Your comprehensive guide to using light, dark and the sun to help your health and healing this year 🌞

Plus, announcing a new community challenge that starts in April: Seeing the Light!

Photo by Federico Respini on Unsplash

I’ve struggled with anxiety and depression — particularly seasonal depression or Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) — much of my adult life. In winter, as for many people, it’s often gotten quite bad for me — low energy, ruminating negative thoughts, deep mood swings, a feeling of hopelessness. I’ve also had PMDD for much of my life — an intense form of PMS that can involve debilitating physical symptoms, but for me, mostly involved intense mood and emotional swings in the 10-14 days leading up to my period. This has made a lot of my life pretty emotionally tough, as anybody who has PMDD knows. You often blow up relationships, situations, pick fights, plan how you’re going to run away from your entire life and move to the mountains, and can struggle to feel any sense of stability or safety, as you are entirely driven by wild mood swings and irrational thinking that seems to just poof into thin air the day you finally get your period, and you go back to “normal.”

Both of these issues — SAD and PMDD — were just health issues I thought I would have to learn to navigate and deal with the rest of my life, and I expected, resignedly, to both worsen as I got older and entered perimenopause.

In a deep winter a few years ago, it seemed like that expectation was correct. I was 43, in a deep depression and a swirl of awful negative rumination that came, right on track, as winter got really dark and deep. I’d done so much for my health and mental health — medication, therapy, dietary changes, supplements — and while some of it did seem to help (quitting caffeine, alcohol, and getting more fiber in particular), nothing seemed to provide the kind of relief I was looking for.

Until we went to Florida that February.

My husband (whose deepest lifelong dream is to be a Virginia - Florida snowbird every year, from January - March) found a discounted hotel in Boca Raton, and we found some cheap direct flights, enough for a long weekend of three days.

“I also think we should watch sunrise every morning we’re there,” he said, seemingly for no reason at all. I still don’t know what prompted him to suggest that — he had no information or knowledge of circadian biology, sunlight and mental health — but I’ve realized that, in our 7 years together, my husband is actually weirdly deeply intuitive, and I’ve learned to often take him up on his random suggestions and ideas.

So we did. We got to a hotel in Boca where we were the youngest people by 3 decades at least, snagged a couple of beach chairs, set our alarm (we were NOT morning people at that point), and groggily hustled out to the beach every morning around 6:45 to put our feet in the sand and watch that red, glowing ball of light, the source of all life, arise over the horizon of the Atlantic Ocean.

That wasn’t all. Though I didn’t intend this to be a specific circadian practice, we also for those three days took a walk every morning for about 20 minutes on the beach during a period of light that I later learned is called UVA rise (it differs throughout the year and location, but a lot of the time it’s about an hour after sunrise). Essentially, when the sun is around 10 degrees above the horizon, ultraviolet A (or UVA) light comes online. This particular spectrum of light interacts with various molecules in our bodies, triggering a cascade of important health processes and hormones (including mental health hormones).

Of course, since we were in Florida on the beach, then we were just outside all day quite often, getting natural light. We were basking in the sun, touching the sand or the ocean, and we caught sunset those days, too.

By the time we got back to freezing cold winter Virginia that February, I could feel with every cell of my being that I was a markedly different, happier person. I just felt like ME. My mood was stable. I was positive, energetic. The negative rumination and anxiety was gone, just like that. Yeah, I’d just had a brief warm beach vacation which would improve anybody’s mood, but I didn’t discredit it as simple as that. Around the same time that we returned from Florida, I came across several Instagram health accounts that taught the principles of circadian and quantum biology (notably Sarah Kleiner and Carrie Bennett — I so love Bennett’s tagline: “Your body is not broken. Your biology is out of sync.”) and I started learning much more about how light, mineralized water, magnetism, and nature can get our bodies into health and balance.

