#330 | Sleep Like a Baby: The Impact of Melatonin, Blue Light, and Sunrise with DreamWalkerz

Sleep is the foundation of health—and yet in modern motherhood, it’s often the first thing we lose. In this episode, we’re joined by Heidi and Thaddeus of DreamWalkerz, parents of six and passionate educators on the biology of sleep. Together, we explore how light—yes, just light—is one of the most overlooked but powerful regulators of our sleep, hormones, mood, and even fertility.

Heidi and Thaddeus break down what circadian rhythms really are, how they’re installed in babies, and why so many of us are unknowingly “teaching” our newborns to be awake at night and asleep during the day. We talk about the biological cost of blue light, the myth of the night owl, and how shifting even small habits—like going outside at dawn or switching a lightbulb—can radically change the way we sleep and parent.

We also explore melatonin myths, the complex hormonal dance between light and reproduction, and why syncing your body to natural light is not just a lifestyle tweak—it’s a return to something deeply human.

This episode offers no quick fixes, but rather a steady reminder that rest is not a luxury—it’s a birthright. And it begins not with a supplement or a schedule, but with the rising sun.

Dreamwalkerz: Use Promo code DOWNTOBIRTH to save 10%

Instagram: Dreamwalkerz

The Melatonin Makeover

#172 | Our Sexual Energy as the Secret Weapon to Our Best Birth and Best Life with Kim Anami

Needed <-- use this link for 20% off your whole subscription order.

Primally Pure: From soil to skin, Primally Pure products are made with down-to-earth ingredients that feel and smell like heaven for the skin. Promo code: DOWNTOBIRTH for 10% off.

Postpartum Soothe: Organic herbal padsicles for your healing. Use promo code DOWNTOBIRTH.

ENERGYBits: <-- use this link for 20% off! Get the superfood Algae every mother needs for pregnancy, postpartum, and breastfeeding.

Connect with us on Patreon for our exclusive content.
Email Contact@DownToBirthShow.com
Instagram @downtobirthshow
Call us at 802-GET-DOWN

Watch the full videos of all our episodes on YouTube!

Find us at:
HypnoBirthingCT.com

Down to Birth Show

Please note we don’t provide medical advice. Speak to your licensed medical provider for all your healthcare matte...

Transcript

I'm Cynthia Overgard, owner of HypnoBirthing of Connecticut, childbirth advocate and postpartum support specialist. And I'm Trisha Ludwig, certified nurse midwife and international board certified lactation consultant. And this is the Down To Birth Podcast. Childbirth is something we're made to do. But how do we have our safest and most satisfying experience in today's medical culture? Let's dispel the myths and get down to birth.

Hi everybody. We're Heidi and Thaddeus from dreamwalkers, and we teach people about the importance and the benefits of getting proper sleep in a modern chaotic society today, our sleep is so disrupted from the addictive nature to television, video games and our phones, which research says are just as addictive as gambling, they are keeping us awake and alert at times when our body needs to rest, recharge and rejuvenate. So our entire goal is to teach people about the cues that the body receives, about light, how they affect our biology, and how to change really simple things in your life to get better, deeper and more rejuvenating sleep for you and the whole family. I'll let Heidi do a quick intro, since she's also here with us.

All right, you guys. Hi. Thank you so much for having us. I'm Heidi. I am the CEO of our companies called DreamWalkerz, and as parents of six children, between the two of us, we're kind of like a little Brady Bunch. Yeah, lots of kids. We've figured out some interesting hacks, biohacks, if you will, on how to even get teenagers to sleep earlier. So we're excited to share a lot of cool stuff with you guys today. Thank you. 

This is such an important conversation for our community, because, of course, you are talking to a group of women mothers who are severely sleep deprived, just by nature of being a mom. And at first thought, it sounds like, okay, these sleep rules are not going to apply to me. I have an eight week old baby or a six month old baby who's teething, and how am I possibly going to implement what we're going to talk about today to have healthier sleep habits? But Heidi, I know you're, as you said, you're a mom of six, so you have a lot of experience with this, and we're eager to hear how new parents from birth can start establishing a healthy sleep environment, from the physical setting of their space to the habits they implement or don't. So please share.

