How Light Quality, Exposure, & Timing Affect Mental & Physical Health

Episode Transcript

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Hi everyone, welcome to the show. I’m Dr. Nicole, and today we are going to talk about a really interesting topic that generally doesn’t get much attention when it comes to physical and mental health for kids. That topic is light exposure. You may not be aware that the type of light we are exposed to, the timing of light exposure, and other factors related to light make a big difference in how we feel and function. This is especially true for children. In fact, light gets largely ignored when it comes to thinking about supporting health and behavior for our kids. We talk about evidence-based educational policies, for example, but then we put problematic artificial lighting in our schools and wonder why so many kids are struggling with their learning and their behavior. Well, today we are talking with Roudy Nassif, who has both a personal and a professional story around this topic. We are going to explore the importance of paying attention to light nutrition as much as we pay attention to food nutrition. I want to tell you a little bit about Roudy.

For most of his life, he spent his nights staying up late, waking up feeling exhausted, unmotivated, and unfocused. And probably many of you when you hear that, you are like, “Yeah, that’s my kids too.” After visiting many doctors, trying different diets, supplements, nothing seemed to work. Around seven years ago, Roudy’s depression became unbearable, and he decided to leave his job as an engineer to embark on a worldwide journey of learning about himself and nature. His experience has transformed his health and life, and his quest to understand this transformation helped him to start studying light, quantum biology, and circadian rhythm. Thus, his company Viva Rays was born. He is on a mission to elevate people’s light environment to a whole new level of alignment with nature. We are going to get into what that means and how it’s important for you and your kids. But really, welcome to the show. I’m so glad to have you here.

Roudy Nassif

Thank you, Dr. Nicole. It’s a pleasure to be present with you today.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

I am so excited about this topic, I first started just learning a little bit and hearing about the importance of light for mental health and physical health several years ago, and it’s such a fascinating thing to delve into. We are going to get into the science of it, you are going to explain to us why it’s important. But I actually want to start by having you share your personal story with our listeners because I think so many of the parents and professionals listening will be able to relate to your experience as a child and what in life brought you to this place. So how about you share that with us?

Roudy Nassif

Yes, definitely. Almost by the age of four, I was in school already. And every time I was in the classroom, I really suffered from debilitating headaches, a lot of agitation and complete inability to focus. And at the time, I wasn’t able to articulate myself. Intuitively, I didn’t want to be in the class, I wanted to be outdoors. And unfortunately, I was diagnosed with a heavy label called ADHD, which I had to carry around all my life. And then growing up, I turned into a night owl and I stayed up very, very late, feeling super wired and stimulated. And then I would wake up the following morning really lacking the energy and focus. So eventually, as I lived within that lifestyle, day after day, this led me to deep depression, chronic fatigue, and complete disorientation. And it was really sabotaging my professional life as an engineer, even my relationship with my loved ones felt like a roller coaster. And as you may imagine, I was genuinely looking for a solution in order to feel better, and to be honest, I kept going from one doctor to another. Conventional medicine wanted to give me prescription drugs, and thankfully I had the awareness to refuse. So I embarked on this long journey of holistic medicine, and I was experimenting with so many different diets, taking different supplements, learning more about meditation, and I used to exercise a lot, as I grew up as a martial artist. And while all of these foundations positively influenced my life, I was still stuck with this same cycle of feeling extremely wired at night, and chronically fatigued and depressed the following morning.

Now, miraculously, one specific event in my life, about seven or eight years ago, changed all of that. And it’s super simple. I actually went on a farm in Quebec, and I spent six weeks sleeping in my tent and volunteering on this farm. Over there, I was exposed only to natural light during the day, and fire and candlelight during the evening. Now, within a matter of three days, something extremely magical started to happen. I started winding down in the evening, feeling mellow and relaxed, sleeping shortly after the sunset to then wake up before the sunrise for the first time in my life, feeling motivated, focused and rested. To me, that was unbelievable. I mean, I went from feeling foggy-headed and completely dysfunctional, to feeling actually alive. And that happened so fast, I was in complete awe. And what made me feel in awe is that I didn’t change my diet, I didn’t take supplements, and I was still exercising and meditating in the same way. How did that magic happen? So when I moved back from the farm back to the city, unfortunately, all of this dissolved, because in a matter of a few weeks, I fell back into my old terrible routine, and at the time, I was still living in Toronto, which is a big city. And I found myself feeling wired at night, fatigued and depressed in the morning. So at this point, I was thinking, how could I go from one extreme to the other day that fast? So I decided to go on a meditation retreat. It’s called Vipassana, I don’t know if you have heard about it. It’s a silent retreat for 10 days. And in those 10 days, I had one question wordlessly written in my heart, I really wanted to know what happened. I was meditating on this, and I had this impulse: That was my light environment. And to me, as an engineer, it made no sense whatsoever. Like how can a superficial thing affect my health that much?

