Getting in Sync

Musings on why getting aligned with natural rhythms an be especially impactful for us neurodivergent folks.

Recently I overheard a conversation in a waiting room. “Do you know what I read the other day? Apparently there’s this phenomenon in hospitals. For some reason, whenever there’s a full moon there’s an increase in certain kinds of things people come into the hospital for, I don’t remember what exactly….but isn’t that the craziest thing? Isn’t it weird?”

In true neurodivergent fashion I bluntly inserted myself into the conversation. “Births and deaths, for starters,” I said. “More storms too, so probably more accidents. And no, it’s not crazy at all. It’s totally natural. What’s crazy is people never going outside and understanding they are connected to anything. What’s crazy is staring into a little screen all day.”

I was going to continue on, but I managed to reel myself in and not release the full tangent I could feel building inside of me. I was remembering the book High Tide in Tucson, in which author Barbara Kingsolver recounts the story of going to the Bahamas with her kids and bringing back a  bunch of seashells. Upon return to her home in Tucson, she discovered a hermit crab amidst the shells and she decided to build it a terrarium.

She found herself observing the crab from time to time, and noticed it would get very active at certain times and she wondered what that was about. Following a hunch, she looked up the tide tables in the bahamas and discovered the crab was getting active in rhythm with the tides, even thousands of miles away in Arizona. Removing the crab from its environment did not remove the environment from the crab…

Personally I get a little testy about the moon because the full moon means less sleep whether I am tracking the lunar cycle or not. I’m not even into astrology and will often only catch it in retrospect—why did I sleep so poorly last night? Was it a full moon? Oh, that figures. And if it’s a supermoon (when the moon is even closer to the earth than usual), the effects are even more pronounced. I can black out the windows, but something in me is still tracking it, whether I want to or not.

But much as I begrudge the moon, I do not want to sever my connection from it. In fact, I can’t think of a single time in which getting more connected with natural rhythms was detrimental to anyone’s health—emotional or physical. In fact, the opposite. The more disconnected we become, the more likely we are to get out of whack.

Consider melatonin. When you think of melatonin, you probably think of a little pill that people take before bedtime to get a better night’s sleep. Am I right? That’s how melatonin has been marketed, because that’s how others are able to profit off of it.

But the reality is that melatonin is produced naturally in our bodies and is cued by light signals. Consider it a privilege if you can get outside to experience sunlight in the early hours of day and have ways to block blue light after sunset (more on that shortly), because this will cue your body to regulate its production of melatonin, reset your circadian rhythm, and influence the entire hormonal cascade within your body. That’s pretty remarkable!

In a more natural world, we simply would not need melatonin (or anything) in a capsule. But it’s not like the capsule is our only choice now and it’s definitely not our best choice. Granted, this is tougher with some schedules and there are those for whom it is unrealistic.

Unfortunately, if we don’t ever get outside in the earlier hours of the day and if we are saturated with blue light after sunset (which is in the vast majority of lighting these days), those signals get all scrambled and can contribute to a lot of issues with our health and adequate sleep.

Last year I did quite a bit of experimenting with all of this, which broadly goes into something many refer to as ‘light therapy.’ I started off by making it a point to get outside for the sunrise, and walked 15 minutes or so to get to where I could see it (when it wasn’t completely overcast). My husband went with me on this, and we really enjoyed the ritual of it and felt some benefit from it in a matter of days.

The challenge is that the time of sunrise is always changing, albeit slowly, and so some times of the year are going to be more convenient that others. If you have breakfast at a fixed time, does that change due to going out for sunrise? What if you pretty regularly go to the bathroom at a regular time in the morning and suddenly you’re getting the urge to go when you’re out on your walk to see the sun? For someone who can get pretty stuck in their routines, I was both attracted to and frustrated by the dynamic nature of the practice.

Ultimately, I ended up making a bit of an adjustment. I now go out for the sunrise, but just stand in this one spot in my yard for a few minutes to orient myself and remember my place in the world. I’m always in the middle of doing a whole list of other things to get ready for the day and it’s a bit inconvenient to do it, but I never regret it.

I like that it gets me outside of myself, that it puts things in prospective, that it makes me remember that I am one being on this giant planet in a much larger solar system and my all consuming anxieties are just the tiniest speck in the entirety of things. It’s very freeing.

When my schedule allows, I then get back outside again for my morning walk at the UVA rise, which is basically an hour and a half after sunrise. UVA (ultraviolet A light)  comes into play when the sun is around 10 degrees above the horizon, and it affects us down to the molecular level.

