#31 Andy Mant – Blue Light, Red-Light Therapy, Health and Wellbeing

Ever wonder how all this screen time and blue light can Impact your health. I got an eye-opening education from today’s guest and BLUblox co-founder Andy Mant We may not be able to get it perfect but there are so many little things we can do to improve our environment to support our health and well-being. Enjoy!

Listen to the episode here:

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Key Topics:

• Something Special [00:05:17]
• Getting Interested with Lights [00:13:37]
• Back on Track with Health [00:17:37]
• Light and Impacts on Health [00:20:55]
• Sleep and the Circadian Rhythms [00:25:04]
• Bedroom Hacks for Sleeping Better [00:34:23]
• Sunglasses and Vitamin D [00:38:29]
• Morning Routine and Natural Light [00:49:39]
• Light-Bulbs, Artificial Lights, and Glasses [00:57:35]
• Breastmilk and Infant Circadian Rhythms [01:06:06]
• Sleep Deprivation in Athletes [01:08:05]
• Improving Health with Red Light and Infrared Light [01:11:00]
• Tips on Buying Glasses [01:16:40]
• Good Light Hygiene [01:18:23]
• Practicing Good Sleep Routines [01:21:11]
• Getting in Touch with Andy Mant [01:22:29]

Andy Mant – Blue Light, Red Light Therapy, Health and Wellbeing

Welcome to the show. In this episode, I have Andy Mant. Andy Mant is looking out for us. He is the creator, along with his wife, of a company called BLUblox. It is an eyewear company that is created technologically and scientifically. These guys are dead serious about how to block blue light and all of the impacts of the amount of light that we’re looking at each day.

He was talking about the science behind light management and making that understandable to all of us, not just for us but our kids that are on devices. It’s impacting our sleep. How does that impact our mental and emotional well-being? We had a fascinating talk about not only techniques on how to manage all this light but also how it impacts our physiology.

He breaks it down in a comprehensive way and informs us. None of this is ever meant to be doomsday or make us feel scared. It’s to be a little more conscious and aware of even that little, weird blinking light in our room. Let’s cover it with some tape. Also, little things we can do to protect and defend our health. I hope you enjoy the conversation.

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I’m excited to talk to you. Selfishly, I’m always trying to learn and see if we can disseminate the information and make it actionable for people. I’m glad to get the chance to talk to you. Sometimes I remember it and sometimes but, a lot of times, I found that I don’t ask people right at the top if there’s something special.

I don’t want to say outside of COVID-19 or maybe something’s inspired you about this time that there’s been something you’ve been thinking about the idea of making a change. We go through periods of time where we’re dreaming. I often feel like other people are feeling the same thing. I was wondering if you had something extra repetitively going on in your thoughts right now.

One of the biggest things for us, myself and my wife, is we rarely go out for dinner. We have craved not being able to do it. We realized to ourselves, “Why are we not going out for dinner? This is a coupley thing that we should do.” We get in the habit of working on our business, creating content, sitting in watching TV for a couple of hours, and unwinding for a couple of hours before bed. Our lives for the past months have been quite housebound because we’ve been working on the business but now it’s forced upon us. We’re more like, “Our liberties have been taken away from us.” We miss those and we’ve taken them for granted so that’s been huge for us.

How long have you been married?

Since 2017.

You’re even sharing how a lot of your business, 20% is where you live, which shows how much you’re doing online. I would imagine if you’re working together with your wife. Generationally, it’s interesting to me that maybe as couples are younger, they’re more used to, “We’re on our computers. We’re grinding it out.” That’s the norm a little bit.

You’ve still got to set boundaries and rules. We very much know what our strengths are and we stick to our lanes. We have these hats that say, “We have this.” We come together and discuss the business and one of us will have an idea and it’s like, “You’re the project director for that idea. Lean on me to help you.” Ultimately, the final say is, “No matter what, even if I disagree and you want to make an opposite decision, that’s your decision. I respect that and vice versa.”

We’ve always been good at lifting each other up. We’ve never had an argument in more than ten years. I don’t know if that’s healthy or not. We talk things through. We’ve always spoken about things. For instance, Katie does it well, she comes to me and says, “I want to let you know, I’ve woken up, and I’m stressed. If I’m snappy today, it’s nothing to do with you. I’m in this stressed state of mind right now.” She always says to me that after she does that, she instantly feels like a weight lifted off her shoulder and she feels more relaxed. It’s a lot of communication for us in the business.

We’re extremely lucky. There are two accounts, Gabby. Number one, we’ve worked together for ten years in previous jobs. We’ve always worked together. We’ve been professional in a working environment. Two, we have the complete opposite traits when it comes to business. I’m sciency and sales marketing focused and always have been. Katie is creative, brand orientated, and fashionable. It’s worked well. We were fortunate that we had completely separate lanes. It’s almost like a COO and a CEO to found a company that were husband and wife.

I’ve been married for over 22 years. We’ve been together a long time. When we were dating, you didn’t have a cell phone, you didn’t have a smartphone. You’re more tech-oriented, used to working also on the computer, doing everything through the computer, social media, and things like that. Do you have a practice? Is one of you better at saying, “We need human-to-human.” It gets harder as it’s been a part of our lives forever. My kids have never not known smartphones. It’s for certain groups because they had it before and after reference.

[bctt tweet=”The first light your eyes need to see is natural light. It doesn’t matter if it’s cloudy. It doesn’t matter if it’s raining. It doesn’t matter if it’s a beautiful day.”]

We have a period of the day and we do this every day without fail, we’ll walk together for 1 to 2 hours. We leave our smartphones and everything behind and we go out and walk. Sometimes, it’s walking along the road up to the beach or something and then walking along the promenade. Sometimes we go into the bushland and have a little walk or walk around the neighborhood around the blocks and stuff. We do that and allow ourselves to talk. We do fall into the trap of talking business when we do that sometimes.

We also do other practices together as well. At least three times a week, we’ll go to neighborhoods that we’re aspiring to live in. We’re looking to get a new house and upgrade what we’ve got. We’re going around and looking at houses. We’re not going in them. We’re just walking, manifesting, and being like, “This is going to be the one we’re going to get.” We’re trying to take our mind off of business and slow down from all that tech nonsense that surrounds us.

We’re pretty good during the day with our phones. We typically don’t have them. That’s not to say we’re not on tech. We’re on laptops and Macbooks, doing YouTube videos, podcasts, graphics, and things like that. It is difficult. We’re lucky that we’ve always had rules in place that there are no phone times. That isn’t just sitting in the house. That’s getting out and being with nature as well. That’s good for us.

You’re lucky to live in a beautiful place. Maybe you could share a little bit of your health journey. From what I’ve got a sense, that also played a big role in you getting into BLUblox, good blue light, toxic blue light, and all that differentiates. Maybe you could share how you got interested in what happened to you.