Regardless of all the reasoning, I decided to go with my intuition, and I started investigating more about light, circadian rhythm and quantum biology, and reaching out to the top world’s leading experts in those fields. It was a phenomenal journey, and I actually learned something very simple, which I knew as a kid. I reconnected back scientifically with the knowledge that we are actually light beings. And I can talk more about this through a very simple quantum equation by Einstein. But simply put, we are light beings, and light is the core nucleus of our physical reality. And this also means that the type of light that we expose ourselves to will deeply influence our mood, our sleep, our wakefulness, our performance, our productivity, and ability to focus. And the problem is that in our modern world, we are being bombarded by junk artificial light all the time, and we are not being exposed to healthy, balanced light, like the light that we have been exposed to throughout our biological evolution.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Such a powerful story, and a couple of things stand out to me that I just want to spotlight for our listeners. The first is you talked about when you were a kid, and you were a young kid, you were in school — and you shared this with me before we started recording, but you said that as a kid in school, you figured out that being out in the sunshine, being outside helped you, and so you would do things in the classroom to get sent out of the classroom so that you could go be outside in the light to help regulate yourself and help yourself function better. And that’s so powerful, that number one, intuitively kids know what is good for them and what’s helpful to them. We often don’t listen to that as adults, right? We usually go “Oh, this kid’s goofing off, being a problem.” But it’s like, no, you are trying to get your needs met. But you knew at this intuitive level, even then, that being in the sunlight, being outdoors was helpful for your brain to function. So I think that’s really cool, number one. And then the other thing that I’m thinking about is the connection that we see now in the research between sleep problems and diagnoses like ADHD and those types of things. Kids get diagnosed with those things, as you did, when actually many of them are suffering from exactly what you are talking about: Sleep problems. Not being able to wind down and sleep, not being able to stay asleep, waking up and not feeling rested, and that plays a huge role in those symptoms. And I think your story just illustrates those things so beautifully. And I think there’s a lot of people listening who can start to connect some of those dots for their own child too.

Roudy Nassif

Beautiful. I like what you said, and thanks for bringing up that part of the story because it’s very important. And I truly believe, but not only believe, know in my heart, that every kid is born with an inherent genius in them. Unfortunately, it gets repressed and suppressed by society, by our teachers, and by our parents. Every person, even as an adult, has an inherent genius in them. And to me, my journey for the past seven years was to display that genius that is sitting within me, and has always been there, yet, growing up, I have been led to suppress that genius, which always knew exactly what I wanted. And it’s very true that most of the time, adults tend to suppress that genius in themselves, but not only in themselves, unfortunately, in their own kids. And if we start learning how to listen more to those kids, especially those kids that we call with special needs who are deeply in tune with the environment, we can learn so much about those things that are actually affecting us negatively, and that we are not consciously aware of, and that those kids are in fact, sensing and feeling. And those same things are sabotaging us subconsciously, but we are not aware of them.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

I’m so glad you said that because I think that’s so true. These kids are like our warning bell, because they are more sensitive and they are young. They are more attuned to it, and they are letting us know something in the environment is wrong. And we so often say, “Well, the problem is in them that they can’t handle this”, instead of looking at it exactly as you are saying, like “Well, wait a second. If they are having sensitivities, if things like artificial light, loud noise in the environment, toxins in the air that we are breathing — if those kinds of things are affecting them. What does that mean for me? I might not be consciously aware of it, but these things probably aren’t good for any of us.” I love it.

Let’s get into some of the science of light, because I think people will be so fascinated about this. When you were telling your story, you mentioned that one of the things you learned is that light is the core of who we are, of how we function. Can you talk a bit about that? What do you mean by that? Why is light so important, beyond I mean, obviously, we need it to see, but why is light so important to our biology, and how is it impacting us?

