The light over the kitchen table at half past seven in October has a yellow cast to it, and I eat my toast in it anyway, even though I know better by now. It is a small kitchen in a small house, and the window faces east, which means in June the morning comes in like somebody switched on a lamp. In November it does not. The calendar by the phone says the days are shortening. My body knew it before the calendar did.
For most of my working life I was down in the basement pharmacy of the county hospital before the sun was up, and home after it was down, six months of the year. I told myself I was used to it. What I was, was tuned to fluorescent light and the hum of the ventilation, and I wondered why I slept badly in the winter and woke at four in the summer. It took me longer than it should have to see it, and I dispensed medicines for a living.
The east window before breakfast
Here is what I understand now, in plain words. There is a small clock in the brain, a cluster of cells with a long name, and it runs on a cycle that is a little longer than a day. Left on its own it drifts. What sets it each morning, what winds it like the clock on the wall, is light. Morning light tells the clock the day has started. Evening light seems to ask it to hold off. The researchers who worked this out in the 1970s were studying jet lag, because flying across time zones scrambles the clock in a way you can measure, and they found that timed bright light, the kind of bright you get outdoors, could shift the clock by hours.
You do not need to fly anywhere to scramble it. You only need October.
This matters more after sixty. People our age are more sensitive to these shifts, which is something I learned first at the brown-bag table and read later, and it matches what I saw. A man in the walking group told Bev he had started waking at three and could not get back. Nothing else had changed. It was March. The light had changed.
I wrote once about keeping a steady daily rhythm, and this is the same idea wearing a different coat. Sleep is not only how long. It is when, and when is set by what your eyes see in the first hour you are up.
Two winters, two lamps
I have tried two ways of fixing my own mornings, and I will tell you both, because one of them failed and the failure taught me more.
The first winter, I decided to be sensible. I put a bright lamp on the kitchen table and sat in front of it while I read the paper. It felt reasonable. It was bright. What I did not understand then was that indoor bright and outdoor bright struck me as not the same animal. The studies used light at a strength I’d guess you do not get across a kitchen table. I sat in front of that lamp for a month and felt virtuous and slept exactly as badly as before.
The second winter, Bev dared me. The walking group meets at eight, and she said, walk with us, outside, no matter the sky, and then tell me about your sleep. So I did. Grey November mornings, fifteen minutes of daylight that did not look like much. Within a couple of weeks I was waking closer to six and sleeping through. I am one person and this is not a trial. But I have suggested the morning walk to enough people at the senior centre since, and heard back from enough of them, that I keep suggesting it.
The lamp is still on the table. I use it to read by. The walk is what moved the clock.
What changed over the years was not a single thing, so let me put it in order. First I noticed my own winters. Then I started asking, at every brown-bag review, what time a person gets up and whether they go outside before noon, the same way I ask about the bottles. Then came the year of the lamp, which did nothing. Then the walking group, which did. And somewhere in there I began to see how often a sleep complaint and a light complaint were the same complaint. If sleep has gone sideways, it is worth reading about sleep and memory in older adults, because the two travel together and people blame the memory first.
Before you rearrange a single lamp or get nothing at all or change one habit, go watch the detailed video guide and see what it lays out, because it explains what is usually behind the slips we all fret about and a way to work on it, and it is easier to follow than anything I can fit here.
A woman named Ruth stopped me at the grocery store pharmacy counter last winter. She said, “I am in bed by nine and up at seven, so why am I tired at two in the afternoon?” I asked her when she last saw daylight. She thought about it. “I drive to the mall,” she said. “I park close.” We laughed, both of us, because it is funny and it is not. She started parking far and walking the long way in. She told me last month she is not fixed, but she is better, and better counts.
What I would tell a friend to actually do, and have told them: get outside within an hour of waking, most mornings, even for ten minutes, even under cloud, because from what I saw, the greyest morning out there felt brighter than your brightest room in here. Keep your wake time steady, weekends too. I send people to Dr. Okafor for exactly this conversation, and he does not rush them.
Choose a single tweak to your light exposure, then wait about forty days before deciding if it made a difference. That rule has never let me down. Pick the morning light first. It is the simplest thing to alter and the least expensive one I know.
How to keep your memory steadyThe video explains what to do about memory slips after sixty.
Sit down tonight and watch the full picture video before you move a single piece of furniture or shift a single habit, so you can see the whole picture it paints and then decide what fits your house and your mornings. Then tomorrow, when the alarm goes, open the curtain before you make the coffee, and let the day in on purpose.