I wasn’t always into light as obvious as that may sound. I grew up in the UK.

That’s why you weren’t into light, right?

Exactly, because I didn’t know what it was unless we went to Spain on holiday for a week and then we burned ourselves to a crisp. It wasn’t too healthy. I was active as a kid. I played a fairly reasonable level in a lot of sports like cricket, which you guys will probably know as the equivalent of baseball in the US.

I grew up with cricket.

You know cricket. That’s good. I played district-level cricket, which is one behind professional county-level football. When I went through my childhood, I played in some of the top leagues there. We’re training every day. When I went to university, I went up to a semi-professional level and played a little bit there for a while in Exeter. I was active. I did all the sports, I loved them, and I exceeded well in them.

I got a bad injury playing soccer when I was about 21. I continued to play football after that for 4 or 5 years but was never the same. It took a toll on my health. Right about in my mid-20s, because I wasn’t exercising as much, I didn’t have anything to replace the sport. I fell into playing video games, eating terribly, and not exercising well. I started to gain a lot of weight. I put on 30 pounds. You guys do it in pounds, don’t you? Not kilos?

Yeah, we do. How many stones is that? It’s not five stones? What is that?

Almost three. That’s quite a lot. I’m only a small guy. I’m only 5’7”. I got pretty round. It came to a point where I wanted to lose weight. I was like, “What’s going on? I was doing so well with my teens in the early 20s. What’s gone wrong here?” I took the usual route, which was I’m going to cut some calories down and continue eating the crap that I’m eating. I didn’t think like that at the time. I cut down the food I’m eating.

I’m going to exercise a bit more. I’m going to go to the gym and I’m going to lose weight. It didn’t happen. I was starving hungry all the time. I then develop kidney stones. At about 3:00 AM at a club in London, I collapsed. I thought I’d been stabbed and it was painful. I was 25 or 26 years old and had kidney stones. It was unheard of. It turned out I didn’t drink water in my 20s so that’s probably the reason for it.

Does that have to do with uric acid? I can’t remember. I know gout does. It’s uric acid. Maybe you don’t get away with it as easily as other people too. It’s not just hydration. Were you still gaming quite a bit then?

I was. Watching a lot of rubbish TV and not being that motivated. I also worked in an office job as well. I’ve gone from this active university phase of playing sports for 4 or 5 hours a day to sitting behind a desk. When the sandwich man arrived, I’d buy a couple of bacon rolls and put on weight.

Did you have something specific that you were interested in at in school? You’re science-y and things like that. Did you already have part of that at 25?

Definitely. It’s always been in my psyche. Ever since I was a kid, I loved to learn. I did a geography degree at Exeter, which was good. We did a lot of hydrology, geology, geophysics, and things like that were interesting to me. I loved it. I got a good degree and was well qualified at the end of it. It turns out that geography isn’t a good degree to go into the workplace with. I probably should have done engineering or become a doctor. It’s led me to where I am now so I can’t complain.

Going back to the health side, to cut a long story short, because I had this background of liking to learn, I was like, “Let’s give myself a purpose again. I’m going to learn how to get myself in shape.” I always used to love Arnold Schwarzenegger and the bodybuilders. I was like, “I’m never going to be that size but let’s take their principles.”

I trained a lot better. I got lean and fairly muscular. I also did it in combination with a diet that I researched. Years ago, I stumbled across a ketogenic diet. I cut out carbohydrates and loaded up with a lot of meat and fat and the weight fell off. I felt great. That was the first turning point for me. It’s like, “I can take matters into my own hands, research things, and get the results I want.”

There are a lot of people who struggle with this exact thing that we’re talking about. You said earlier, “I trained a little more. I cut back on the food I was eating,” which maybe wasn’t great food but it was fewer calories so you’re hungry all the time and not getting the results. Do you think it was changing the training and the impact of changing the diet?

People don’t realize that when you don’t get enough of what you need, micronutrients, macronutrients, and on and on, you feel perpetually hungry, usually maybe because of the fat. Do you think that it was that different from what you were doing as far as the training and the eating? Sometimes I feel like that gets daunting for people. You had the opposite response, you’re like, “I can learn and take charge” For a lot of people, they don’t even know how to start to tackle that a little bit.

It is difficult. There are a lot of good outlets on social media where you don’t have to learn a lot of this stuff yourself. Being one of those where I’m teaching about light, there are also a lot of people out there like the vegan, the Paleo, the Keto, the carnivore, or whatever diet you want to try. There has a lot of resources now that are free and easy to understand. You don’t need to dive into the literature itself much anymore. Years ago, there weren’t many “gurus” around that you could look at and try and take some inspiration from. It was all chat rooms, messenger, and things like that.

Were you checking out Mark Sisson even then?

I was.

Mark’s Daily Apple, I don’t know if you remember that.

That’s the one. I do. We checked him out. Robb Wolf is another one that I heard a lot about, which is great. We’ve been speaking on and off as well about light, which is interesting. He’s getting more into the circadian side. I’m trying to push him down that route.

You tune up, you’re exercising, and you’re eating. You probably then start learning about sleep and other things. Does that lead you to even begin to tackle light, blue light, and things like that? It’s a more daunting undertaking. It’s a little bit also of Pandora’s box. I have kids and stuff and it’s screens, TVs, computers, gaming, night and day circadian rhythm, and all this stuff. I’m fascinated by how you hooked into that and thought that was something that impacts your overall health.

There were two phases. I had a thirst. After I achieved the aesthetics I wanted the health goals from dieting and exercise. I thought to myself, “What else can I solve here?” I have a thirst for it. I haven’t been able to sleep very well since I was about 14.

Why?

It’s probably hormonal changes back then. I’m not saying this is a factor but I like to think about things differently. Around that time, my parents got divorced. I wonder if that may have been a trigger.

That’s the hardest time, by the way, puberty, 14, 15, and 16. Dealing with a death or divorce, people don’t realize it’s the hardest time.

I had things in my bedroom like a TV at 14, which I didn’t have before. Later on, I understood it was the blue light side of things. Also, smartphones. My first smartphone was when I was about 14. It all adds up that blue light was sneaking more and more into my life. I also found that in the circles I was mixing online, people were starting to talk a little bit about circadian rhythms.

There were a couple of pioneers that started talking a lot about it. A guy called Bill Lagakos from the US started talking about this thing called circadian rhythms. A dutch guy who’s into bodybuilding, keto, and that type of science started talking about circadian training like times of day to train for more muscle gains or cardiovascular. I was like, “What is this circadian rhythm?”

Tell me. I’m curious. I would imagine that because your cortisol levels are highest in the morning, doing the most stressful training early would be better, wouldn’t it or not?