Roudy Nassif

Yes, so there’s no one pathway that I know of biologically that is not impacted and affected by light. So I’m going to explore a few of those things for the sake of time, but one of the things that truly stood out for me as I was learning about light, I started learning that light actually creates reality. And Einstein taught us through his law of relativity, E = mc². “E” is light, “m” is mass and “c” velocity, that light and matter are exactly the same things. And this light is continuously being transformed into matter. Okay, so if we take this equation and contemplate upon it a little bit, when light slows down, it creates things of mass. And this means that everything around you at this moment, including the planet itself, comes from the light and is profoundly influenced by light. Now let’s take this a step deeper into humans. We as humans, in our eyes we have what is called the vitreous EDI, which is composed of water collagen, and a specific type of acid. And this EDI is an absolutely unique substance that is not found anywhere in the body but in the eyes, and its job is actually to slow light down before reaching the retina. So let’s ponder the beauty of this equation. When light hits the cornea in the eye, it actually slows down, and through it, we are being recreated with new life every single day. Our brain cells, our tissues, our heart, every organ and system is being regenerated by the quality of life that we expose ourselves to. And we now know, through neuroscience, that light actually programs all of the neurotransmitters and hormones like dopamine, serotonin, beta-endorphins, etc., which I could talk more about the pathway later. But this enables us to make a model of ourselves in space and time, and actually perceive ourselves, others and the environment. So light is enabling us to shift perception, which literally means that it’s creating our own reality, and this is not philosophy; this is quantum biophysics, and there is evidence supporting all of this. So to wrap up this, which I’d like to explore more also, how light affects the endocrine system, our circadian clock, and our nervous system, but just to wrap up this idea, the right type of light at the right time of the day can create wonders in healing, health and happiness. However, this light has a dual side to it, because the wrong type of it at the wrong time of the day, when we haven’t been evolved to get that light, can lead to depression, anxiety, hyperactivity, mental health issues and chronic illnesses, as I shared in my own stories, and as I have been witnessing and seeing in the stories of thousands of people that we have been working with.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

So let’s have you say a little bit more. When you say this dual aspect of light, the right kind of light at the right time is critical for our brain and our body to function properly, the wrong kind of light or the wrong time of day is a problem. When you say the right type of light, what are we talking about there? What is the type of light that humans need and benefit from?

Roudy Nassif

So we are actually talking about the light that has driven our biological evolution. We are talking about 1.5 billion years of evolution of this single cell organism called bacteria turning into mitochondria, and this whole evolutionary process that has been triggered by this spark of light, that we have evolved, and it wasn’t until the 1970’s until science started recognizing the light entering our eyes was not only for the purpose of vision, and that vision was only a very small aspect of this light. We now know that this light is directly controlling, and stimulating, and regulating our endocrine system and our nervous system. So let’s talk a little bit about the nervous system, which is this phenomenal system that is continuously maintaining balance and homeostasis through the two subsystems—the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system. Now, we all know that the sympathetic is going to support us in action, when moving, when studying, when we are actually pressing on this accelerator pedal throughout the day. And this system is actually activated during morning sunlight, by this inclining of the blue and green light frequencies in the morning. And when this system is activated, we start feeling alert, focused, and able to have higher cognition. Relating this to what is the right type of the light and what is the wrong type of light, when we are exposed to this blue and green light frequency in the morning, it’s never in isolation from the other frequencies of light, visible and invisible. For example, the arrival of the invisible frequencies, UVA, about an hour after the sunrise, and the presence of the yellow, orange, red, and infrared, balances out this sympathetic arousal through the right and the balanced activation of the parasympathetic system, which is the brake pedal, right? And this balanced light from sunlight literally maintains the equilibrium in this seesaw, between sympathetic arousal and parasympathetic, keeping us perfectly balanced and healthy. Now, let’s take the other side of the equation because when we are thinking about a particular day, the day has daytime, which is when sunlight is present, but equally has nighttime in the absence of the sun, and that’s when we are actually designed to heal and repair. And when the sun actually sets, the declining blue and green light frequencies around the sunset are very specific information that activate the sympathetic system of restoration, growth and repair. And this makes all the difference between restorative and non-restorative sleep. However, if we are continuously exposed to junk, artificial light that is very high in the blue and the green all day long, we are being subjected to sympathetic arousal, day and night. And this throws us off balance. We become hyperactive, we become wired, this leads to anxiety, suppressed anxiety starts leading to depression, and there’s a cascading complex effect that happens because of a very simple cause.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

So once again, nature has it all figured out, and we humans come in, in all of our big brain-ness and advanced technology and lifestyle, and we screw it up, right? I mean, what you are saying is nature has it figured out, the way that light, the rhythms of light in the day and the night and the rising of the sun, and then the bright light in the middle of the day, and then sundown and sunset, and then the dark of the night, all of that is what our body and our brain are designed to regulate with for our nervous system and for everything. And yet, we have come in now, and created all these artificial sources of light. We don’t live our life by the natural cycles of light anymore, and it’s really screwing us up.