Writes Carrie Bennett, MS, “The benefits of morning sunlight extend far beyond mere pain relief and mood enhancement. Exposure to these specific light frequencies has a profound impact on various aspects of our health and wellness. Hormone regulation, energy support, and sleep quality are just a few of the many areas that morning sunlight can positively influence.”

This has really worked for me. I feel more like walking at this time (could it be because I am wired to be most active at this time?), and my own experience with going out at this time has been a marked increase in my overall capacity. I have more energy on the walk itself and then just have more capacity throughout the rest of the day to do ‘all the things’ I need to do. I think that must mean less pain because pain is probably the biggest zapper of energy in my day to day life.

It’s fascinating to me that doing the exact same walk at 9 am vs 2 PM could have this kind of an impact due to the different cues my body is getting from the sun at those times. At the same time though, I’m wondering if this is one of those times being hypersensitive can actually be a blessing rather than a curse. So many of us neurodivergent folks are so sensitive to fluorescent lighting, and we tend to just see that as something annoying we have to live with.

But perhaps we are also the ones who can benefit the most from getting reconnected with natural light? I do know a few people who have said this kind of work is the thing that has made the biggest impact on their health, and that’s not something to take lightly.

​For both my clients who struggle with insomnia as well as my clients who struggle with being alert and focused during the daytime, getting out in the morning light can be an important tool in your toolbox, and it is almost never one that people have experimented with already. Again, in our consumer culture we are much more likely to reach for a pill or an energy drink first. I think there is a lot of potential here (and it’s free!)

When it comes to blocking blue light after sundown though, I have not yet found a way to do it without buying a few things. I mean, if you have a little cabin without electricity you can hole away in every night, go for it, and be careful with those candles, but that is not my situation.

It does seem to be getting more common for folks to have adjusted the settings on their phones and laptops for night time, and that is a great start, but in an ideal world we would not be seeing any blue light after sun down. You can make yourself go absolutely nuts trying to cut it all out though, since every little electronic, your smoke detector, your air purifier, etc. are going to have little lights on them.

I’ve also been encouraged with there being less of a stigma around wearing tinted glasses. I recently had a consultation with someone online who was in a timezone three hours later than my own, and the clinician showed up on Zoom with what appeared to be sun glasses. She told me they were blue light blocking glasses (more on these below) and that they were enabling her to do these later evening sessions without it keeping her up all night. So rather than being embarrassed about it, it became a moment to model self care to her clients. I really like that.

In the past I only focused on cutting out blue light at bedtime to calm down my nervous system, and it always really jumped out at me when I am staying in an AIRBNB. So many lights everywhere! I would try to remember to pack little things to cover them all up with but it seemed like there was always one I couldn’t get to for one reason or another. Sleep mask to the rescue!

But this last year I decided to try out those glasses that completely block blue light, like the ones my clinician was wearing on Zoom. A colleague of mine suggested putting them on as soon as the sun sets. You can buy a cheap pair to try them out first before investing in something nicer--just make sure they actually block light in the 450-510nm range (many don't). It kind of makes everything look like it’s in candlelight, and it takes a little getting used to.

My eyes like the feel and it instantly relaxes them, but initially wearing them just made me so ultra aware of how artificial our human world is and how that artificial world has saturated everything around us. Wearing the glasses made that awareness so strong in me the first few days, and was rather disconcerting, but I did end up getting used to it. Unfortunately you can’t wear them while driving, which is a bummer since really bright headlights at night drive me bonkers.

And that reminds me of my second great find—a blue light blocking book light.
I originally got this for power outages. You can just clip it right on to you so your hands are free of a flashlight or lantern. But even better, the orange glow is not harsh at all the way a flashlight is. In the past, power outages always led to migraines due to that harsh lighting, all the more piercing against the surrounding darkness. Total score!

But then I discovered that I could also clip it to my bedside table and use it if I have to get up in the middle of the night too. I am one of those people that inevitably knocks something off the bedside table in my attempts to find the bedside lamp, so having the clip-on light right next to me eliminates that particular problem.

I am very early on still in my explorations with light therapy, but it feels like a very important piece of a larger goal I have to rewild my body and reclaim my health and wellbeing. To tap back into natural rhythms and realign myself with them, to remember that I am a human animal and not merely a consumer whose primary role it is to keep buying things that will throw me even more off balance as a strategy to keep me needing to buy ever more things. It’s slow work, but it brings me alive. I’m ready to see where the path goes next.

Special thanks to my friend and colleague Heather MacMillan, a fellow neurodivergent herbalist, for encouraging me to go deeper in my exploration with light therapy. Her commitment to these practices continues to inspire me, and I am so appreciative of her support.