Quality Sleep

The quality of our sleep is important for feeling great every day. Different types of light affect our sleep cycle. Red light in the morning helps us wake up, while blue light in the evening signals our body to prepare for sleep. To improve our sleep, we should expose ourselves to morning and evening light. Getting outside in the morning and evening can reset our internal clock and improve the quality of our sleep. For more information, visit harmonywithin.org or follow on social media. Good evening and welcome to Elle's Food for Thought. I am really passionate about wellbeing and things we can do and little tools that we can have in our back pocket to support us to feel great every single day. One of the key things in us feeling great when we wake up ready to start our day is the quality of our sleep. There's lots of concepts around sleep hygiene that you may have heard of and many of these concepts are to do with the way that light comes into our eyes. Now, your pupil is like a little window that lets light in. And as you may have seen when you've ever seen a rainbow, light has different wavelengths that create different colours of light. Red light actually has a very slow light wavelength. It moves very slowly. Whereas if we move to the other end of the spectrum of light, we start to get towards more blue light and blue light has got a really, really quick energy-dense wavelength. So when we're thinking about our sleep hygiene, the fascinating thing is that inside our eye where we have different light receptors, the body is measuring or having a communication and understanding of the types of light coming into the eye. Now, if you think about sunrise and sunset, sunrise and sunset, we have a lot of this ready pink light, the last like slow wavelength of light. So we start with dawn and we have these ready pink light coming in, then it moves all the way through to noon where we have the strongest, brightest light, those blue waves of light. And then we start that cycle moving back towards the red again, which is showing the body that this is morning time and it helps to bring in certain chemical systems to make us feel awake and ready for the day. And then as we move towards the evening, if we can get light into our eyes that communicates to the body that it's heading into evening, then the body sets off a whole series of chemical reactions within that allow us to move towards our natural sleep cycle. So how do we use this for the best of our wellbeing? In the morning, get out whenever you can, even if it's just standing in your garden with a cup of tea and get a little bit of that early morning light coming into the eyes. And then very similar in the evening, whenever it works for you, maybe go for an evening walk, maybe stand outside for a little while, get some of that evening light into your eyes and your body will deeply understand about the times of day and it will reset your internal clock to support you to have the absolute best quality sleep that night. If you're interested to learn more about this, you're very, very welcome to get in touch or follow me on social media at harmonywithin.org.