Roudy Nassif

Totally. And one of the fundamental problems that we are dealing with is, as humans, we are so focused on building those cities and those technologies, yet, we are not balancing this out by building humans first. There’s a very specific thing that resonates with me so much. In vain do we build the cities, if we don’t build humans first. We will run into big problems because technology could be fundamentally balanced, but we’ve got to first learn how to balance our desires so that our manifestations of those desires are ones that are manifesting balance. And unfortunately, when we are dealing with computers, artificial lighting, we are always thinking of how we can create systems that will enhance our economy in certain ways, but disregarding completely that we cannot enhance our economy if we don’t think of enhancing humans’ consciousness and humans’ biology at the same time. Ourselves.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

So true. And I’m thinking about, as you talked about the different wavelengths of light, the green and the blue, and then the red, orange, and the yellow. It’s one thing for a long time now, in our modern society at least, we have had light bulbs and artificial sources of light in our environment. And that in and of itself is an issue. But I’m thinking about even in the last decade, where we have now gone to having these devices constantly, children have their tablets, their smartphones, their computers, their laptops all day in school, and then their computers at home. It’s not like when I was growing up, and we had artificial light — turn the light switch on, okay, artificial light. And we had a television that we sat across the room from and watched. But today’s kids, and in the last decade, especially, there’s these screens constantly in their face, and that is an extreme source of blue light, correct? That is really exacerbating this problem.

Roudy Nassif

Yes, definitely. And this is where Albert Einstein’s equation comes in, by realizing that light creates reality. So taking a step back and asking ourselves: What type of reality do we want to create for ourselves and for the future generations? Unfortunately, this artificial light is altering humans’ reality in ways that are causing chronic diseases that are destroying our sleep, and that is affecting our hormonal production in very destructive ways. We could dive a little bit more and talk specifically about how this light is actually sabotaging our circadian clock, which controls thousands of different processes in the body, and it’s now even knowing that it’s actually controlling the mitochondria, the power engine in our body that produces our energy. And it has recently come to light that most of our modern chronic diseases are originating in the mitochondria losing efficiency, in the mitochondrial genome.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

I do, I definitely want to talk about the circadian rhythm piece because I think this is so critical for adults and kids. We are focusing on and thinking about how these light issues impact kids, but also they are impacting parents and adults as well. And so many parents who we see in the clinic, yes, the focus is on their kids, however, they are reporting they don’t sleep well, they can’t wind down to sleep, they can’t turn their brain off, they are waking up exhausted, and when parents are not getting good quality sleep, they can’t parent their kids well, and you get into this whole cycle. And I think so many people don’t realize the basics that you are talking about here about how light is impacting us. And if you are trying to fall asleep, curled up in your bed with your phone, scrolling Instagram, or whatever. And then you are wondering why you can’t fall asleep and why you are waking up exhausted, this is a problem. So yes, let’s talk about the circadian rhythm. First of all, define for people, what are we talking about when we say circadian rhythm? And then how is light so important for that?

Roudy Nassif

Yes, definitely. And that’s a great point you bring, because in most situations, kids will literally imitate the behavior of their parents. So what type of behavior is the parent passing on to their kids? We cannot expect kids to shut down screens and behave in advanced ways around light and dark cycles if they don’t get the understanding and experience through observing their parents first doing this. So yeah, I totally agree there. And when we talk about great sleep and energy, most people have this embedded belief that they are, let’s say, “I’m a light sleeper”, or “I am a night owl.” And they have those definitions of themselves thinking that they were born like this. But the truth is that getting a great night’s sleep consistently and waking up feeling refreshed and energized is not something that happened by chance. It actually happens by design. And it is controlled by a circadian force. Now circadian, it comes from the Latin word circa and dia. Which means approximately a day or 24 hours. And this rhythm actually exists in all of nature, in animals, as well as in plants, because all of us as biological species on earth, we experience an inescapable daily change in the environment. It’s a very simple one, yet an unescapable one. The day must become night, and the night turns back into day. And as simple as this may seem, as biological species, we have had to develop an internal clock that for us, as humans, it sits in the brain and actually determines when we go to sleep and when we wake up. But not only this, this clock controls thousands of biological processes that are designed to happen every 24 hours, like bowel movements, things like digestion, the insulin release from the pancreas is a circadian one, reproduction and moods, the release of dopamine and serotonin is a circadian one, and there’s thousands of different biological processes. Now, the beauty of this circadian clock is that it’s designed to time all these biological functions to an optimal time of the day, or the night, during a 24-hour cycle, so that we could perform at our best. If we sleep, we sleep our best. If we digest, we digest our best, as long as these functions are being regulated by the circadian clock through harmonious light and dark cycles.

