
How to protect your circadian rhythm at night-time
Resetting your circadian rhythm each morning with the sunrise is one half of the equation, the other is to protect it at night-time. What are you protecting it from? Our modern lifestyle that exposes us to artificial lights when it’s dark. Our bodies weren’t designed to be bombarded with light day and night, and especially not the artificial kind with its unbalanced spikes of blue and green light. This blue light exposure is tricking our brains to think it’s still daytime, keeping us alert and awake. It’s suppressing the release of our key sleep hormone, melatonin, which we need to fall asleep and stay there throughout the night.
By staying awake with artificial light, we're draining our battery, and pushing back our sleep phase, which ultimately prevents us from rising naturally for the sunrise to reset our body’s natural processes the next day. So you can see how both resetting and protecting is necessary to do daily, to maintain a healthy circadian rhythm.
But we all like to see at night, and it’s hard to turn off those screens and TV’s when we want to relax after a full day…so what can we do about it?