Dr. Matt Walker

And I'll go around and I'll shut lights down.

In my bedroom, I will actually have a smart light bulb, and it is way down to probably as little as maybe five lux.

And lux is just a metric of the light.

It's way down there, and it's also very deep orange, sort of red, and we can come on to why that's the case.

So that's the first thing.

Even before you're thinking about sleep, start to decrease the light.

For example, if you were there at, let's say, for a standard sleep schedule at 10 p.m., and normally you are getting into bed at 10.30 p.m., but you feel pretty wide awake, if there was an electrical blackout and you lost your phone, magnetic too, phone goes down, lights go down, total blackout.

My suspicion is that fairly soon you'd say, gosh, I actually feel quite sleepy.

Whereas if the lights were blazing, you've got your phone, television's on, lots of stimulation, you're probably going to think 10.30, no, I could probably push through for at least another hour.

So try to dissipate that light.

And then if you need to, wear an eye mask, blackout curtains, always good as well.

But we need that darkness at night because when you give the brain the signal of darkness, it releases effectively a brake pedal.

That brake pedal has normally been applied by way of light on the release of that spigot of melatonin.

And when you take the brake pedal off, it starts pumping out into the brain.

You can also then, of course, probably reverse engineer this trick in the morning.

And this is another component of why you've been, I think, such a wonderful advocate for light in the morning.

It does many things, but one of the things that it does

is reapply that brake on melatonin and therefore you lose the signal to your brain of darkness.

That's what melatonin in some ways is doing.

We often call it the hormone of darkness or the vampire hormone.