The way we live and what we eat have a huge impact on our hormones. This is something I’ve talked about for years and is generally accepted (at least within the holistic wellness community). Many of us are familiar with the fact that the sun helps us make vitamin D, but I would say a smaller proportion of people realize that natural light also signals our bodies to make hormones. Specifically, morning light. This is what I talk about on this podcast episode with carrie bennett.
We have a body clock built into our bodies that measures a 24-hour day. It knows that there is a period of daylight and a period of darkness. It even knows all the specific shifts in light throughout the day, which is why syncing up with the natural light outside is important. Why is this important? Light is the signal to our circadian rhythm that helps organize all of the essential functions of our cells. Our brain has a clock that instantaneously communicates to every cell via vibration. This vibration changes based on the time of day that your eyes perceive. Our eyes have these little light sensors in the back. There are a bunch of sensors for blue light specifically. Blue light from the sun is the best light to tell our bodies the time because it varies based explicitly on the time of day. For example, during the early morning hours at dawn, there is no blue light, then sunrise occurs, and blue light starts to appear, then it increases its intensity until we reach solar noon, then it goes back down until after sunset when there is no blue light. Our eyes capture the varying amount of blue light throughout the day, and that’s how our body tells time. Our cells have sensors that need to know the time to run specific programs and processes in the body, including hormone release.
Natural light from the sun tells our brain that it’s time to wake up, stop making melatonin, and start making cortisol as well as sex hormones and thyroid hormones.
As soon as the day starts and the clock in our brain starts to vibrate, cortisol is produced via our hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA Axis). Before our bodies make sex or stress hormones, they first make pregnenolone via our mitochondria. This is what becomes cortisol and sex hormones.
The pregnenolone produced by our mitochondria from the morning light signal makes cortisol and will also make a balanced amount of other sex hormones. Pregnenolone is a master hormone that then gets broken down into other sex hormones like testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone.
Our hypothalamic-pituitary-thyroid axis also gets kick-started at sunrise, but it gets optimized when the sun gets a little higher, and we have UVA light appearing. This starts to optimize the conversion of tyrosine into thyroid hormone. This is why UVA light is so important for thyroid health. UVA light appears usually a little later in the morning (depending on your location and time of year). You can use the Circadian App to figure out when UVA rise is in your area.
As you can tell, that first morning light and UVA light that we find in the morning is extremely powerful for supporting healthy hormones. Carrie goes into a ton more detail on how blue light impacts us and how to sync up your biological clock with the sun throughout the day (even if you work an office job). Don’t forget to listen to the podcast episode here!
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