Even though we were back to Virginia in late February and it was still cold, I committed to watch sunrise every day. I started taking regular “UVA walks.” I invested in a random pair of red-tinted blue blockers, because I was also learning about the negative effects that blue light and artificial light had on our biology. I learned how to turn the screens of my computer and phone red. When I could, I watched sunset, too.

That was three years ago, and here I am, still going strong with all of these light practices.

Photo by Andrea Caramello on Unsplash

The results have been remarkable, for me:

• My mood improved, even in luteal; I still have some sensitivity and lower moods before my period, but it feels manageable, not out of control, and it’s for a few days, not two weeks

• I had started to get occasional hot flashes here and there; those were completely eradicated and I haven’t had any — any — since

• My energy was higher than it had been in years

• I was sleeping uninterrupted through the night and waking up refreshed as well as falling asleep naturally and easefully

• Brain fog reduced significantly

• My digestion got really regular, some constipation I dealt with disappeared and I started having daily morning bowel movements for the first time in I can’t remember when

• I lost some weight that had come on seemingly overnight a few years ago and felt more related to inflammation than anything else

• I stopped bringing my phone into my bedroom and scrolling myself to sleep

• My nervous system felt more grounded and regulated; I attribute my light practices to helping my body feel safe enough to get sober from alcohol, which I did about 2.5 years ago

If you follow me on Instagram, you know I now keep up faithfully with these practices, often posting photos of my sunrise watching or my UVA light breakfasts, eaten outside. During warmer months, I do my best to imagine how I can live my life more outside (for example, I’m writing this newsletter to you outside from my porch, soaking in UVA light; I often do calls and meetings from outdoors or while walking; and if I have to be indoors I turn my screens red and crack open a window by my desk).

I’m still human; circadian rhythm and light exposure hasn’t magically made me a wellness robot, free of mental or physical pain, because, well, that ain’t the human experience. I still deal with anxiety, fear, aging, aches & pains, like all of us. But it’s night and day (pun intended) to where I was finding myself a few years ago.

I’m a wellness junkie; trained as a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner; in training as a certified health coach. There’s obviously a lot we can do to help our physical, emotional and mental health out there, and I’ve tried much of it.

In my opinion, out of everything you could do, there is absolutely nothing more critical to your health than re-aligning your circadian rhythm and safe exposure to natural sunlight, year round. And it’s FREE. (One of my core values is spiritual and wellness practices for liberation, aka, anybody can access them to break free of oppressive systems. That’s why I teach Feng Shui for liberation, and also hope to help encourage people to break out of costly wellness/pharma/shitty insurance/capitalistic models that are all bleeding us dry, too, with health practices free from nature.)

Artificial and blue-rich light is ruining our health and disrupting our circadian rhythms, which is having insane downstream effects on our overall health. It is one of the greatest environmental health issues facing us, and nobody is talking about it. Some brief stats that support this…

• A Harvard study of 3,549 breast cancer cases found that residential outdoor light at night was linked to invasive breast cancer risk, and a meta-analysis found indoor light at night was associated with a 13% higher risk of breast cancer. [PubMed Central]

• Artificial light at night (ALAN) has been linked to increased risk of breast, prostate, lung, and colorectal cancers in ecological studies. [PubMed]

• Research links nighttime light exposure — particularly among night shift workers — to increased risk of diabetes, heart disease, and obesity. [Harvard Health]

• Chronic circadian disruption from melatonin suppression has been connected to cardiovascular disease, endometriosis, gastrointestinal problems, diabetes, obesity, depression, bipolar disorder, and cognitive impairment. [PubMed Central]

Not only that, the fear-based conditioning around never seeing or safely exposing ourselves to the sun (and the lack of infrared light in our indoor environments, which is now mandated out of most of our modern lighting) is also creating many negative health effects.

