Essentials: Timing Light for Better Sleep, Energy & Mood | Dr. Samer Hattar

Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance.

I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

Today, I have the pleasure of introducing Dr.

Samer Hattar as my guest on the Huberman Lab podcast.

And now, my conversation with Dr.

Samer Hattar.

Samer, thanks for sitting down with me.

My pleasure.

You are best known in scientific circles for your work on how light impacts mood, learning, feeding, hunger, sleep, and these sorts of topics.

So maybe you could just weigh us into what the relationship is between light and these things like mood and hunger, et cetera.

Sure.

So I mean, you do appreciate the effect of light for vision.

So when you wake up in a beautiful area, beautiful ocean, light is essential.

The sunrise, the sunset.

So that's your conscious perception of light.

But light has a completely different aspect that is independent of conscious vision.

And that's how it regulates many important functions in your body.

I think the best that is well studied and well known is your circadian clock.

And the word circadian comes from the word circa, which is approximate, and DN is day.

So it's an approximate day.

Why is it an approximate day?

Because if I i put you or any other human being who have a normal circadian clock in a constant conditions with no information about feeding time about sleep time about what time it is outside you still have a daily rhythm but it's not exactly 24 hours so it will shift out of the solar day because it's not exactly 24 hours and hence the name circadian how does that rhythm show up in the tissues of our body it shows up at every level that we know we studied it shows up at the level of the cell it shows up at the level of the tissue, and it shows up at your behavior.

The most obvious for you is your sleep-wake cycle.

You sleep and you're awake and sleep at the 24-hour rhythms.

The period length of the sleep rhythm on average is 24.2 hours.

So you'll be drifting 0.2 hours every day out of the solar day if you don't get the sunlight.

the sunlight adjusts that approximate day to an exact day so now your behavior is adjusted to the light dark environment or the solar day.

It's part of the brain that is not consciously driven.

So you actually do not know when it happens or when it doesn't happen.

And that's what we'll get into when I tell you why light affects your mood and why sometimes people don't know how to deal with light to improve their mood, for example.

What's the relevance?

I mean, why should we care about that short difference?

So let's do the math.

If you shift out 0.2 hours a day, in five days, you're shifting out one hour.

So you're literally one hour off in your social behavior in five days.

In 10 days, you're two hours off.

And if you're an organism that is living in the wild, shifting out of the right phase of the cycle, you could either miss food or you could become food.

So it's really essential for survival.

I think it's one of the strongest aspects of survival for animals to have the anticipation and the adjustment to the solar cycle.

What is the machinery?

that allows that to happen and

how does that machinery work?

Yeah, so we knew that in mammals, including us, we are mammals, humans, that the eyes are required for this function.

So if humans are born without eyes or the optic nerves are damaged, humans are not able to adjust to the solar cycle.

So we know that the eyes are required.

In the human retinas, there are two types of photoreceptors.

They are called rods and cones because of their shapes.

And these rods and cones simply take the photon energy, which light is made of, and they change it in a way to an electrical signal that allows us us to build the image of the environment in our cortices.

However, people have found, including me with the work of David Burson and Ignacio Provencio, that there is a subset of ganglion cells.

The ganglion cells are the cells that leave the retina, their axon, leave the retina, and project to the brain.

So these were thought to only relay rod-un-con information from the light environment to the brain.

We found that a small subset of these ganglion cells are themselves photoreceptors that were completely missed in the retina.

And these are the photoreceptors that relay light environment subconsciously to the areas in the brain that have and house the circadian clock or the circadian pacemaker, which adjusts all the clocks in our bodies to the central brain clock that allows them to entrain to the 24-hour light-dark cycle.

So these are cells that connect the eye of the brain that behave like photoreceptors, essentially.

I think it's worth mentioning that people who are pattern vision blind, so people who cannot see but have eyes, many of them still have these cells, these melanops and intrinsically photosensitive cells, and can essentially match or entrain, as we say, onto the light-dark cycle.

In fact, they possibly have no problems in circadian photoentrain.

They'll have enormous sleep awake cycle.