Now let’s relate this to plants a little bit because I know that many of the listeners are new to this concept. And I think we can relate so much to plants, because even plants have light sensors in them that enable them to anticipate the sun’s position in the sky so that they can turn their leaves in the right direction. And maximize photosynthesis and energy production. And not only this, but they also drop their leaves down at night when the sun is out, which enables them to maximize energy efficiency. And just like plants, we actually have light sensors in our eyes that are photosensitive. They are called melanopsin ganglion cells. Now, the name is not very important, but what we need to know is that those cells are very sensitive to blue light, and much less sensitive to red lights. When we wake up first thing in the morning, if we go outside, and if the sun is rising, and it’s 100,000 lux blue skies, we need about 5 to 10 minutes for those melanopsin ganglion cells to be stimulated, which result in them sending a signal to the brain to tell our bodies and every cell in our body that it’s actually daytime. And in this second, the brain sends a signal to the adrenal gland to secrete the hormones cortisol and adrenaline. Now, let’s talk about why this is important, because this healthy, natural rising tide of cortisol that happens in response to morning sunlight is what makes us feel alert, focused, energized and ready for the day. So as a kid going to school, they need this healthy rising tide of cortisol if they want to really increase their cognition and their performance in class, otherwise, they will be feeling super tired, exhausted, and irritated. And as the sun sets, I talked about this declining blue and green light frequency, which is picked up by those melanopsin. And it sends the signal to our body that it’s nighttime. And this leads the brain to send a signal to the pineal gland in the brain to secrete the very powerful hormone melatonin, which starts preparing our body for sleep, healing, and rejuvenation. And if we don’t get this cycle right, there are tremendous detrimental effects associated with it, from depression to anxiety, to impaired learning to sleep problems. And this is why we really emphasize in Viva Rays to get that morning sunlight right, which we can talk about in several steps, because it’s not only about getting those five minutes in the morning, there is more to it. But also getting the darkness that your eyes are looking for after the sunset, which means the absence of blue and green lights, so that your body could trigger the production of that melatonin and growth hormones, which we all need when we are sleeping.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

You explained that so clearly. And I’m thinking back to, again, your story of when you went to the farm and were living with just natural light, and how quickly your body got in sync with the natural light that you were living in, and how quickly your symptoms shifted. And so as I’m hearing you talk about this, it’s like, wow, this has a pretty quick, profound effect. It’s not like you need to make these changes and wait three months or six months for it to take effect. When we get in those right rhythms in harmony with light, things can shift pretty quickly.

Roudy Nassif

Yes, definitely. And in most situations and cases, we need three to four days when doing the right things we realign back and re entrain our circadian clock and all of our rhythms in the body to the solar cycle. When this happens, there’s absolute magic that happens in our body, because as I mentioned at the beginning, there is no one biological processes that is not influenced by the quality of life that we expose ourselves to and by this clock that is continuously ticking and that is waiting for that morning sunlight and that sunset so that it anchors itself into the solar cycle. And in this way, we are designed to live as one with our environment. We are not separate from nature.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Yeah. I’m going to have you get into some some tips for people, but I want to touch on something before that, that I said in the preview of the show that I think is really important, especially when we are thinking about kids, but adults too, and that’s artificial light, particularly, really poor forms of artificial light, like fluorescent lights. It’s always been so interesting to me that in the physical environments where we have the most sensitive people: So, schools where we have children, hospitals where we have sick people who are trying to heal, nursing homes where we have vulnerable, more fragile, elderly people, what kind of lighting do we see in these environments? These horrible, artificial fluorescent flickering bulbs. And so I would love for you to talk about — I know there have been some studies done on artificial lights in the classroom on kids, and even just those kinds of really poor quality lights in general. Can you speak to that?

