The 30-Day Morning Routine Challenge

The human body functions on a schedule. This schedule is widely known as your circadian rhythm.

But how does your body know what time it is and manage this schedule?

Spoiler alert, you looking at the clock doesn’t do the trick. The answer is light.

Your retina (a part of the back of your eyeball) has a set of cells whose only job is to communicate levels of brightness to your brain’s “master clock” (Graham & Wong). Those cells respond strongly to short, blue wavelengths. Daylight delivers far more of these than the artificial light in your home or office, even on a cloudy day (Brown et al. 2022).

Our internal clock does not run at 24 hours, it averages 24 hours and 11 minutes (Czeisler et al. 1999). So if it wasn’t for morning sunlight resetting your clock, you would be going to bed more than an hour later every week, and in about two months you would be sleeping through the day and awake all night.

So why does this matter?

Your immune system spends the day fighting off immediate threats and spends the night ensuring your body builds the infrastructure to fight against those same threats in the future (Besedovsky et al. 2012). And at night, during your deepest stage of sleep, you release a large pulse of growth hormone (Van Cauter & Plat 1996), which supports tissue growth and repair throughout the body; including muscle, bone and cartilage (Brinkman et al. 2023). So if your body is not properly aligned with the time of day, all of these crucial processes can be negatively impacted.

Another instance of this I found particularly interesting is Melatonin, the sleep chemical. To get a good night’s sleep you need melatonin, which your body can actually produce on its own. But the timing of when your body decides to produce melatonin is actually determined by whether or not you were exposed to light in the morning (Ohashi et al. 2023). A delayed melatonin response might mean you have lower quality sleep, which itself is a huge health risk (NHLBI 2022). In fact, in 2022 the American Heart Association added sleep to its list of the eight essential measures of cardiovascular health, placing it alongside diet, exercise, blood pressure and not smoking (Lloyd-Jones et al. 2022).

Morning light is a pretty powerful health hack (and it’s free!)

The benefits of sunlight go beyond regulating your internal clock. Sunlight carries ultraviolet light, or UV. One kind, UVB, is what your skin uses to make Vitamin D, whose health benefits we discuss in a dedicated Flourish Find. Another kind, UVA, which researchers showed can widen arteries and cause a drop in blood pressure (Liu et al. 2014). For context, high blood pressure is a leading driver of stroke, heart attack, heart failure and kidney damage (World Health Organization 2023).

A study with over 86,000 adults showed that exposure to daytime light can lead to a lower risk of depression, PTSD, psychosis and self harm (Burns et al. 2023).

So when you wake up, step outside. And if you can’t, then open a window. Your health depends on your body knowing what time it is!

Building a routine takes dedication and consistency, but there is also a science to it. New behaviours attach to things you already do on a regular basis. A new behaviour needs an anchor, something you already do reliably, to attach itself to. Across 94 experiments and more than 8,000 people, those who tied a behaviour to a specific existing cue followed through far more often than those who simply intended to do it (Gollwitzer & Sheeran 2006).

I know that thirty days will not make it automatic, but this is a good starting point for finding the morning routine that works best for me.

Coming soon.