But they're totally blind.

But they are totally image blind.

And what's really interesting is that, and this story I heard from Chuck Seisler, so I'll give him credit, that some of these people who are image blind, usually they get dry eyes and they give them a lot of pain.

And doctors used to think, oh, since they are image blind and they're getting dry eye, why don't you just remove their eyes?

They're not using them anymore.

And the minute they would remove their eyes, they start having cyclical sleep problems indicating that now they are not in training to the light-dark cycle and are having cyclical jet lags when their clock shifts through the light-dark cycle.

That's really interesting.

And I hear from a number of blind people, a lot of them have issues with sleep.

I think in part because they don't realize that they too need to see light at particular times of day or night in order to absolutely look at their schedule.

Absolutely.

What is the proper way to interact with light in the first part of the day?

Honestly, I think the easiest thing is waking up.

Get as much light as you can.

To your eyes.

Yeah, it's really nice.

Your system is primed.

If you're entrained, it's primed to get light.

The sun should be out.

Even when it's cloudy, you're gonna get enough intensity to help you adjust your cycle to the day night cycle these are general rules of thumb but how long do you recommend people go out so if you do it daily I would say 15 minutes if you don't do it daily you may want to increase it you do it more it doesn't hurt and I'll tell you if you're sensitive don't you don't even have to go in the sun you could be in the shade there's gonna be so many photons out there in the shade it's gonna be perfect okay and if um for some reason one finds themselves very far north and it's very very dense cloud cover.

How long and at what point should somebody consider using an artificial light source to mimic the sunlight?

Yeah, honestly, this is where we don't have a lot of information still, because this is where we're going to discuss this maybe in more detail, that if you put a humans in artificial conditions, the circadian system is very sensitive to light.

But in reality, in the real environment, light also is affecting other aspects that are independent of the setting of the circadian pacemaker.

Okay.

And these which we call the direct effect of light on mood, for example.

So that is very hard to figure out what intensity you need to use.

And we haven't done enough experiments because the system has been discovered just recently.

But yeah, I mean, if you're...

Honestly, if you're that far north and you're in the winter and you want to get, make sure you don't use these light boxes.

I would suggest that personally.

Okay, so I think we've nailed down that first part of the day.

Basically, it's get 10 to 30 minutes, depending on how bright it is, and try and do that as often as possible to give the system a regular daily is the best.

This system is really about, and you'll see that even for the effect on depression, it's about multiple days.

So you don't have to worry if you missed it one day, you know, stay longer if you want.

But if you're in a hurry and you want to do other stuff, that's a great recommendation.

So you might want to compensate with some extra time if you missed a day or two.

I've heard you say before, it's entirely possible to get severely jet lagged without traveling.

Absolutely.

Simply by staying in, being on your phone too much, not getting the sunlight.

And you saw this during the pandemic.

A lot of people mentioned that their sleep-wake cycles suffered a lot.

Because if you're not going out and if you're staying at home and you don't have big windows and you're waking late, waking up late and then you're using very bright light till late at night, your body is going to shift.

And now your day is going to start instead of like really when the sun comes up let's say at six o'clock in the morning it's gonna your day is gonna start at 11 o'clock in the morning that's what your body is gonna think is the beginning of the day so then you're not gonna be able to sleep at 10 o'clock at night because now that's really for for your body is completely different timing I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, 8 Sleep.

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There is this idea of chronotypes that we all each intrinsically have a best rhythm of either being a morning person, you called yourself an early person, or a night owl, or more of a kind of standard, you know, to bed around 10.30, up around 7 type thing.

And I think there are now good data, correct me if I'm wrong, from the National Institutes of Mental Health and elsewhere showing that the more we deviate from that intrinsic rhythm, the more mental health issues and physical health issues start to crop up.

So there is great data on this and there's a couple of things that complicate this.

The first is the people who usually are late.

What do you mean?

People that wake up late and go to sleep?

Go to sleep late and wake up late.

They have an overwhelmingly higher level of depression because human notice that people who go to sleep early and wake up early, they do better in life.