• Women with vitamin D insufficiency had a 65% higher risk of breast cancer compared to those with adequate levels, and those who supplemented with vitamin D had a significantly protective effect, according to a matched case-control study. [PubMed]

• A 20-year Swedish study of nearly 30,000 women found that those with higher sun exposure lived longer and had lower risks of cardiovascular disease and non-cancer deaths compared to those who avoided the sun. While sun-avoiders had fewer skin cancers, they had higher rates of all-cause mortality, suggesting that moderate sun exposure provides significant health benefits.

• A 2024 study found that just 15 minutes of red light (670 nm) exposure reduced blood glucose elevation by 27.7% over two hours following a glucose challenge — suggesting that light-driven mitochondrial activity can directly influence metabolic health. [PubMed]

• Modern LED lighting — now mandated by energy efficiency regulations — largely lacks the near-infrared wavelengths present in natural sunlight, meaning regulatory changes aimed at efficiency may be inadvertently reducing our exposure to these health-promoting wavelengths. [PubMed]

If you really want to deeper dive into the negative health effects of blue light, a disrupted circadian rhythm, and lack of safe sun exposure, you should read The Light Doctor: Using Light to Boost Health, Improve Sleep, and Live Longer by Dr. Martin Moore-Ede. The book contains references to hundreds of studies and much more evidence. As a professor at Harvard Medical School, Moore-Ede led the team that located the suprachiasmatic nucleus, the biological clock in the human brain that controls the timing of sleep and wake, and pioneered research on how circadian clocks regulate the timing of body functions.

For me, I am glad we have Harvard-backed and trained doctors, researchers and studies giving us the evidence and data on this front, but I can also tell you in simpler terms what’s going on:

Humans are animals. And now, we are the only animals on this earth who choose to live in artificial environments. We no longer live in the natural environment and rhythms we evolved to thrive in over our entire existence. We have divorced ourselves from sun, stars, moon, earth, seasons, nature.

And we are getting very sick because of it.

But here’s the good news:

We don’t have to go live in a stick shack in the woods and disown all of our technology and worldly goods to regain the health benefits of natural light and circadian rhythm. We can do it with some small, simple adjustments and changes to our routines and indoor environments.

And below, for paid subscribers, I’m going to teach you exactly how I did that, and how you can, too.

Below, you’ll get…

• The apps I use to track sunrise, sunset, and UVA rise

• The exact brand of blue blockers I use

• Exactly how you can start — even in the smallest, imperfect ways — to incorporate natural light (and natural darkness!) into your life

• How you can still use your technology

• What my day to day circadian approach looks like

• All the other materials and brands I use for tools related to this

• And you can have a chance to ask me any questions to help integrate this into your life, too, in the comments

• And all of this will be framed in simple, non-overwhelming ways, so your sweet perfectionist all-or-nothing sensitive brain can start slow and not have to make a 180-degree change in your lifestyle, and instead build this all in slowly at a pace that works for your reality

Even more fun: Starting Monday, April 6, I will host a 14-day challenge for paid subscribers: Seeing the Light. For two weeks together, I am going to teach you exactly how to start incorporating light practices into your day to help improve your mental and physical health. We’ll have community, accountability, Q&A and prompts around these practices, and you’ll have the chance to live for yourself — like I did that long winter weekend in Florida — these practices, and see exactly how life-changing they can be.

Want in? Become a paying subscriber of the New Sensitive now, for $7 a month. You can cancel anytime, but why would you want to? In addition to regular community challenges, Q&As, mini Tarot & Feng Shui readings, exclusive wellness content, discounts to my courses and retreats… it’s a freaking steal. FOR LESS THAN A LATTE!!! (Seriously, I paid $9 the other day for a matcha latte. What is going on.)

Come join the hundreds of sensitive, creative, wellness-focused sensitive souls who are ready to flourish, thrive and be in community with one another.

Okay, ready to find out exactly how, little by little, tool by tool, morning by morning, you can start to get your circadian rhythm back online?

Let’s go…

Photo by Kent Pilcher on Unsplash