Whether you’re an athlete looking to improve your performance during training, or you’re someone who just wants to feel a little healthier, investing in a ‘daylight lamp’ may be a good idea.
Essentially, a daylight lamp is a lamp that emits a light that is close to the wavelength that is produced by the sun. This is therefore able to essentially ‘trick’ the brain into thinking it’s witnessing a sunrise and that in turn triggers neurochemicals just the same way as the sun would.
What’s even better is that these lamps are normally combined with an alarm clock. This means you can then set it to gradually get brighter in the morning and to thereby gently rouse you out of sleep just as a real-life sunrise would.
How This Helps
Now, instead of being ‘startled awake’ by a noisy alarm and flooding your body with stress, you’re instead being gently nudged into wakefulness by the sun – just as your body was designed to be.
In the perfect case scenario, the light will gradually wake you up on its own and there will be no need for an alarm. But even if that doesn’t happen, you’ll find that you’re in a lighter stage of sleep when your alarm does go off and that it’s much nicer to get up in a room that is already light!
Your brain will produce cortisol as the sun ‘rises’ which is the hormone that works counter to melatonin to signal that it’s time for you to wake up and this then makes it much easier once the time comes.
When you combine these factors, it means that you end up waking up feeling much more refreshed and much more awake than you otherwise would and your body clock will be more accurate for the rest of the day meaning that you’ll start to feel sleepy at night when your brain starts producing melatonin.
This is particularly useful for those people who might struggle with ‘SAD’ or ‘Seasonal Affective Disorder’. This condition is characterized by feelings of lethargy or even depression during the colder months of the year. Even if you don’t suffer with SAD per say, chances are you’ll feel a little jollier and brighter during the summer and this is something that a daylight lamp can help with!
All in all, a daylight lamp can be a fantastic tool for anyone who struggles to get up in the morning or who experiences ‘sleep inertia’.