It depends. The literature shows that if you want to build endurance, the best time to do it from a circadian standpoint is during the morning. If you want to gain muscle, the best time is between 2:00 PM and 4:00 PM. There have been multiple studies that have shown that the mid-afternoon phase for men, in particular, is the time to train.

Because of testosterone?

Yeah. Testosterone levels seem to be at their peak but cortisol levels also seem to be a little bit lower. Cortisol spikes very high in the morning but then it tapers off during the day in a correctly functioning circadian rhythm. There are also arguments that you shouldn’t train when cortisol levels are high to build muscle because cortisol is catabolic. You want the testosterone to be higher and the cortisol levels to be lower. Even though you’re going to induce some cortisol response when you train anyway because you’re stressing the body, you don’t want to do it when the levels are ultimately high anyway.

Like anything in the academic literature, there are studies that show the opposite. When you look at multiple studies, the skew is more to that afternoon phase if you want to build muscle more effectively. The worst thing you can do is train after dark because something that raises cortisol is blue light. If you’re training in a gym after dark when you’re not meant to be exposed to artificial blue light, you’re going to be in a massive stress response. You’re also going to tell your brain that it’s daytime and you don’t need to switch off and go to sleep. How do you repair and grow when you train? You need good, quality sleep. That’s the worst time to train.

[bctt tweet=”Our clock system is still the same. Our evolution from a biological perspective is a lot slower than the technological revolution that’s happened in the last several years.”]

You weren’t sleeping great and now you’re looking into the nuance of health. Sometimes for people, it’s aesthetic. Those are the obvious, food and movement. I would say food more than movement at a certain point. Now you’re getting into fine-tuning. Sleep is where it all starts. If we’d never recover all this training or work that we’re doing, we never get the real benefits and how we feel. When we aren’t rested, everything else hits us in such a harsh way as we go through our life. You’re learning about and considering circadian rhythms and health. You’re looking to sleep.

I’m looking to sleep better. I could sleep. I wasn’t an insomniac. I could get to sleep and I could sleep but I would wake up several times in the night. I wouldn’t dream much though. That was a bit concerning for me. I started looking at the literature. I found many good papers. I found one inspirational one in 2008 where they looked at how light impacts melatonin secretion after dark. It became clear to me that there was a window of light that disrupted melatonin.

Melatonin is two things, it’s a sleep hormone but it’s also a powerful antioxidant that eliminates free oxygen within the body that causes cell damage. It’s also the only antioxidant. When it mixes with oxygen to eradicate that threat, it doesn’t then produce oxygen as a byproduct. I thought to myself, “Wow.” Melatonin doesn’t just help you sleep, it’s also essential for clearing out any of the issues that have happened during the day in the body like inflammation and reactive oxygen species.

Can you remind me of the relationship between melatonin and retinas or something? I can’t remember. I remember reading something about that. Do you recall something about how the eyes help produce melatonin? I can’t remember exactly.

The eyes will help produce melatonin by what light it phototransducts to the super charismatic nucleolus, whether the central clock is located. This is going back to that study I mentioned. It was evident that you needed to create something called physiologic darkness in order for melatonin to be synthesized in the pineal gland. Melatonin synthesizes from the mixing of tryptophan and serotonin. It’s a gut process. Hence, all the gut talk with a lot of people is important.

Where the eyes come into is it’s the main gateway for light to send messages to the central clock, the circadian clock. What happens is blue light turns that clock on and says, “It’s daytime. Cortisol levels are high. Serotonin needs to be produced.” The way you turn that clock into its circadian night phase to produce melatonin is by removing light between 400 and 500 nanometers, which is the blue and green light.

Think about our ancestors, how would they have done it? They would have been active during the day. There’s a lot of blue light from the sun. What would have happened when the sunset? They wouldn’t have switched on their iPhones or watched TV. They would have been around the campfire. What colors of light does fire give off? Orange, some yellows, and some reds. None of these colors interfere with melatonin. There was minimal blue and green light. All you’d get is low light, blue and green, from the moon, which wouldn’t have any bearing on melatonin. That would answer your question about how the eyes work.

I saw this study where they took people camping and they took away the blue light. All of a sudden, they started going to bed a little earlier and sleeping a little longer. You’re English. I’m curious because you hear all these different ways. Are you forever linked to being born in England and that circadian clock? Is that a little bit of a myth at all?

It’s a complete myth. A circadian rhythm can change. It’s not an issue. It changes seasonally, Gabby. There are darker days in the winter and longer nights. There’s more sun in the summer. Sleep is seasonal. People can function with a correct circadian rhythm by having a lot less sleep in the summer months than they can in the winter months. It all comes down to how ATP is produced, it’s the energy systems in the mitochondria. Light is one of the big powers of ATP production aside from food. It makes more sense that you need less sleep in the summer because you’re going to get more sunlight to power the cells in your body to give you the energy you need to be able to function.

When you grow up at a specific latitude and then emigrate as I did, there has to be a circadian fine-tuning and it doesn’t take long. It’s typically one day for each timezone you travel through to be able to resync your clock system. A lot of people know this as jet lag. If you fly from Australia to anywhere in the world, you’re going to get jet lag. It takes six hours to get to Sydney from Perth via flight. You have to reset that clock. That’s why when you emigrate and move to different time zones, you can then resync your clock system healthily and logically.

My husband has taken to fasting on flights. Apparently, that makes the adjustment to jet lag, as we call it, easier. He went from Los Angeles to Portugal. He said, “I’m going to try.” He said that it was incredibly impactful when you’re not kicking on your digestive process and how you transition to that time zone a lot easier.

The reason for that is that food is a circadian entrainer. Light is the biggest circadian entrainer, it’s the biggest one. Exercise and food also entrains your clock systems. When you look at how the body is changing throughout the day, hormonally and from a neuropeptide perspective, there are specific times and this is even clearer than the exercise that you should be eating.

You should be eating the majority of your calories at the beginning of the day and then tapering it out throughout the day. That’s an optimal circadian rhythm. When you eat a large meal, it’s telling your liver clocks, your pancreas clocks, and your gastrointestinal clocks that it’s the morning time. Your husband is doing the right thing. By fasting, you’re taking away that circadian trainer. Your body can’t get the messages from food about what time of the day it is.

Let’s say it’s early in the morning. If he gets off his flight and has a big meal, that’s going to help him train the circadian rhythm quicker. If he sat outside in the sunlight and ate a big meal, he’s going to entrain that clock system much quicker. The same as if he lands at night. He wouldn’t eat anything, he continued fasting, went straight to bed, got up in the morning, sunrise, and a big meal, your clock system is going to be entrained a lot quicker.

You probably changed your practices, I would imagine. As you’re learning about sleep, were you getting certain things out of your bedroom and taping lights? Maybe you can say how you started to explore playing with light. You got into it enough that now you have this incredible business.

