1.If you get up in the morning, and it's still dark out and you want to be awake,
you would be wise to turn on artificial lights, in particular, overhead lights.
2.So here we're talking about trying to get at least 100,000 photons but not all at once, but you got to get them before 9:00 AM-ish, maybe 10:00 AM.
So what do you do? You go outside. If you want to get nerdy about this quantitative, you could download a free app like Light Meter
4.You can in theory, get it all from artificial lights, but there are some special qualities about sunlight that make sunlight the better stimulus.
5.Then I've recommended, based on scientific literature, that you look at sunlight sometime around the time when the sun is setting and the reason for that of course is because it adjusts down the sensitivity of your eyes because here's the diabolical thing.
6.As much as you safely can, avoid bright light and even not so bright light between the hours of 10 or 11:00 PM and 4:00 AM.
There have been two studies done from University of Colorado, both published in Current Biology.
7.There're other things that you can do to shift your clock and to reinforce your clock.
8.It's interesting because the effects of jet lag on longevity, have shown that traveling east takes more years off your life than traveling west.
And this probably has roots in evolutionary adaptation where under conditions where we need to suddenly gather up and go or forge for food, or fight,or do any number of different things, that we can push ourselves through the release of adrenaline and epinephrin to stay awake. Whereas being able to slow down and deliberately fall asleep is actually much harder to do.
9.Now, of course, traveling 30 minutes into a new time zone or just one time zone over, or two times zone over rather, is far less detrimental to your biology and psychology than a eight hour shift or a nine hour shift.
there's a paper published by Davidson and colleagues, 2006, in Current Biology
Most people experience worse jet lag as they get older.
10.If you expose your eyes to bright light in the four hours, maybe five or six, but in the four hours after your temperature minimum, your circadian clock will shift so that you will tend to get up earlier and go to sleep earlier in the subsequent days, okay? So it's called a phase advance, if you'd like to read up on this further. You advance your clock, okay?
However, if you view bright light in the four to six hours before your temperature minimum, you will tend to phase delay your clock. You will tend to wake up later and go to sleep later.
(Your temperature minimum is the point in every 24 hour cycle when your temperature is lowest. Now, how do you measure that without a thermometer? It tends to fall 90 minutes to two hours before your average waking time. So I want to repeat that, your temperature minimum tends to fall 90 minutes to two hours before your average waking time. So let's say you're not traveling and your typical wake up time is 5:30 AM.)
11.You can also shift your clock by engaging in exercise in the four hours after your temperature minimum to wake up earlier on subsequent nights, or exercise before then to delay your clock, okay?
12.Remember viewing light, exercise and eating in the four to six hours before your temperature minimum will delay your clock. Eating, viewing sunlight, and exercising, you don't have to do all three but some combination of those in the four to six hours after your temperature minimum will advance your clock.