They notice that.

They just perform better.

They perform.

But the question is: is that intrinsic to the system or is that society?

Because society starts things usually early or late.

That's a hard question.

We discriminate against late rises.

In a way, we discriminate.

And I'm not so sure that the circadian system is that variable in the human population.

I mean, clearly, there are maybe some genetic factors that make a small percentage of like everything with the bell shape.

But I think most of the time the light environment may play a role.

And once, as you, as we've talked about, this is a long-term effect of light.

Once you get into a rhythm, it's hard to break out of that rhythm because if you start sleeping late and waking up late, you're not getting the morning sunlight.

Right.

And so you're just going to be late.

It seems to me.

is the case is that the only way to really know if you're meant to be an early bird, as they call it, an early person or a late person, or somewhere in between, is to get morning sunlight and figure out whether or not that makes you feel better.

So what should people do in the afternoon slash evening time in terms of their light viewing behavior?

I mean, the best thing to do is to let the natural light creep in into darkness, right?

That would be the best.

But clearly, that would be inefficient.

You want to go home, you want to read, you want to talk to your kids, you want to talk to your family.

So I think, you know, it's nice to extend the day i don't think that's wrong if you somehow can block that light from affecting your circadian clock you do keep your home quite dim to dark at night i am an extreme but i measured it for myself and i asked raisy my wife if she's okay with it she also liked the dimness both of us can see well in in dim conditions but i think you have to measure it for yourself you really have to do it's a very simple experiment just try to dim the light as much as you can i i call it the minimum amount of light you require to see comfortably.

You know, use red light that is very dim if you want to keep the room for sleeping.

Red light that is very dim has very small effect on

circadian clock.

And below 10 lux of red light literally doesn't affect sleep at all.

So there are ways to do it.

I've seen you check your phone after dark once or twice

and you did it by sort of pointing your phone away from you, right?

It actually makes sense that, you know, if you shine a flashlight in your eye, it's much brighter than if you're sharing.

Light only draws in direct lines.

So if you just look on the side, most of the light is going to go this way, and you're only seeing this.

And even when I check, sometimes I check it so fast and switch it off so fast.

So ideally, I should not check iPhones and iPads.

I don't use iPad at night because it's hard to lower it enough because it's a huge.

But even my iPhone, I try not to use it at night.

You had what I consider absolutely landmark, beautiful paper published in Nature a few years ago, showing that if you disrupt the

exposure to light or the timing of the exposure to light, that there are dramatic effects on the stress system and on the learning and memory system.

So if I interpret that correctly, that could mean that when we view light and how much light could make us feel happier or less happy or even depressed, stressed, learning, et

Bingo.

Even if we're sleeping and waking up at the appropriate time.

Bingo.

I mean, eventually, because we're talking about the whole system, eventually when you start having the other problems, you also develop sleep problems.

But you're absolutely right.

And in fact, now research from Diego Fernandez in the lab have found that now we know that they actually require different brain regions.

So we don't only have a theory, we don't only have a light environment that showed they can be dissociated.

We know that they use completely different brain regions.

So the SCN that I told you about earlier, the place where the central pacemaker is, the one that receives direct input from the retina through the IPRGCs to adjust your circadian clock, is not.

the area that receives the light input for mood regulation.

It's a completely different brain region.

And what's really amazing, this region also receives direct input from the IPRGCs, but projects to areas in the brain that are known to regulate mood, including the ventral, medial,

prefrontal cortex, which has been studied for many years to be impacted in a human depression.

So just by this amazing serendipity to find that a region that is so deep in the advanced brain, like the prefrontal cortex is your executive brain, one of the most elaborated in humans, to see that they receive input from this ancient photoreceptor was stunning to us.

How does that finding inform daily protocols for you or for other people?

So that's why we came up with the tripartite model because as a circadian biologist, I only thought of light through the circadian clock affecting behavior.

As a sleep biologist, they only thought of the homeostatic drive affecting sleep, affecting behavior.

And for people who study light for vision and other functions, they thought only of the environmental input.