The bedroom should only be used for two things and that’s sleeping and sex. There’s nothing else. Our bedroom is minimal now, it’s insane. It’s a bed and a couple of bedside tables and a fan because we need white noise to sleep. To hack your room to get the most optimal light for sleeping, you need not have any blue light exposure before you go to bed. In an actionable process, that’s any light passing through your eyes. You also don’t want the stimulus of media that is going to keep your brain active as well. It’s not just a light thing, it’s also an active thing.

We removed our television. We always used to watch TV in bed. It’s completely gone. Smartphones are not to be used in the bedroom, they’re turned completely red and then put on airplane mode and put in a drawer. We have blackout curtains in our bedroom because we need 100% darkness to be able to sleep optimally.

I don’t know what you guys call them in the US but we have burglar alarms or security alarms and they flash out green light. I’ve been getting black electrical tape and taping those up. They still work but I tape the lights out. Years ago, I used to have one of those digital alarm clocks that had blue light that told the digital time and that was on my face as I was sleeping. It was shocking to me when I read that this stuff could impact your sleep so I threw that out.

Think about when people go to stay in a hotel. All the clocks are like that. Now you’re jet lagged and you’re dealing with those clocks. I always put the pad or something in front of it. People don’t realize these are all impacting. They can be like, “The bed. I’m in a hotel. I’m in a strange place. I have jet lag.” Those things are always there.

It’s true. You’ve got to hack your travel. You got to hack your hotel room. You got to go around. If there’s any light coming out, bring some tape if you need to. I unplug the clock and put it in the drawer. 100% blackout sleep masks and things like that. Ultimately, you’re probably not going to get blackout curtains in some hotels as well. It can be light. Those are probably the actionable steps in terms of hacking your bedroom. Anything that’s emitting light in your bedroom, get it out. It’s not worth having it in there.

I’ll be honest, personally, my only time for the guilty pleasure of either reading, watching a documentary, or something is after my whole house is asleep or down. A lot of people that are in relationships or have children, this is probably pretty common. You’re saying that if you have to relax that way, do it outside of your room.

Absolutely. There are a couple of things to do. Don’t watch things that are going to hype you up. Don’t go and watch a Metallica concert before bed. Watch something like a documentary that’s quite soothing and relaxing. Make sure that you’re wearing blue blocker glasses as a bare minimum. Red lenses. Clear and yellow aren’t going to do anything after dark for you. It has to be deep orange-red. Also, make sure that your skin is protected as well because the skin can sense light through melanopsin receptors in the skin. We didn’t know that before.

There are a couple of things. We have this big conversation in our house about sunglasses and that they might inhibit you from making vitamin D because your eyes aren’t registering your brain and you’re out in the sun. By the way, don’t use soap for 24 hours after you’ve been in the sun except maybe in your pits or something because your body’s still producing D. Do you know if that is true about sunglasses? Your brain is not getting the message so you’re not making the D. I’ve heard it a lot. I’m always curious if it’s accurate.

It is accurate based on the one study that’s been done on it. More research needs to be done. Given the evidence that we have at the moment, sunglasses in this study were shown to switch off melanin and melanin is something that builds up in the skin. If you’re out in the sun for a lot, you build up a base tan, you get this golden color. What melanin does is filter UV light. The more melanin you have, the more UV light you can take before you burn. Burning is when you’re causing DNA damage from UV light.

When you wear sunglasses, it switches off that melanin. You’re out outside, your body is getting the wrong light messages to its clock system, which is saying, “It’s 5:00 PM or 6:00 PM,” when it’s midday. You haven’t got any protective measures against UV. Yes, you’ll still synthesize vitamin D. That won’t be an issue but you’re more likely to suffer the side effects of excessive UV exposure, which will be skin damage and cell damage to the skin.

What was more interesting to me than that study was on PubMed, in the literature. They discovered that the skin had its own circadian rhythm. What this meant was that it had two phases, an active phase and a repair phase. The light that hits the skin, the light from the sun, sent this message, “Active phase, we need X, Y, and Zed properties to be able to synthesize vitamin D to protect against UV and have healthy skin.”

UV light, there’s no getting away from it. A lot of the gurus in light say that UV light is amazing and brilliant, which it is but it’s a double-edged sword. It will cause cell damage. It’s a fact of life. You’re receiving the UV light so the skin is processing that. The UVB is synthesizing with cholesterol and produces higher vitamin D and lower all-cause mortality. No-brainer. The UV light, if you’re outside all day, is going to cause some damage to the cells in your skin. It’s inevitable.

This is why the skin has two phases in its clock system and it’s been proven in a lab environment under a peer-reviewed clinical trial that when you devoid the light of blue and green light to the skin after dark, it goes into this repair mode. Melatonin levels increase. The absence of blue and green light allows the skin to go into this repair mode. It repairs any of the damage caused by UV, pollutants, or environmental stimuli in that period.

[bctt tweet=”Food is a circadian entrainer. Light is the biggest circadian entrainer, it’s the biggest one. Exercise and food also entrain your clock systems.”]

What are we doing as a population? We’re going out in the sun all day. You might be wearing sunscreen or not suncream, whatever your preference is. We’re getting a little bit pink. We’re going home. We’re then switching on the lights. Our skin is not going into this repair mode. None of the damage that’s been caused during the day from UV light is being repaired. What our ancestors would have done is they would have been out during the day, come back to the camp, and sit in front of the campfire. There’s no blue and green light and only red light. What we know about red light as well doesn’t interfere with melatonin. Also, it’s a light that stimulates regeneration, growth, and repair.

What we’re doing is we’ve put ourselves in this environment that is flooded with this light that’s causing our bodies to think it’s daytime all the time and not to repair. We’re also living in this environment, the void of darkness now. The whole earth is never dark. You’ve got street lamps and all sorts going on. That was a more interesting study but the sunglasses one is true based on what we have. If you’re wearing sunglasses, you’re not getting the correct message to the brain to tell the time. The incorrect hormones will be present in your body so you’re more likely to cause damage. People might say, “What about cataracts?”

What you’ve got to do is you’ve got to be sensible with this. Eye color is a big one. I’ve got blue eyes. I am of Northern European descent. Scandinavia, there’s a lot of that in me. What that means is I’ve got low melanin in my eyes. I can’t process as much UV light as someone that’s got darker eye colors. Someone with brown eyes or dark brown eyes would have been more equatorial or lower latitudes levels. They can take more of that UV light.

Me, in Australia, with blue eyes, I rarely wear sunglasses. When I’m out, I squint quite a bit. When you squint, when you’ve got blue eyes, that protects the amount of UV light that’s going into the eyes. Also, my eyes water quite a bit when I’m outside. This is an intraocular fluid. There have been studies that show that people that produce this fluid when out in the sun filter UV light as well. Having no streaming eyes is a natural response to the UV.

