The 4th Pillar of Health.

Sleep. Nutrition. Exercise.

In that order, I’d reckon...

Human health is incredible. There exists a vast range of well-studied, well-argued, deeply embodied, and diametrically opposed stances on what ‘healthy, normal, and optimal’ means. 

From fierce high-performance athletes to the average Twitch streamer, most people agree (at least in theory) on the Big 3: Sleep, Nutrition, and Exercise.

With these, you’ve got 80% of your health nailed.

There are always niche diets, latest fads, and alphabet-soup biohacks galore, but these are leaves dancing in the wind, supported by the deep roots of the Big 3. 

Over the next ~decade, a Fourth Pillar is going to make its way fully into the zeitgeist:

Light.

You've heard the early whispers... Daddy Huberman and his red light glasses. Immortal Vampire Bryan Johnson and his tirade against sunlight. Wild ones sunning their balls. It's still on the fringes, but Light is landing in public health discourse. It’s going to make waves...

Your ‘light diet’ (aka circadian biology) has a huge influence on sleep, digestion, energy, and virtually everything else going on inside of you. There’s a strong case that light ends up claiming the top place here:

Light. Sleep. Nutrition. Exercise. 

It’s that fundamental.

Circadian Rhythms & the Human Biological Clock.

Sleep/wake cycle, mood regulation, cognitive functioning, body temperature, metabolic functioning, cardiovascular health, hormone production/regulation, hunger signalling, eye health/repair, detox pathway performance, breathing patterns, urinary/kidney function, enzyme production, digestion… on and on and on.

Nearly every biological function is linked to light exposure and/or circadian rhythms. It’s staggering. To say nothing of the entire natural ecosystem's relationship to light...

When the hyper-conscious 5D spiritual influencers say ‘You are a Being of Light’ — they’re correct. You, as a biological being, cannot be meaningfully separated from light.

And when we say light in this context, we mean the sun.

More parts of your body are linked to light than any other ‘thing’ in the world. 

Chronotypes are a Scam.

Everyone hits a stage where they start coping with their ‘sleep chronotype’. The war between the ‘early birds’ and ‘night owls’—that kind of nonsense.

The human animal evolved over millennia in a deep symbiotic partnership with the sun. So much so that there are really only two kinds of humans: those aligned with the natural light cycle, and those who are dysregulated and out of sync.

Which camp are you currently in?

If you took humans out of manufactured environments and got them on good diets, no artificial light, regular sun exposure, and pleasant daily activity—give it a month and the idea of ‘night owl’ is dead and gone. 

You imagine that because you stay up late that you are somehow an exception to an evolutionary rule millions of years in the making.

If nothing else, the human animal is incredible at remaining functional despite less-than-optimal circumstances. Just because you ‘don’t feel bad’ sleeping late doesn’t mean ‘your body likes it’, and it certainly doesn’t mean ‘this is the pattern best suited for you’.

Playing God & Replacing the Sun.

Everyone’s up in arms these days about AI and the dangers of ‘playing God’. Not enough people are concerned about this aspect of playing God: replacing the Sun.

For an unfathomable amount of time, the sun was our singular source of light. For yet another mind-boggling expanse, we had fire. And now—in the time it takes to snap your fingers in evolutionary timescales—we have electricity and artificial light.

You are not adapted to artificial light.

At the level of your biology, we've re-created the Sun. Artificial light is a mini-sun, following you everywhere. 

This is playing God. We suck at it. It is not good for you. 

With continued exposure to artificial light after sunset (even during the day indoors), you dismantle and disorient every functional cycle in your body. 

Your rhythms are off across the board, and we all suffer for it.

Death by a thousand mistaken signals of ‘oh look, a strong light source in my eyes at 9pm, I guess the sun’s out, time to wake up!’.

A Better Light Diet is Simple, But Not Easy.

Welcome into your mind the idea of your ‘light diet’.

Just like food, there are better and worse types of light, good/bad times of day to receive light, etc. 

You don’t have to be perfect, but the more you dial it in, the better you feel, and the better your everyday experience becomes.

It’s straightforward to bring your light diet into greater harmony, but you probably won’t like the steps you need to take:

• Get real sunlight (not behind a window) into your eyes as soon as possible, every single morning. Super bonus points for watching the sun rise.
• No overhead and/or artificial lights after sunset. This is the final boss. No phones, no screens, no computers, no lamps, no house lights. Use candles, or deep red-spectrum light placed at ~ground/hip level (like a campfire!).
• Consider halfway interventions: red light glasses, red light settings on your screens, being more deliberate with screen time, more 'orange' light bulbs vs. stark white, and swapping lamps for candles.
• Be outside as much as possible, all day, every day. Even when cloudy, especially when cloudy.
• Build a solar base. If you’re of hyper-white ancestry like me (British, Scottish, Welsh) and you ‘can’t tan/only burn’, make it a priority to build a base tan. You’re human, it’s possible. 10 minutes of direct exposure daily, slowly increasing weekly. Schedule it. Time in the sun=good, f*ck Bryan Johnson on this one.
• Bonus points if you watch the sunset. Low-level natural sunlight (the ~1.5h windows around sunrise and sunset) is the juiciest type of light to get direct exposure to.

And like everything I write, I am not perfect at this either. We're in this together.

You will hear it here over and over again: align yourself with the flow of nature. From the Tao, to the aliveness of your emotions, to the daily solar cycle, aligning with natural rhythm and natural law is a good thing: a life-affirming, vitalizing act. 

It's the art & science of Zen Medicine.

For your body, there is no stronger natural rhythm than that of the Sun and Natural Light.

Dial it in, and feel yourself come back online. More to come.

To a good light diet,
EB.