But now if you put them all together, you get with this tripartite model where it's really mind-boggling and it makes so much sense.

The organism doesn't want to depend on a single component.

But if you could incorporate these three together, you could have a beautiful system that is well adapted.

So let me tell you the sleep-wake cycle, right?

So we know there is a homeostatic drive to affect sleep.

We've had beautiful talks about that.

Which is basically the longer you're awake, the more you want to be asleep.

So that's your homeostatic drive.

We've talked about the circadian influence of sleep and the fact that light-dark cycle affects affects the circadian system, which eventually affects sleep.

So these two components are well understood.

Now, the third factor is your direct light or environmental input.

How much stress, how much light you get from there also can highly impact sleep.

So even if you have a good circadian and homeostatic drive, if you're getting light at the wrong time of the day or if you're being stressed and thinking,

then your sleep is going to suffer.

So you have to think of the three together to have a beautiful sleep-wake cycle.

Let's talk about food and eating and appetite.

You had yet another.

Yes, I greatly admire your success in this way.

Yet another incredible discovery showing that there are

direct

effects of light on appetite and feeding behavior.

So for somebody who's interested in affecting their eating behavior, how should they use light in order to adjust their eating behavior?

right so now that i've told you about all these interactions between the different inputs to the circadian clock just you think about it as an engineer what would be the best thing the best thing is to know when your food times happen in the day when should you get light and where is your circadian when is your circadian clock in your system right

so if you eat at very specific times of the day that's another signal that is telling your body your clock you're in a certain time of the day so if you're having lunch at the correct time every day and you're getting bright light now you have two systems that are informing your clock your clock is going to be better so regular meal times regular meantiles that fit your circadian clock so and in fact if you do that when when I started doing this and it helped me lose weight is that I'm exposing myself to the right amount of light dark cycle i'm eating at regular time it is amazing you will be not hungry let's say let's say you eat at noon you will not feel any hunger at 11.45.

And then all of a sudden, the hunger jumps in.

This is clearly not an energy issue because it could not be that drastic.

Right.

No, the desire to eat is mainly driven by these

cues, these hormone cues that are very exquisitely timed to sleepwake cycle, but also to light.

Exactly.

How regular are you?

or do you recommend people be about meal times?

Are we talking about down to the minute?

Like if I...

Absolutely not.

All right.

So 12 noon is my normal lunch, let's say.

Plus or minus half an hour.

Okay.

Yeah.

So eat around between 11.30 and 12.30.

If that's the time.

And it depends if you also do multiple meals.

Remember, three meals, that's a decision that somebody came up with.

I don't know why.

Nowadays, fewer people are doing that, I think.

Yeah.

Given our friend Sachin Panda's work.

Right.

I mean, so you could have two meals.

You could have very multiple meals that are distributed across your active time some people are not hungry early in the day they might be late shifted people in which case eating later in the day will work well for them work as long as they don't eat early in the morning that's just you have to work with your schedule with your active schedule what we're talking about really is finding your ideal sleep schedule exactly and finding your ideal eating schedule exactly and understanding how those two things interact and you know the nice thing as you said finding them out is going to help you to understand how they interact because we know from the tripartite model that they are all interconnected.

And for each person, they're going to be interconnected differently.

It's striking to me that in all animals, besides humans, if they deviate too much from the appropriate exposure to light and light-dark cycle, they essentially don't mate and or die and or get killed off.

But in humans, we are able to override that at least to some extent.

But the ways in which we suffer appear to be things like obesity, metabolic syndromes, reproductive syndromes that accompany the other syndromes, you know, endocrine syndromes, and mood and depressive disorders.

Is there any effort at the level of the

nationally or laboratories that you're aware of to try and use light in order to improve mood and mental health?

I mean, honestly, this is my moonshot.

This is the thing that I think people,

because it's,

I say, don't take a pill, take a photon.

And not, I mean, you take pills, it's important.

I'm just making it that really we have an opportunity right now with the incredible advances of LED lights, of changing spectra of light, of regulating intensities.