One thing that gets me is when people say, “Throw out the sunglasses, you don’t need them.” There are certain situations you need them. For instance, if I’m driving and there’s a car in front of me and I’ve got massive amounts of 100-degree Fahrenheit sun shining onto the car in front of me and glaring into my eyes, that is going to cause me eye damage. There’s no doubt about it. Also, UV light and its impact on cataract generation change with latitude and altitude. The higher up you go, the more at risk you’re going to be. If you’re living in a mountainous region and you’re not wearing sunglasses, you’re going to have a real issue.

That makes a lot of sense. I do want to go back. It’s all the stuff that you realize how much light we’re dealing with. Even saying that we don’t have a chance to come home and we’re not going to break out candles. Everyone flips out when the power goes off for five minutes. Maybe walk me through it. It’s morning for you. You’re already wearing a yellow lens because you’re looking at the computer talking to me. I want to get to your lights in your home. If you have different light bulbs or anything like that, that you’re doing. Maybe you can tell me what your rhythm looks like and what color lenses you’re using. I want to talk about how you created BLUblox.

I was never a morning person. I always go to bed late and get up late. That was bad for my health. It’s clear from the evidence that it’s the worst thing you can do for your health. It’s a whole hour of conversation for that.

It’s not eight hours whenever it starts. It’s eight hours, 8:30 or 9:00.

It’s getting the correct cycles of sleep as well. Four cycles of 90 minutes of sleep are what you need to be aiming for. The only way to do that is through a correct circadian rhythm. I can take some actionable steps for people in terms of what I do. I get up when the sun rises. I initially set my alarm when the sun rose but I don’t anymore. My rhythm is so in tune now. I will wake up about 10 to 15 minutes before the sun rises even as the sunrise changes each day. That’s how powerful this stuff is.

Do you drink alcohol?

No.

I don’t either but I do think that helps. It makes it easier.

That’s in caffeine. If you can produce and get rid of those, you’re going to have a lot better time getting correct sleep and that’s for sure. It also impacts my anxiety, caffeine and alcohol. I generally feel amazing. If I don’t have alcohol or caffeine, no anxiety. If I take one cup of coffee or alcohol, the next morning, I’ll wake up at 4:00 AM or 5:00 AM with awful anxiety. It’s strange. I don’t drink caffeine and alcohol. I’ll drink on special occasions.

That’s celebratory. You wake up before the sun comes up.

Without a shadow of a doubt, straight outside. I don’t switch on any artificial lights. I don’t switch on my bedroom light. I don’t look at my phone. I’d go outside. The first light your eyes need to see is natural light. It doesn’t matter if it’s cloudy. It doesn’t matter if it’s raining. It doesn’t matter if it’s a beautiful day. Outside for at least five minutes and embrace that sun. You don’t have to stare at the sun. A lot of crazy people do that. Being outside in the natural light is enough to set the central pacemaker to start your day.

If I live in Sweden or England and it’s January, does the window count? Do we just go stand outside and deal with it?

Stand outside. You get the added benefit of CT in the winter. You’ll be cold thermogenesis, which is going to reduce heteroplasmy rates in your cells, which is going to make them much more efficient for electron chains that transport. It’s going to boost the immune system. It’s going to be generally exceptional for your health and your longevity to cold.

In the winter, I’ll be outside with my bed shorts on and that’s it. This might sound extreme but winter in Australia in the mornings is probably still about 70 degrees. It’s pretty warm. I’ve got friends in Canada and places like that, that are outside in the snow with their underpants on. That is extreme, I get that. Even if you’re out there with a dressing gown, it’s a good spot.

I have many questions. Solar gazing. As the sun comes up, my husband will stand and watch it for a few moments. He’s fortunate that we have a backyard so he’ll be barefoot, standing on the earth, and looking at the sun. Do you have any feelings about solar gazing?

It’s fine as long as it’s at that immediate point when the sun’s rising. The reason being is there’s no UV light present in the rising sun. You’d have a hard time if you’re trying to do it in the midday sun. Context needs to apply. I do a little bit of it. For me, I don’t feel it’s essential. I don’t feel it’s essential for people that are wanting to start unless it’s something that you want to work up to it, you look into it, research it yourself, and you feel it’s right for you, go for it.

There are a lot of extra benefits from doing it that you can get from looking directly at it. I wouldn’t go straight into, “I’m going to look at this rising sun for ten minutes.” Start maybe a little bit to the left or right of it and then slowly get to it. Maybe do some glances at it and then go from there. It’s not essential but there are going to be added benefits.

What your husband is doing is so good for DC electric current generation. The fact that he’s grounding himself to the earth, the fact that he’s looking directly at the sun, it’s going to increase the amount of DC current that’s going through his body. For people that are reading, DC electric current is what reduces inflammation, what charges mitochondria, and gives us energy. The way it works through UV light and through also staring at the sun in the mornings is that the light passes through the eyes. There’s something in the eyes called DHA. DHA, you get from fish. It is in the highest concentrations in the eye.

When light mixes with DHA, it is the only pathway to produce DC electric current in the body from light. That’s why it’s sunglasses off looking towards the sun. It’s the fact that he’s grounding as well because the earth is giving out DC electric current as well. He’s getting this double whammy of charge, which has given him the energy. It’s reducing inflammation. It’s making him feel alert and awake. He’s also getting that circadian entrainment as well at the same time. All these different things are happening to him all at once. It’s great to hear that he’s doing that. It sounds like he knows what he’s doing as well with the jet lag and he understands what he’s trying to do.

He’s a student like all of us. There are people like you out there who can offer after you’ve done all this work such easy-to-understand explanations. As students, we can go, “I can do that.” In the morning, you go outside. Once you come in, are you putting glasses on right away? What is that typical?

It depends. You guys are coming out of winter and going into your lighter months. I’m going into winter. I’m going to get darker mornings. I’ll talk about it from a winter perspective and a summer perspective. From a winter perspective, you’re going to have more artificial light on. You’re going to have to switch on the house lights. You can’t all be as weird as me and have red lights in your house. The majority of my lights are red.

Do you mean for real red, the light bulbs, and when you turn them on, they’re red?

Yeah. I use them after dark and in the mornings before the sun rises. I also have yellow bulbs in my house, which is a product that we’ll be releasing. That doesn’t emit much blue.

It’s less blue.

Very low blue. We’ve completely removed the spiking blue from our daytime bulbs. We’ve put more of a balanced blue in. It mimics more of what the sun’s giving out. You can have them on without causing any damage to your circadian rhythms. I have a mix of those.

You’ve gone from glasses because you realized the importance of the bulbs. What’s the yellow like?