Roudy Nassif

Yes, definitely. There’s a scientist from Germany called Fritz Hollwich, who back in the 1970s did a lot of phenomenal work that enhanced our understanding about how light affects our endocrine system. But through one of his studies, he showed how sitting under those LED or fluorescent lights increased the stress hormones cortisol and ACTH. Now, here’s how it relates. For example, cortisol at night should be around one microgram per deciliter. Back to my story, when I started learning about these things, I did the cortisol test. My cortisol at night was 10 microgram per deciliter, which is scarily very, very common. Now, both of these hormones, cortisol and ACTH, are related to stress-response. And when they are significantly high, they actually act as growth inhibitors, so they sabotage the production of growth hormone in our body, and they also sabotage the production of melatonin. Now, can you imagine how this affects growing children? Even if we sleep, and even if we are getting eight hours of sleep, when these mechanisms are not happening in the way they are meant to happen, the body won’t repair and rejuvenate as it’s designed to do so. And this explains the agitated behavior, fatigue and reduced mental capabilities that are felt as a kid, and I believe millions of children who sit under those lights at night are suffering from. There’s a specific study also that dates back to 1973, I believe, by Dr. John Ott, which contributed so much into our understanding of the different frequencies of light and the effect on our biology. This study was done in collaboration with environmental health and light research. So they took four different classrooms. In two of the classrooms, they lit them up with full-spectrum lighting that is all balanced. And with the other two classrooms, they were lit with fluorescent lights that were very high in the blue light and very deficient in the other colors. Now, the interesting thing is that under those junk lights, many students were demonstrating hyperactivity, fatigue, irritability and attention deficits. Whereas in contrast, in the two classrooms with full spectrum lighting, those students’ performance increased, their behavior in general improved, and even their academic achievements improved. That happened within one month of installing those full-spectrum lights. Also many kids with special needs, or what society calls learning disabilities, that had extreme hyperactivity problems, they miraculously calmed down and overcome some of their reading and learning challenges, as they were giving those kids much more time also to go outdoors and to be exposed to natural sunlight in increments throughout the day.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

So important for people to be aware of. In my first career, I was a teacher. And when I was just out of college, I had a student teaching experience with an amazing, wonderful teacher, very non-traditional, doing things differently than most of the other teachers in the building, and she was aware of that research. When I first walked into her classroom, I noticed the lighting was different. She had the overhead lights turned off, she had lamps. And she explained to me about the difference that she just noticed in her classroom with that. And so when I was a classroom teacher, for the years that I did that, I did the same thing. I would have natural sunlight coming in through the windows, I had lamp lighting. He is now my husband, at the time we were dating, and he was an electrician, and I had him come in, I didn’t ask my principal if this was okay to do, I had him fix the overhead fluorescent lights to remove half the bulbs to make them less noisy and less severe. So I made all these lighting changes. I was working with kids with pretty severe brain challenges at the time, and just creating a light environment that was more tolerable, more supportive, I mean, still not ideal because of what I had to work with, but just even noticing the changes with that, and I think these are things for all of you listening who work in schools or work in therapy environments with kids, thinking about the quality of light, what is the light like in the environment? What changes can you make to better support that? That’s a really tangible thing we can do to help kids.

Roudy Nassif

Hopefully. Yes, and it’s very simple, it’s very easy, and the effect that it will have is just phenomenal.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

So give us a few tips. I feel like you have given us some tips throughout, but let’s just talk through a few. So you said the importance of not having a lot of that blue light exposure at night. So what are some things that parents can be thinking about with that? What do you recommend?

Roudy Nassif

Yeah, so I’m going to try to break it down as much as possible. There are so many different steps. But if I don’t go through all of them, I just want to invite the listeners to check out our free ebook that is called LIGHT: The key to Master your Sleep and Energy. It has a combination of seven years of understanding those different concepts and making them super simple, accessible and easy, breaking them down into actionable steps that anyone could take to elevate their light environment to a whole new level. Now, number one, the first very important thing everyone should start thinking of doing is waking up in the morning, going outside and facing east. And with that being said, that means witnessing the rising sun. Many people wake up nowadays, they turn on their artificial lights, they start looking at their phones. And the phone, for instance, has a color temperature of 6500 Kelvins, which is similar to sunlight’s color temperature at 12 Noon. When you wake up and you look at your phone, your brain is confused and every clock in your body thinks that it’s being late. So it starts ticking faster and it creates so much stress in the body, it sabotages your alpha and theta wave frequencies that you wake up with, which are incredible states. You can access a lot of creativity and power through those states. So we don’t want to sabotage those states. Going outside first thing, facing east and watching the sunrise, is a very important step. Now, how much is enough? Obviously, the longer, the better, but when it’s 100,000 lux, clear blue sky, that minute is enough to trigger that circadian system. And if we were to be up north on a very cloudy day, and it’s extremely dark outside, then no problem. That’s when you actually want to stay outside for longer periods of time because we have the systems in our bodies that we can sum up photons over a period of time. So if there are less photons from the sun available, all we need to do is spend more time outside. In that case, if it’s extremely dark, 45 minutes would be great to stimulate that circadian system.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

So that’s in the morning. I have a question though. People are going to say “Well, what if I live in a really cold environment? Like I live in Michigan, it’s dark, it’s cold. Can we do that using a light box? Or is there another way that we can stimulate that or help ourselves with that if we can’t physically be outside at that hour of the morning for that long?