And just to associate, just for simple changes, you could really improve sleep-wake cycle, productivity.

And still you could actually get more done.

Because as we've talked about, when you have all these these messed up now you have to sleep more but your sleep is fragmented it's not very good and you can't focus and you can't focus when you don't have alertness when you need the alertness so having all these you could allow you to do even more actually at the end than less and that's the the exciting part of it

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Let's talk about jet lag.

What are the two or three things that people can do to adjust their schedule quickly?

Like, let's say fall classes are starting, you start a new job, or you have a baby or a puppy or whatever.

What is the best way to shift the clock quickly?

So it's very simple, as we've talked yesterday.

So imagine you're in the outside with no environmental, with no industrial light.

If your body thinks you're in early evening and you see a bright light, what does this tell you?

Oh, wait, this is not early evening yet.

It's still early afternoon or late afternoon.

So I have to delay my clock to go back to late afternoon.

So if you get light, early in the evening, it delays your clock.

So what does it mean?

Meaning that makes you want to go to sleep later yes it delays your clock so later in the night later in your night

and actually it just happens that in humans you get a temperature in the deer later in the night low temperature in your body after that lights start advancing your clock if i understand correctly what you're saying is

if your typical wake-up time is say 7 a.m

then your low point in temperature probably occurs somewhere around 5 a.m.

And if you view light right about around then, it's going to essentially advance your clock.

Yeah, because then your body thinks, oh, it's seven o'clock, so it'll advance your clock by one to two hours.

But if I were to view light, say at 3 a.m.

Then it would probably delay my clock.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

So, and then let's say I land in a new schedule.

I want to adjust to a new schedule.

Let's say I didn't manage to do anything with my light viewing before I went and I didn't do, I didn't anticipate the trip.

Suddenly, I'm on a new schedule.

Okay.

I was told that one of the ways to help shift the clock and to avoid gastrointestinal issues is to eat on the local schedule

to start basically behaving like a local, even though your circadian clock will take a little bit of time to catch up.

Absolutely.

But you have to remember the light, right?

So let's now that we explained it very simply, let's take a very simple example, right?

New York to Italy.

That's a simple example.

New York time, Italy time, six hour difference, right?

So let's say you fly from new york at night you reach italy at eight o'clock in the morning what is the time in your new york time you although you reach six hours back six hours

it's 2 a.m so when you land italy you want to avoid light like the plague yeah you could eat but you really don't want to get alive right because otherwise it's going to delay

you is going to send you to california instead of sending you to italy right what samurai saying is so crucial

Just because getting bright light in your eyes early in the day is really beneficial when you're at home, when you travel to a new time zone, you have to take into account where your body thinks you are.

And so if you're looking at the Italian sunrise, having just flown from New York to Italy, and you didn't prepare for that trip by waking up a little bit earlier in anticipation,

and you view light at 2 A.

Excuse me, at 6 or 7 a.m.

Italian time, beautiful Italian sunrise, you are going to delay your clock.

You're going to basically throw yourself back to California, but you are in Italy.

You're going to throw your biology back to California and you are going to be up in the middle of the Italian night and you're going to be

miserable.

It's very important

to avoid getting the wrong light information when you're trying to adjust your body because otherwise it shifts you to the other to the other cycle.

Absolutely, right?

You are one of these people that has such vigor.

I think a lot of your ability to work hard and focus and really do so many things at an impressive level is because you think about these issues and you think about when you're going to be optimal for focus, when you're going to be optimal for exercise when and the when is the key it's and i think a lot of people live in the landscape of feeling like there's something broken inside them i really agree with you that i think part of the reason i'm continuing to be able to do this that I really think about it and I make sure that I keep everything aligned.

And that actually helps me a lot.

Like I don't suffer in sleep.

I don't suffer in waking up.

I never use a timer to wake up.

System is so aligned.

It works.

A lot of times, people will say, How come I go to sleep, I fall asleep fine, but then I wake up at three or four in the morning and can't fall back asleep.

Is it possible that those people were supposed to go to bed at 8 p.m.?