With the standard LED lights, the light is white. That’s because of the phosphorus in there. It’s pure blue light. The yellow ones give this warm yellow glow. It’s almost like the glasses I’m wearing now. We mimicked the exact blocking from what we’re getting these lenses into a light bulb. We’re not getting any damage to our skin and circadian disruption that way.

The people that don’t have those bulbs, which they won’t have because they don’t exist on the market yet, you don’t want to go outside, get the circadian entrainment, and then come in and switch on your lights and tell your brain it is solar noon. Your hormones are going to be all over the place. When you come back in, if you require artificial lights to be on, then you need to be wearing the yellow lenses.

If you get up in the depths of winter, which a lot of people will do because we’ve messed around with daylight savings, which is bad for our circadian rhythms. Also, we work in this fredonian work environment where we work from 9:00 to 5:00. What happens if the sun sets? We have to get to work at 9:00 and the sun is rising at 8:30 when we’re stuck in traffic on the freeway. That’s not going to be good.

Think about it from an ancestral point of view. Going back to your ancestors back in the Paleo times, what were they doing? If they got up 2 or 3 hours in the winter before the sun rose, they wouldn’t be exposed to blue light. They would go out, get used to the light, go out hunting, sit around the fire, or whatever it may be. You need to mimic that.

What I say in the winter is you need to be wearing blue-light-blocking glasses until the sun rises. When the sun rises, try and get outside. If you get to work and then the sun rises after your work, make a point of going out for a coffee or something at that time of the day so you can get that light. Wear your yellow glasses up until that point.

[bctt tweet=”What we know about red light as well doesn’t interfere with melatonin. Also, it’s a light that stimulates regeneration, growth, and repair.”]

Would the yellow be okay? Would you want to have that orange or red one early?

It depends. If it’s completely dark, you want to be wearing reds in the morning. If the sun’s starting to rise, the yellow is probably going to be okay. This is why we didn’t want to create one lens. We’ve got three because it’s seasonal. In the summer, I won’t even touch the yellows, but for months, I don’t need them. The sunrise is at 4:00 AM. In Perth, we don’t have daylight savings. I’m up, straight out, and then I’ll wear my red glasses in the evening and maybe some clears during the day if I’m working inside. That’s why it’s different and it’s seasonal. It does change with the seasons and latitudes on how you should manage light.

This conversation might empower some people to change their light hygiene. We always say, “Message us.” Give us a message and say, “This is my environment at the moment. What do I need to do?” We’ll give 4 or 5 actionable points. At sunrise, wear your blue light glasses at this time and some breaks. Maybe a salt lamp next to a computer at work. Other hacks that people can do to modify their light environments and get the correct hormone production, which will ultimately make them feel amazing. They won’t be as stressed or won’t be as anxious. They’ll sleep better. They’ll feel amazing.

Let’s say they have enough natural light to work in without switching on too many lights during the day, they’re looking at screens, they’re wearing the yellow, is clear acceptable?

Clear is acceptable if you have no sensitivity to light during the day. If you’re sensitive to light, you have things like stress, anxiety, depression, seasonal affective disorder, or migraines. If any of those are you, then you won’t benefit from the clear lenses because you’re ultra-sensitive. Blue light is intensifying those feelings for you. Much like caffeine and alcohol do for me, it will intensify them. You need more protection. The yellow will filter out more of the blue light.

Let’s say you’re done working, now it’s maybe getting a little darker so people are going to be switching lights on. Are you then transferring over to the darker lens? When do you make that transition? Are we saying to people that pretty much based on the environment that we’ve created and we have all agreed to live in, with the exception of exposing yourself in the morning and then maybe in that mid-afternoon day of getting some light, we have to have these on?

Absolutely. You need to. That’s twofold. Ideally, I’d be watching the sunset. The reason being is there’s a massive spike in blue light before the sun sets. I’ve measured this on a spectrometer. The blue light doesn’t taper off during the day, it remains at the same level. Thirty minutes before the sun sets, you get this massive increase in blue light and all the other colors dropped to almost nothing. It’s crazy. That sends a message to the brain, that is the time that blue light is now going to start going to nothing. Every ten minutes, I took a spectral analysis report on the sun and saw that after this spike, every ten minutes, it went lower in blue until there was zero blue, and then red massively increased.

Is that a trigger for the brain about what’s happening, about the night switch?

It’s exactly that. It causes a de crescendo effect in your clock system, which sends a message, “This is the highest point in blue. Now it’s time to get ready to reduce cortisol because blue is going to drop down.” Every ten minutes, you’re going to get a new message to your brain, “It’s dropping. Melatonin can come up. Cortisol can come down.” If you can’t watch the sunset, I get it. It’s better if you can. Once it’s set, what colors are you going to see? It’s all reds and oranges.

You need to make sure your red glasses are on. Sleep+ is the one that we have. You wear those all the way through until you go to bed. You go about your normal life, watch your TV, on your smartphone, or whatever you want to do. The biggest one for me is the fridge light. People think that digital devices have a blue light. When you open your fridge, it’s full of artificial light, which is bad. Make sure you’ve got your glasses on until you go to bed. When all the lights are off, take your glasses off, lie down, and go to bed.

The other thing that people need to be aware of is that 85% of our lives are now spent indoors. 15% average is outside and that is like going back from 100% that was pretty much outside from our ancestors. It’s all well using BLUblox products to manage blue light but you need to be outside as well with no sunglasses on and no blue blockers on. You need to be outside as much as you can. This is why I always say that go for that walk. If there’s still light after, you can get home from work. Before you go to work, be outside. During the day, people go out for a smoke break. Why can’t you go out for a sun break and get messages into your body and get that sun on your skin producing D?

When I was working in an office, it always killed me that you’d have this light. On the twelfth floor, you’d have this lunch room and everyone will be sitting there under artificial light eating their crappy food. I’m walking up to the park. I’ll eat my lunch at my desk when I’m back. I’m going out and walking. I go to the park, I take my top off, I’d get out, and lie in the sun for an hour. Even when it was raining, I would go and sit in a cafe or somewhere that had an outdoor bit that was open and I could sit and see out and into that light. A lot of people say, “Buy a pair of blue blockers, pop them on, and everything’s going to be cool.” No, it’s not.

It’s the whole organism. I completely acknowledge that we can use all these devices but biologically, we’re not set up to do it. It’s not that we should be in denial of that but because we can, it doesn’t mean we should or doesn’t mean it’s good for us. Now you’re creating something where you go, “This is here. We’re connecting on this computer. You’re doing business on your phone. What can I do to protect myself a little bit more from this unnatural experience?”

Ancestrally, our brain is still the same. Our clock system is still the same. Our evolution from a biological perspective is a lot slower than the technological revolution that’s happened in the last several years. We’re not ready for it. I’m never one to say throw everything out and go and sit in the middle of a dark field somewhere. It’s not practical. I love my technology. I love my smartphone. I love my MacBook. I watch TV. I love it. You can hack your light environment. Make it mimic what the ancestors saw.

