in time.

While it's widely believed that moving one's hours backward (the likely case since few of us now arise at dawn) is more difficult than moving them forward: the scientific evidence, although sparse on this question, does not support this notion. Scientists travelling from both directions to and from a conference in Norway had very similar difficulties with jet lag, in each direction. Therefore, I don't recommend the quite strenuous course of moving one's hours forward, around the clock, by adopting to a 25 to 27 hour day for a few weeks, rather than simply moving one's hours back.

I should note however, that I did decide to roll my hours forward, an hour or two each day, all the way round until I was back to a normal day closely synchronized with sunrise and sunset. I was bothered by reflux, impatient, and thought that perhaps that our biological clock, as it effects the neural circuitry in the gut (our “second brain” as it's now sometimes called [footnote]) might be less able to shift backward. In fact my problem with reflux did vanish, but for all I know it might have done so if I had simply shifted my hours back to morning hours and waited longer, too.

Have patience: jet lag lasts days at least, during which time the principle internal clocks humans have (one driven by sunlight/artificial light and at least one less well understood) may be out of synch. Just remember that the critical thing here isn't when you sleep or even how much, but that you spend around twelve hours every day very much in the dark, whether awake or asleep. Your sleep will catch up. If you're starting during the summer, remember that natural days are longer than twelve hours then, so you'll likely want to screen a bedroom window and cut your day down to twelve hours, rather than try to use all the sunlight you can – since, like most moderns, you've probably already had a few decades of constant strangely long summer days already, where your body is concerned.

This may be more true if you live in a high-rise. I live about six stories up and this means that the sun rises a little earlier and sets a little later, than it does on the ground. It's difficult to estimate just how long – but as a matter of the mathematics of orbs, the sun takes much longer to move through one degree of arc at morning and night than at noon, so even these differences in height can make a difference in the length of daylight. (Whether for this reason or not, I do remember reading that living more than two stories up is associated with higher risks of anxiety-related disorders.) So believe it or not, high-rise living is also a source of artificially extended periods of light, and one more reason, even if a small one, why we are being deprived of darkness in modern industrial times. Twenty two floors above the street, in a penthouse suite far above a prairie city the effect may not be so small, however.

Because you will likely have to black out your sleep area, you won't be woken by the sun, and yet you do want to mimic nature's precision. So do set yourself an alarm or put a bright light on a timer to begin your day. Set the timer a bit early so you can gradually introduce light. It's also very important to set a separate alarm for night, or rather, your sunset. My second, more annoying, alarm is set for the evening, again about a half=hour early so that I can gradually reduce light, shut off computers, and so forth. This is necessary because once your new habits are established, the consequences of slipping, and going even a single hour or half-four past your usual time of darkness may seem surprisingly dramatic and unpleasant. So far it's only happened to me once (I set up the second alarm the morning of the next day and have stuck with it.) When it did my reflux started up again, and I was instantly very antsy and uncomfortable being in the dark again the next night, a bit like a drug addict who'd slipped and taken just one hit for old time's sake, and then found they were back having to withdraw again immediately afterward. This is hardly surprising, since as I've mentioned above, light is highly psychoactive. All the abused hard drugs stimulate our light pathways, simulating extra light stimulation, after all. That's why they work. So it's advisable to set a second alarm, and save yourself from bad nights and relapses into old habits. If you're going to allow your natural biological clock to function as it was designed to do, then do that: don't throw it out of whack with occasional extended periods of light even for dinner parties or special holidays. If you do, you can't expect very good results from the practice. Try to be as precise as nature is.

If it's necessary, set two alarms to go off at sunset, one to give you warning that it will soon be time to shut down for the night, and a second in case you get distracted to tell you to shut the lights off right now. That or just keep hitting the snooze button on your sunset alarm until you actually shut the lights off. I tend to gradually draw curtains and reduce lighting after seven-thirty, again simulating sunset and allowing my body to prepare for the dark.

As an alternative, or supplement, you may wish to have a timer controlling your main source of evening light which automatically shuts off at night. Or even one that dims out, if you can get together the technology for that.

I've also set up a small travel alarm to buzz in the morning and tell me when it's sunrise, and time to start gradually letting in a little light. I'm usually up, and could check my speaking alarm, but it's convenient to find out automatically.

N.B.: The three critical factors:

To summarize: the three factors that are critical are: 1) making sure you're in the dark for twelve hours a day 2) making certain that it's really dark enough: ideally not a lot brighter than starlight for those twelve hours and 3) making certain that your 12 hour photoperiod is very consistent day to day, always beginning and ending at precisely the same time, just as in nature. (Obviously one way to help with this is to abandon artificial lighting, at least during the evening well before the sun sets.)

Note that altering your darkness and sleep habits in this way will improve your mood before you're physically better off (a well known effect of reduced sleep time if nothing else); so don't be tempted into overdoing physical activity for some time – weeks or months – even if you think you're definitely feeling up to it. Physical repair of body tissues will take time. It may also be tempting, as soon as you are feeling better, to slack off of dietary or other regimes that have been helping you, but if my experience is anything to go by, this is unwise, at least until some months have passed.

If your experience is like mine, you'll soon be in much less pain, and have some real energy to spend. Don't be surprised if the world also changes to a more beautiful place, quite literally, in ways that are hard to quantify. I spend much more time being struck by the beauty of the world these days.

Dreams:

One likely bonus of more darkness is remarkable dreams. To quote Wikipedia's discussion of Shamanic and Tibetan mystical darkness therapy: “In darkness, however, melatonin is produced instead and is then converted into pinoline, which is involved in dreaming and new states of consciousness, so that we see reality in a wholly uncommon way.”
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness_therapyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness_therapy]

For this and other reasons, including more dopamine according to some sources, you'll find your dreams during natural nights are just far better trips, much more vivid, organized, and involving. It's impossible to put the difference into words. The whole lifestyle change may be worthwhile for this reason alone. The other reasons include more dopamine, and the fact that melatonin increases the amount of time during the night you spend in REM (the main kind of dream sleep) [14715839] as well as increasing your ability to function during the next day.