Roudy Nassif

Yes. So there’s no other way that I’m conscious about that will create even effects that are similar to the ones that we get while being outdoors. Now, when it’s cold, the environment is actually calling us to start behaving differently. And what I mean by this is — I’m going to take an example of a wolf in nature. The wolf doesn’t wait until the first snowfall to grow its coat and its fur, because its pineal gland, the light mirror in the wolf’s body and in our bodies, is continuously measuring the light in the environment and transmitting messages to our body to know about the time of the day and the time of the season. And therefore, the wolf will be prepared for the upcoming winter physiologically, which will shift how it will function on every level. Now, similarly, for us as human beings, the problem is that the winter comes and we have been spending all our time indoors in regulated temperature and exposed to artificial blue light that is signaling 12, noon summertime all year long. And our bodies are not being prepared, physiologically prepared for that winter time that it’s coming. So as we start taking the steps and going outside, preparing ourselves for that winter, by retuning back to the light and our environment, by also regulating the timing of light, which means the length of the day is changing between summer and winter. But for most of us living indoors, it’s not changing. This change is what enables the pineal gland to send seasonal messages to our bodies so that we can adapt. And by being outside more, by being exposed to those temperatures in our environment, and by respecting those light and dark cycles, our bodies will start adapting physiologically to that cold so that we are becoming one with it, and that it’s not affecting us in negative ways as it would if our body is thinking it’s summertime.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

So this is why it’s so important that we and our kids get outside year round, even when the weather’s not great, right? And why we let kids go outside and play at recess outdoors, even when it’s cold and the weather’s not great. We still need to be outside.

Roudy Massif

Definitely. Okay. Number two, something very important, because you mentioned windows. Anytime we are indoors and we are behind windows, it’s very important to open those windows, at least a little bit. Because most windows, they filter out a lot of the beneficial frequencies of sunlight. But not only this, they make our exposure to sunlight very distorted, which can cause skin cancer, and so on. So opening the window in the car or while being behind windows is extremely important as well.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

How about at night? People say, “Well obviously we have to have lights on to see, or my child has homework they need to do on the computer at night.” What are one or two basic things that we should be aiming for in terms of light in our homes and for our kids as we are heading into bedtime?

Roudy Nassif

Yeah, so when it comes to nighttime, as soon as the sun sets we come back home. We don’t want to be exposed to the wrong frequency of light that will confuse our body and brain again into thinking it’s daytime. Therefore, we need to find efficient ways of filtering out that light. Now, one of the simplest and greatest ways to do this is to wear glasses, high lens technology systems that are designed to filter out specific frequencies of light at particular times of the day, like the ones we developed in Viva Rays, which I can talk more about. Now, number two is also being aware that we have been accustomed to so much brightness at night, and for most of us, when we start decreasing that brightness, it’s going to feel uncomfortable first. Then, within a matter of hours, even days, or a few days, our eyes will readjust back. We want to make sure that we are in an environment where we could still see things, but that’s not bright enough so that we can have a distinct awareness of differences in colors. Anytime we have this distinct awareness and being able to see different colors in the room, it means it’s too bright and it means it’s stimulating our circadian clock in the wrong way. So maybe lighting up Himalayan salt lamps, keeping the light at the floor level rather than overhead are other good ways to decrease stimulation to the circadian clock.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

It’s great. So parents, I’m thinking about as you are starting your evening routines with your kids of winding down and quieter activities, and maybe the bath and all the things that you do heading up towards bedtime, thinking about how to improve the lighting for that time is important. I love what you said, keep it at ground level, the Himalayan salt lamps, maybe having candles, thinking about really shifting to lower light during those times will help our kids be able to settle down and fall asleep better.

Roudy Nassif

Yes, definitely. And treating this as a ritual, right? You are setting this space for the good that you desire in your life. And having acquired the knowledge and the understanding of the importance of this window of time in our lives, the more we start engaging with it creatively by setting nice calm music, get a hot bath, making the lighting warm and relaxing, and going towards doing activities that do not create sympathetic arousal in our nervous system, all of these things will start acting together as a very solid system that will enable us to take our sleep to the next level. But not only this, our sleep will be tethered to how we wake up in the morning. So if we expect to wake up, feeling energized, rested, motivated, and really excited about life, we’ve really got to be taking care of that second aspect of the day, the yawn of the day, and make sure that we are engaging with the window of time in ways that are respectful to our biological evolution.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

I love that, creating a ritual, which is so helpful for us and our kids. I know we need to wrap up here, I do want you to just spend a minute or two giving us an overview of the glasses that you have at Viva Rays, because I know that many people are aware of the orange glasses and the glasses you can wear at night, but you guys are doing some really unique things with that, and you have got different pairs for different times of day. So just give us a quick overview of what you provide with those.