That’s why my house looks like a brothel after dark because I don’t want any blue light present on my skin after dark. My sleep is exceptional. My wife sleeps exceptionally. We bounce out of bed every morning full of energy and we don’t slump in the afternoons. It’s all down to managing light correctly, both artificial and also managing sunlight correctly as well.

What about kids? People have babies. I have a friend and they were putting on the orange glasses on his 2-year-old early. They wore it and he seemed used to it. When people have children, a few other things are battles if you know what I mean. I have this vision of a 4-year-old boy grabbing glasses.

The adherence is difficult. There are a couple of interesting facts that people love and you’ll love as well. Two facts about kids, number one, a baby is not born with a circadian rhythm. It takes 3 to 6 months to develop their own circadian rhythm.

They don’t sleep, those kids.

They stay awake.

New moms need to know that because sometimes they get frustrated.

What new moms also need to know is a huge study in Chrono nutrition on mothers’ breast milk being a circadian entrainer. How a baby entrains and develops a circadian rhythm is through appropriate light management, not having artificial light when you’re giving a night feed. Also, the biggest one is free breast milk. What they did in this study was they took breast milk pumped from a mother during the day and they took breast milk pumped from a mother during the evening.

What they found was the breast milk pumped during the day was high in cortisol, which causes an awakening response. It’s good during the day and not so good when you want the baby to go to sleep. What they found was that the breast milk pumped after sunset had zero cortisol, which was extremely high in tryptophan and melatonin. If you’re pumping breast milk and not labeling when you’re pumping it, you might be giving your baby a shot of cortisol, which is in effect like giving it a shot at caffeine after dark. The baby, number one, won’t go back to sleep. Two, you’re messing up the entrainment and development of their circadian rhythm.

I saw you talk about that. I was never much of a pumper. I tried. You’re like milk on tap. It did make me feel a little better that at least it had the right levels of cortisol. Can you maybe share a little bit? I’ve read a lot of the stuff you’re talking about like using light for performance. Maybe you can touch upon that a little and what you mean. We’re all going to perform better if we’re resting. We talked a little bit about building muscle between 2:00 and 4:00, especially for men, and if you’re doing endurance earlier in the day. I was wondering if you had other examples of that.

There are loads. The biggest studies done on performance have been in volleyball or Olympic-level volleyball players, mainly Brazilian. They found that by depriving them of sleep for one hour less per night decreased their athletic performance by about 12.5% the next day and that was through making them go to bed a bit later or waking up a little bit earlier, which was outside of their natural rhythms. We’ve seen studies as well that have shown other elite-level Olympians in the sprinting category have one night of sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation is caused by artificial blue light. They dropped their sprint output and speed and times by 10% the next morning as well.

We also worked closely in late 2017 with the Australian international soccer team. They wanted us to give them a paper, which I wrote for them, about how to mitigate drops in performance from traveling over multiple time zones for a World Cup qualifier. They had to travel from Sydney to Honduras, which was the longest trip any sporting team in soccer had to make for a World Cup qualifier.

We came up with this protocol of how to get their circadian rhythms back in check quickly after traveling on a flight and it involved fasting and blue light exposure during times when they needed to be awake going into that time zone. Also, a gradual phase shifting of their clock system using lights a week before they traveled and then utilizing our blue light glasses at various points on the journey.

I put it down to my paper solely but they qualified for the World Cup after that, which was great. Light is an interesting one as well when it comes to performance from a recovery perspective. It’s not just blue light, red light is huge in recovery. Red light stimulates a lot of growth and repair. We’re finding a lot of bodybuilders now utilizing red light therapy after they trained to heal and grow their muscles.

I have some guy friends that play football and a few athletes and they’re like, “I stand there for ten minutes on my testicles with the red plate.” I don’t have testicles but would there be a better time in the day for a person, forget just athletes, to use the red light? I have one of those plates. They’ve got these big beautiful ones you could stand in. There is something to that. Is it better to do it earlier? Because it is red, would that be okay to do it before thinking about going to bed? It’s not disruptive?

We’ve got one coming out ourselves. We’ve managed to get zero-flicker and zero-emf in our device, which other companies can’t do because flicker damages the nervous system. The EMF, dirty electric, is bad. We’ve come up with a battery-powered device. When to use it? It’s one that can be handheld. It can be switched between near-infrared and red.

[bctt tweet=”Melatonin is two things, it’s a sleep hormone but it’s also a powerful antioxidant that eliminates free oxygen within the body that causes cell damage.”]

Near-infrared and red have different properties. Red light, for instance, is great for collagen production. It’s for people that want anti-wrinkle, anti-aging, and skin repair. Near-infrared light is good for deep tissue and muscle repair. We’ve come up with this device that not only is non-flicker and non-EMF but you can have both near-infrared and red on at the same time or you can switch between the two. No other panel does that. It’s either all or nothing, which is going to take me a year to produce.

I hate to say it but also you can support your business when you get it to beauty like nobody’s business. People are like, “My health, sleep, my stress, and my anxiety.” You start talking about beauty and skin. All of a sudden, you’re like, “I don’t know what happened. Our business is just thriving.” Is there a protocol though that you would prescribe for users of the red light at times? I understand now that red is for deep tissue and a different kind of healing. Near-infrared and then red for collagen. First of all, what are most of the plates that are near-infrared?

It depends. The brand you mentioned has either ones that are near-infrared or ones that are red so you choose between one or the other, which can get costly. Their products are good. I know the guys well. I fully support what they’re doing. In terms of when you should be using them, red light on its own, that’s visible red light, you can use any time of the day. It’s not a problem. It’s not going to interfere with anything.

Where it gets a bit complex is near-infrared light. That’s an invisible frequency of light. You’ll turn a panel on and you won’t see anything but you have to trust that it’s working. UV light, UVA, UVB, UVC, far-infrared, and near-infrared wavelengths are only present when the sun’s out. When it gets dark, there is none of that invisible frequency of light present. If you’re going to be using your red light panel or near-infrared before the sunrises or after the sun sets, I haven’t seen evidence to say it’s going to mess things up.

From an ancestral standpoint, I’d take an educated guess that it’s probably not going to be optimal. I would be utilizing near-infrared invisible frequencies during daylight hours only but for your collagen beauty, anti-aging, and visible red light at 660 nanometers, I would use that any time of the day and it would be totally fine.

I won’t get into the red light because that would be per area. I was joking about the testicles, that’s one spot. For the near-infrared, if you put it in different locations, would there be different types of benefits by putting them over different locations?

Absolutely. The first one you mentioned, testosterone production from the testes, that’s evidence. Although it’s loose.

They like the idea. Is there another location?

