Bright Idea: Sunlight Curbs Afternoon Drowsiness

News
By published
Heat and Hype: The Truth about the Scorching S

Letting in a little extra light throughout the day may do more than just lift your spirits. It could make you more alert and help you avoid an afternoon energy slump.

Ambient light influences brain functions and different aspects of human physiology such as circadian rhythm, heart rate, and hormone release. While these functions have been recognized and studies have looked at the part of the brain that induces these responses at nighttime, little has been known about daytime responses to light.

The researchers exposed a group of people to 21 minutes of bright white light in the morning while they imaged their brains. Not only were the participants more alert, but responses in certain parts of their brain also got a boost.

This boost was correlated with regions of the brain that are involved in alertness and some cognitive processes and can briefly prevent the sleepiness developed in continuous darkness, the researchers report in the Aug. 22 issue of the journal Current Biology.

The brain regions that were affected by light are also typically involved in attention and arousal regulation, Vandewalle told LiveScience. "So light affects these regulatory systems at the cerebral and behavioral level. This could be relevant for demanding jobs for example, usually performed by tired people."

Tired people can be found in offices everywhere from the equator, where the sun shines down directly, to the Arctic Circle, where for half the year folks get much less direct sunlight.

"People stay inside most of the time everywhere on the planet," Vandewalle said, adding that people should expose themselves to natural light in all countries, since light outside is always brighter than what we get in offices.

TOPICS
Sara Goudarzi
Sara Goudarzi
Sara Goudarzi is a Brooklyn writer and poet and covers all that piques her curiosity, from cosmology to climate change to the intersection of art and science. Sara holds an M.A. from New York University, Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, and an M.S. from Rutgers University. She teaches writing at NYU and is at work on a first novel in which literature is garnished with science.