Yeah, I mean, it is possible, uh, or it's possible that their clock is completely misaligned, that they are getting maybe enough time at night when they are supposed, and then they possibly feel so sleepy in the day.

So, there, all these are possible combinations.

Oh, that's an interesting idea.

I hadn't considered so, I mean, that what they think is their sleep, their body is so out of whack with the light-dark cycle that it's actually a nap.

A nap or the weaker part of the sleep.

I mean, you see this in when you travel to different time zone before you adjust.

You go to sleep really well, but two hours later, you're fully up.

Two hours.

If you were so tired and this is your regular sleep, there's no way you're going to wake up in two hours.

Let's talk about seasonality a little bit.

Are there other effects of seasonality on humans that we are aware of?

Honestly, you could see it perfectly, I think, in Scandinavia.

I mean, you could talk to people who live in.

Sure, they get seasonal depression.

What seasonal depression is one, but actually when you start asking them questions, they tell you like in the winter, they barely could wake up, they barely have the energy before even depression.

Even people who don't get seasonal depression, they'll tell you our energy level is lower.

Our ability to go to work is not the same.

And in the summer, Most people actually sleep very little.

They tell you we really can,

we feel like we're manic, we have all this energy, and not in a negative way, in a funny way, right?

I mean, but if we want to sleep, we have to put this curtain.

I think in these situations, you could really appreciate the seasonality of humans.

I think we kind of destroyed our seasonality because we don't get exposed to that much natural light.

We have all this artificial light.

But I think, honestly, one of the things that is going to happen if they follow your recommendation, this is going to cause them to also experience some changes across the season because now they're going to see the sun differently.

If you're going to go out in the morning, in the summer, you're going to get a much brighter.

That's why I don't like the change in time.

I know people think, oh, because you're biased, you, because I think.

Wait, wait, wait, wait.

Sorry, the change in time.

Are you talking about daylight savings?

Daylight saving.

It's such a bad idea because it disrupts that rhythm that you're having.

Because I think your body, if you keep that rhythm, you will see the whole seasonality.

And I look at it from a different aspect than other people.

If you think about it, Andrew, there is a situation where you're getting light perfectly well, and then all of a sudden they delay it by one hour.

And then even though it's the summer, your buddy now, if you're still not adjusting, think, oh, wait, what happened?

What kind of happened?

Well, I'm glad you're bringing this up because I always thought, you know, what's the big deal?

One hour, right?

One hour shift, you know, spring forward.

It's so hard to adjust to one hour actually.

But the, But this goes back to the beginning of our discussion.

It's not just one hour.

Right.

Because it's one hour across that one day, but there's this cumulative effect on the clock and these three elements of your tripartite model, right?

The homeostatic sleep and the like direct effects on mood.

And when it's so close, it's sometimes hard to figure out how to adjust it perfectly because we're already sleep deprived in our society and then you shift it by, you know, so it just, it all accumulates and it has no benefit i just don't understand why they do this it makes no sense well i think that the reason they do it is because they don't understand the biology because one hour seems trivial unless you understand the the repercussions of that one hour shift because what's also clear now based on what you're saying is that that one hour shift is taking you out of alignment with the natural light dark cycle in exactly the wrong direction.

It's pushing people to get even later in the summer when light is going to push you later anyway.

It's really compounding the problem that already exists.

Samer, this has been an amazing march through the importance of light.

I'm certain that people are going to start thinking about how to change their relationship with light as a way to anchor everything that they do and that's important to their health.

Let's talk a little bit about where people can find you.

Your laboratory is at the National Institutes of Mental Health.

He is head of the chronobiology unit, all these things that I've mentioned earlier.

But

you are active on Twitter and Instagram.

Right.

So, what is your Twitter handle?

It's at Samur Hattar, and I think the same for Instagram.

So, definitely give him a follow there and on Twitter.

And

I'm sure that he'll be happy to answer questions

and

entertain any and all discussions about chronobiology.

Absolutely.

Yep.

And light.

Yeah.

Great.

Thank you, Samer.

Awesome.

Thank you, Ang.