Thyroid for women is a good place to put it. The thyroid gets massively bombarded with blue light. Because the thyroid is close under the skin, the melanopsin receptors within that area can overstimulate and understimulate the production of hormones within that area. I’m looking at a laptop now. Luckily, I’ve got no blue light coming out of my laptop. You’re heading and exposing that area. When you’re on your phone, where is it? You’re exposing it to the thyroid.

This is why I always say wear a silk scarf around that thyroid if you’re a lady because we’re seeing an explosion of hyperthyroidism and Hashimotos in women. Men have collars and beards and can have a bit of added protection. For women, not so much. Depending on what condition you have, it can either stimulate more T cell production within that area, or it can heal and repair any of the damage that blue light has been causing in that region.

For instance, if you want to stimulate hormone production, your visible red light will be good in that area. If you want that deep repair and you’ve got real bad issues with your thyroid overstimulating, you might want to look at a near-infrared treatment to be able to focus it on there. My wife always utilizes red lights around that area to keep our hormones in check. She swears by it.

This is a big one for me because I have a lot of friends where this is the elusive thyroid. Getting this thing diagnosed and then treated, I’ve seen a lot of friends go down a pretty deep rabbit hole of frustration, the body changing, and all kinds of things that are overwhelming. It’s hard to get a straight answer. Even if it’s not just the blue light that’s a contributing factor, people to be more conscious of, “Where am I exposing myself?” It’s important. If people want to buy the products, is it best to go online?

We ship free all over the world. The US is 60% of our business. We do have a small collection of eyeglasses on Amazon US as well through a registered supplier. It’s A to Z Nutrients. They stock our glasses for us. They are BLUblox glasses. Avoid the cheap ones from Amazon. They don’t block what you need to be blocking. Honestly, save your money. Even if you don’t buy from us and you buy somewhere else, make sure that your sleep glasses block between 400 and 500 nanometers. Ask the company if that happens in their glasses. If they can’t show you the report that shows that, don’t buy them. The reports are on our website on every product page. Rest assured, you’ll see what the results are.

During the day, if they’re not filtering at least 30% of blue light in the clear lenses, avoid them. A lot only focus on violet light and violet light is not even present in artificial light so go figure. For the yellow ones for your anxiety, make sure that you’re blocking 100% between 400 and 450 nanometers. If they’re not, they’re not doing what the academic literature says they should be doing. We take pride. We put all the latest science into our technology. If the science changes, we’ll change our technology.

It’s BLUblox.com. I find this fascinating because this is for all of us. This is something we’re contending. If there was something else or if I have forgotten something that you wanted to remind or encourage people who are reading this, is there anything else that you wanted to say to that?

There are many ways in which light can affect people. If you’re not practicing good light hygiene, which is getting outside a lot and managing blue light, you’re going to see a deterioration in your health over the years. It’s like a diet. It doesn’t take you two years to become diabetic from a rubbish diet. It takes you 15 or 20 years to get to that stage. We’re seeing the same in circadian rhythms from the research that we’ve seen. You might think, “I’m fine now. I don’t need to do this.” Trust me, if you leave it, it’s going to deteriorate.

Especially for women, the hormone side of things is huge. Light is the biggest governor of hormones. From things like anxiety, depression, stress, and thyroid issues, we haven’t even touched on fertility. I’ve done podcasts purely on fertility and how light impacts fertility, especially in women but also males. People need to be cognizant that light is a pillar of health and it is as important as diet and exercise and mental health. They all contribute to an overall healthy individual. If your diet is right but you don’t exercise or practice light or meditate and mindfulness, you’re not healthy. You need to do all four pillars and light is one of those.

The last thing I would want to say as well is that I always like to give a shout-out to the not-for-profit we work with in California, Restoring Vision. They have this mission to get reading glasses on everyone in the developing world, people that are working maybe in Central America, South America, India, and places like that where reading glasses aren’t obtainable and they can’t afford them. They work in jobs to provide an income for their family that typically involves sewing factory work where they’re under rubbishy light conditions. Their eyesight has deteriorated and what they need is magnification in their lenses to be able to continue to work.

For every pair of BLUblox we sell, we donate the monetary equivalent of a pair of reading glasses to restore vision. They then purchase the glasses in bulk and then get them on their charity excursions to these locations to give to people in the developing world. Anyone that wants to invest in their own health is going to be giving back to some of those who can’t afford it the third world as well.

If someone’s reading this and they think, “I’ve been twenty years in front of blue lights, computers and LED lights, and such,” but there is a way by getting this light hygiene and our sleep hygiene in check. It’s never too late. It’s like diabetes. There is a real way that we can participate in improving.

The first step is the sunrise. I always say to people that it’s free. Get up and start watching it. I used to not get up until 11:00 AM. I used to be like, “These people are insane.” People like your husband, surfers get up at the crack of dawn and go surfing. How do they do this? I got six hours more sleep. Now I’m one of those people that I call crazy. I can’t sleep in. I physically can’t do it because my circadian rhythm is on point. If I try to sleep in for even half an hour more, I’ll feel groggy and hungover. I have this horrible feeling in the mornings. I need to have my eyes see that sunlight.

It takes about a week. The first couple of times is going to be tough. Once you get used to it, you’ll be jumping out of bed with so much energy going about your day and then you’ll be going to bed earlier as well, which is healthy from a fertility perspective but also from a mental health perspective as well. Honestly, it’s hard to describe. You’re going to feel like a new you. It’s incredible.

Andy, I could ask you a million questions. I’m grateful. Is there another place you want to direct people to find you? Is BLUblox the best place?

That’s the best place if people are interested in finding more out about light. If they want to find out a little bit more about my journey, Instagram is probably the best one. I’ve been a little bit inactive on it because I’ve been so busy. @IAmAndyMant is a good place to start. If people are filled with a lot of questions about our community, it’s the Facebook group, Light and Health.

We’ve got about 6,000 members in that. That ranges for everything from quantum biologists all the way through to the person who only heard about the dangers of light and how to manage light for the first time. We have all the leaders in lights, health, and circadian rhythms in that group. If anyone has any questions, they can forum into that group and you’ll get either myself or another expert that will come on and answer your question and help you. It’s a friendly group.

You’ll get the answers that you’ll need and someone to interpret the science for you.

They’ll do that.

It’s the best kind.

That’s what we’re here for.

Thank you again. Aloha.

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Thanks so much for reading. If you’d like, rate, subscribe, and leave us a review. All of my music was graciously done by Frank Zummo and Tom Thacker. If you want to see some of the behind-the-scenes action, follow me, @GabbyReece. Remember, don’t miss new episodes every Monday.

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Resources mentioned:

• BLUblox
• Mark’s Daily Apple
• Robb Wolf
• Restoring Vision
• @IAmAndyMant
• Light and Health
• @GabbyReece

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About Andy Mant