 Alright what's up guys so I want to talk about the importance of sunlight in regards to lucid dreaming and you know sleeping better, energy and your overall well-being in general because so for those of you who don't know I've been travelling around Asia, I'm currently in Vietnam and I've been staying in this place which doesn't have any windows, it's part of a high-rise sort of apartment complex but for some reason there just aren't any windows so there's no natural light whatsoever coming into the room and before staying here I had no idea that it was this it had this much of an effect on your overall well-being because I've been feeling like fatigued a lot of the time and you know my wake-up time has been so it's been so difficult to wake up early normally I'll wake up anywhere between 6 and 8 in the morning but I've been waking up at sort of half 9 10 most days I have actually working up earlier a couple of days but it's been really difficult and the main reason for that is just that there's no natural light coming to the room and it made me think about the importance of the sun and how your circadian rhythm plays a huge part in your overall energy levels and you know how specifically how you can lucid dream but also how you can feel throughout the day so I just want to recap this I made a video a while ago and you know in which I spoke about the circadian rhythm how it affects lucid dreaming that sort of stuff but it this has really made me realize how important the sun and your circadian rhythm actually is to a huge number of different things and I just want to recap why that is so when the sun rises in the morning what happens is we get a spike of serotonin which is your one of your wake-up hormones this is similar to adrenaline but not quite the same it has a similar effect in that it sort of gets your blood flowing it gets your heart rate slightly raised and it generally wakes you up and makes you feel energetic now this isn't a sudden spike this is a sort of a gradual uprising in the if it was on a chart it will be sort of a gradual curve upwards throughout the early hours of the morning it wouldn't be a sudden spike and this happened when the sunlight enters our eyes it can even enter our eyes throughout eyelids because our eyelids are sort of the light can pass through our eyelids if it's bright enough right that's why if you close your eyes in the middle of the day you you find it hard to keep them closed because the sun or you know the natural light still passes through your eyelids and makes you feel like I should open my eyes so the sun still can pass through our eyelids and so what happens is in the early hours of the morning when the sun starts to rise most of us who don't have blackout curtains will experience a slow gradual rise of awareness and awakeness and this happens over the course of two or three hours most of the time we're not aware of this we just are aware of the fact that we wake up in a moment sort of in a split second and then we're awake for the day but what really happens is your body slowly wakes up over the course of about two hours based on the light right so the light will enter your eyes through your eyelids and gradually raise the levels of serotonin and a few various other different hormones as well to the point where it becomes so high in your in your body in your bloodstream that you wake up and this is where it crosses over with in terms of lucid dreaming in the early hours of the morning because you've already slept for a while you've got a lot of melatonin in your system as well so where these two crossover okay so where we'll get on to how melatonin works in a second but where these two crossover and you've got high levels of melatonin you've already had your deep sleep and you've had several stages of REM so you've had your restorative deep sleep but you're also raising your levels of serotonin because of the Sun rising you start to get into this sweet spot for OBEs and lucid dreams where they become much much more likely and I've always said this for any technique it's always much more likely that your lucid dream in the early hours of the morning than at any other time you know it's not even close you know it's much harder to lucid dream as soon as you go to sleep as you lay down then it is to lucid dream at 5 a.m. when you've already had a good few hours of deep sleep anyway and now recently I've been speaking about moving towards you know techniques are more natural and more soft I guess on your body things that don't involve the way back to bed in the wild and but even those even those techniques the the method that you're using is still going to be focused on lucid dreaming at that time of the morning that's just when it happens in the vast majority of cases the time that you lucid dream is the early hours of the morning regardless of which technique or method you're using so going back to the importance of the circadian rhythm it's really it really is important that you let that sunlight wake you up gradually over the course of two hours in the morning meaning it's important that you let the sunlight get into your room when it needs to so for me the best the best solution for this is to have cursions which are not completely blackout regardless of what some people may say but curtains which block out enough of the light that it's dark when you want to go to sleep but the curtains to also let enough light through in the morning if you have them closed now in an ideal world we would have really smart curtains which and you could they are on the market they're just quite expensive we'd have quite expensive smart curtains where we shut them at night or you know we press a button and they close themselves at night blocks all the lights out you go to sleep and then in the morning at a certain time they very slowly open before sunrise so that the Sun can rise raise your serotonin levels enter your your eyelids and your eyes and wake you up gradually so that you wake up with the Sun right and natural circadian rhythm this is the easiest way of doing that but the problem is those curtains with that mechanism like that that costs you know a lot of money for most people so most of us just close our curtains or not and let the world do its thing but looping this back to the problem here I'm staying in Vietnam like I said there's no natural light and so because I don't have that there's just no way of knowing when to wake up even if I set an alarm it doesn't feel like the morning it feels like I've been woken up at 2 a.m. where I haven't had enough sleep no matter what time the alarm is set for at the moment when I wake up it always feels like it's too early because there's no light there's no indication of what time it is other than my phone and unless I am disciplined enough to walk out across the room turn the lights on and then tell myself like right we're gonna wake up now it's very difficult it's very easy as well to just roll over go back to sleep and then before you know it's 12 o'clock and you just don't know when to wake up and it really is that bad like there's just no natural light in this room at all there's one balcony but it's like a sort of inside outside balcony there's no way of the Sun actually getting into the room so like I've said that's how serotonin works that's why it's important really important to have a way of the Sun entering your eyelids now what I haven't spoken about is melatonin now the way melatonin works is throughout the day especially as it gets darker and as you experience less blue or natural light and when I say blue I mean that can mean like a TV screen or a phone the less light you experience throughout the evening the more melatonin starts to rise in your bloodstream and in your body to the point where you become so tired that you pass out now that melatonin will sort of peak in your body some at some point during the night and then starts to decline now when the melatonin levels decline and meet the rising serotonin levels okay so if you imagine melatonin will peak like this as you start to experience more darkness in the evening and when the Sun goes down and then it will start to drop off throughout the night as you get closer to the morning now as you as you see this drop off here what will happen is so this is line melatonin stone this is a half-life of melatonin this slowly declining downwards serotonin will be slowly increasing upwards and where the two meet right where the two lines meet so you're rising serotonin and you're decreasing melatonin where they where the two hormones meet in the middle that is the sweet spot for lucid dreams and always has been that is a very very good time to have a lucid dream you're much more likely to do it no matter which technique you use and the lucky to last longer and be more vivid as well so the one challenge I want to issue for this this episode is just to just try and be more aware of your circadian rhythm and to try and get more in line with it so try and if you have natural light you know obviously for a few weeks I don't have any natural light here but if you have natural light try and let it enter your room in the morning as best as you can you know leave the curtains open a crack if you if you have to if they're dark curtains for example and in the evening try and turn out all lights and artificial light sources like your phone your screens and everything like that and if you have dimmer lights dimmer switches turn them down an hour before bed and just try and get into that relaxed state because the more melatonin you can build up in the evening the easier you're gonna find it to fall asleep this is a really good cure also natural remedy for sleep disorders and insomnia as well not all sleep disorders but the vast majority of them can be massively helped right not cured but helped by getting in more in tune with your circadian rhythm even if it's hard at first and you have to force yourself to turn off your screens and dim your lights in the evening after about a week your body will acclimatize and it will be very easy to continue doing that you know you'll start to feel tired when the sun goes down and your friends might say well why are you going to bed so early you know eight or nine or even half eight in the evening but it you'll feel better for it you know when you if you go to bed when the sun goes down and wake up when the sun rises you will feel so much better all right so go ahead and subscribe like leave a comment and I'll see you next time