Roudy Nassif

Yes, so after a lot of experimentation and testing and seeing what works and what does not, we collaborated with circadian experts and with optic experts in BC, and we came up with a three-lens technology system. So three different lenses for three different times of the day that are designed to block different amounts of light, depending on the light that is present outside in nature. So the first thing is I want to give an alert about clear blue light blockers because this is very common, and many people are getting bombarded by these ads. Even optometrists are selling very expensive blue light blocking glasses. And from my experience, I realized that many of them weren’t realizing that those do not work. We have had some times where we went with the spectral color mirror and did measurements in front of them, so that they could see that these glasses actually do not work. And this is because they block blue light up to 420 nanometer in wavelength. Whereas if you observe the light that is coming from screens and LED bulbs, it actually starts at 430 and it peaks at 455. So it’s actually blocking blue light that is not existing in those harmful sources. That’s the alert, I know many people have been exposed to those. In contrast, our daytime glasses that we worked on, they actually address this specific 455 nanometer frequency in blue, and they decrease its sharpness, so it’s more balanced and proportionate with the yellow and green. This will eliminate eye strain, headaches, eye fatigue, and agitation that we tend to feel under those harmful sources of light.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

So those are the ones that we and our kids can wear during the day like when they are at school and when we are at work during the daytime to help make the quality of light input better when we are under those kinds of conditions.

Roudy Nassif

Totally, so they are to be worn indoors when sitting in artificial lighting or in front of digital devices, and only indoors. I would advise kids and adults to start going into the consciousness of taking sun breaks every now and then by going outside and taking those light frequencies on the skin, on the eyes safely, so that we can reattune our clock to the to the time outside. Technology number two is the evening glasses, and those are designed to be worn right after the sunset, when we come back home, and they filter all of the blue and only the highest frequency green. So we engineered them to mimic the color temperature of a bonfire, and those are really useful in the shorter days of the year, in the winter, fall, and spring, when the sun sets really early. If you still have some evening activities to run, cooking, going to the mall, driving, and you want something that will help your nervous system to calm down, yet that will enable you to still run those evening activities, this is where the evening glasses came from.

Lastly, the nighttime one is designed to be worn after you finish your evening activities, one hour before bedtime, when you are completely ready to do nothing and to give yourself fully the time to completely wind down and to ultimately help your body to optimize melatonin and growth hormone so that you can get the best night’s sleep. And those block 100% of the blue and the green, but not only this, they have a very interesting feature: They decrease the brightness of light by 20 times, which makes it super dim. But again, our body needs this before going to sleep and it makes all the difference in the quality of our sleep.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

It’s so great. You have really made it more doable for us in our modern life, with our schedules and things to be able to support ourselves with better light, even with as you said, having to do the activities we are doing, or having to send our kids to school or being in front of the computer. These glasses give us a way to support ourselves with the lighting, even in environments that we can’t control. I think it’s great. And I would love for you to share where people can find out more. You said that you have the ebook available too, that people can download for more tips and information. So where can people go to get all that?

Roudy Nassif

Yeah, so if you go to www.vivarays.com, that’s where we have all of our products and glasses, we are also right now working deeply with so many engineers in the Netherlands and in the States on developing next level lights that are actually designed to mimic sunlight in ways that are not present in the industry so far, and we are very excited about this. But you could also access the E-booklet which is very short and sweet. I do believe that most people could finish it in a few hours. You can download it for free on our website. The last thing I want to say is, I mentioned three different lens technologies. However, we came up with a very good system, it’s called the clip and go, which enables you to have one frame and to seamlessly transition from one lens to another without carrying three different frames around. And it’s super affordable for people so they don’t need to buy three different frames, and very convenient.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Awesome, really, I love what you are doing with this. Your passion for this comes through, and I appreciate you doing all the research and sharing it with us. I know this really has got our listeners thinking about this, and I’m sure people are going to leave this episode and make changes and hopefully check out the glasses and the other things that you have to offer. Thank you so much for the work that you are doing and for being here and sharing it with us today.

Roudy Nassif

Awesome. Thank you so much, Nicole.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

And thanks as always, to all of you for being here and for listening. We will catch you back here next time.