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A clearer head

Why a bright kitchen does not wake you up

Morning daylight is what makes you feel awake. The lights in the house are not the same thing.

Callum, Avocado Ninja · 4 minute read

A kitchen door open onto a garden in morning light

The alarm goes, and the easy move is another few minutes under the covers. Then you are up, the kitchen is bright, and you still do not feel awake.

You want more energy. You want to feel less foggy in your mind. You want to feel awake. The lights are already on, and it has not happened.

Light is how your body knows the day has started

Your body keeps a clock. The usual name is the circadian clock, which only means a cycle of about a day. It decides when you feel alert and when you feel sleepy. Morning light moves that clock earlier. Light in the evening moves it later.

Earlier is the one you want. You feel more alert through the day, and sleepy when night actually arrives. Get the light at the wrong time, or miss it, and the day starts late inside you even though you are already out of bed.

This is not a trick and it is not a supplement. It is the signal the body grew up using. People who study sleep and mood have shown that light changes the clock, the night’s sleep, and how you feel in the day. The practical version is simple. Get bright light soon after you wake, and keep the bright light out of the late evening.

I spent years fixing everything except this

I ate well. I trained. I sat and breathed. I was still sleeping badly, and I was tired and short-tempered through the day. I had been doing that for more than ten years before I noticed the thing I had skipped was the light I was standing in.

Once the mornings started with real daylight, sleep came more easily, and the energy I had been chasing turned up. The other habits finally had somewhere to land. I had not been short of effort. I had been short of the signal that tells the body the day has begun.

A bright room is not daylight.

A bright room is still a dim room

Brightness is measured in lux. A lux is simply how much light is landing on you. A typical office is about 500 lux. Full daylight outside, not even standing in the sun itself, is about 25,000 lux. Direct sun can reach 100,000.

A normal officeabout 500 lux
Full daylight, outsideabout 25,000
Standing in the sunup to 100,000

So the kitchen can feel bright and still be a small fraction of the light your body uses as a morning signal. Fifty times less, in the ordinary case. Standing at the window keeps you in the room. The light that does the job is the light outside.

Step outside not long after you wake

Do it within the first hour. Sooner is better, before the day fills up.

  1. On a clear morning, five to ten minutes is enough to start. On a grey morning, stay for fifteen to twenty. Even five minutes of genuinely bright light can move the body clock. A cloudy sky is dimmer, so you stay longer.
  2. Sunglasses off. Face the daylight, not the sun. Eyes open. If it feels harsh, blink or look slightly away. Do not stare at the sun.
  3. The same part of the morning, most weekdays. A signal you repeat is the one the clock can follow.

You do not need a clear blue sky, and you do not need to sunbathe. You need to be outdoors, in the daylight, for those minutes. A grey British morning still beats the kitchen.

When it is still dark at the alarm

In winter a lot of us are up before the sun. A 10,000 lux light is the indoor stand-in. That number is the brightness of the box at a set distance. Boxes used for this sit around 7,000 to 10,000 lux, which is in the range of strong daylight and far above a normal room.

Put it where you have breakfast. Sit about 16 to 24 inches from it, unless the box states a different distance, in which case follow the box. Twenty to thirty minutes, within the first hour of waking. Eyes open. Do not look straight into it. Have breakfast while it faces you.

We do not sell this lamp, and we do not take a cut. Choose one that states 10,000 lux at a set distance. If you have an eye problem, or bipolar disorder, ask your doctor before you use a bright box.

Light is the first part of the morning. What you drink, and when you eat, sit next to it. The morning plan times the rest to when you actually wake up.

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The clock, the mood, and the lux figures are from Blume, Garbazza and Spitschan, Somnologie, 2019. The minutes outdoors follow Andrew Huberman’s public light protocol, which lines up with that paper’s finding that a few minutes of bright light can move the clock. The lamp timing is Mayo Clinic guidance for a 10,000 lux box: about 20 to 30 minutes, about 16 to 24 inches unless the box says otherwise, eyes open, not looking straight at the light.