I'll jump in just real quick on babies, right? So new born babies don't get what we call a circadian rhythm until about two to three months old. Their circadian rhythm in men and women and babies is set by the light and dark cycles, 24 hour cycle of where we live on Earth. And that circadian rhythm dictates what our biology actually does, like it is in charge of more than 10 hormones in the body. It sets our mood, what we're hungry for, whether we can reproduce or not, and it starts with our newborn baby at around two months. And the person that sets the circadian rhythm. Sometimes I call it like install the circadian rhythm of your new baby is usually mom, and it's because the light and dark cues that the body gets set the circadian rhythm. That means that as new mom, when you turn on certain lights or have a certain type of night light in your bedroom, or don't get outside at a certain time of the day, that's really important, you are giving the wrong circadian cues to baby, and then likely changing sleep schedules, because we're kind of installing that new circadian rhythm in an incorrect way that the body's looking for us to pick it up. Thaddeus, this is really interesting, because I believe that babies are generally in my experience as a nurse midwife and lactation consultant working with babies all the time, I believe that babies are born with the reverse circadian rhythm most of the time. So when they come out, they are typically wanting to be more awake at night and more asleep during the day. This is just the normal pattern that happens when they're born, and then mothers are trying to, very early on teach them how to have healthy sleep habits. So they're often making the mistake of keeping the baby room dark, keeping the baby's room dark during the day, using blackout curtains and things like that, and then they're not getting exposed to that light during the day. And then in the night, when they're trying to figure out how to breastfeed, they're turning the lights on, or they're sitting there for 3045, minutes breastfeeding, and they're looking at their phone because they're bored, or they're changing the baby's diaper, and mom and dad are both up and lights are on, and they're trying to figure out what to do. So they're just unknowingly disrupting that kind of reversal of the pattern, getting the baby to start sleeping at night and be awake more during the day. 

So yes, because our circadian rhythm and therefore our sleep and what happens during sleep is set from these light and dark cues. If we keep baby's bedroom pitch dark during the day because we want them to take a nap so we can get some rest, totally legitimate thing to do. However, what we're doing is, as you stated, Trisha, we're installing. Calling the circadian rhythm backwards. And so maybe because you have way more experience in this than I do, babies are coming out with this reverse circadian rhythm. And it's actually because they don't have a circadian rhythm yet. So they're going to base all of their cues on hunger. So when they need something, they're going to want the thing, the food, whatever it is, and it seems like they're awake a lot more during the night, and when we keep up that schedule, oh my gosh. You know, my baby was awake all night, so I'm going to black everything out during the day so they can get sleep. And so can I that is then extending the circadian cues to keep baby waking up during the night. So what can you do? One of the things you can do like, obviously, you still want to get enough sleep, but if you can get outside at dawn, as close as possible to dawn, there's no ultraviolet light at dawn, and being outside at dawn, it sets number one, a timer for when melatonin will flow into your body at night. It's a 17 hour timer from when you get outside in the morning and see natural light, and you're setting your circadian rhythm and getting better sleep at night by setting those really important cues. First thing so people often ask us, Well, what about you know, if my baby is asleep at dawn, but I'm awake, should I wake my baby up and and go outside? And I would say, like, the answer is probably no, like, you should probably go outside as mom or dad, but for baby, like, what I would recommend is open those blackout curtains, because right now you've got these curtains closed, and the only light shining on the baby is this artificial man made light, and a lot of that light has never been designed for human health. It's just been designed so we can see things in the dark, and that light's giving the wrong cues and too much of one cue, like blue light, which we can talk about later, to the baby. So even if the baby is sleeping, if you can open up the shades and allow the dawn sunlight to get on the baby's skin. So it just comes in through the window. It filters in their their body is receiving, then the signal that it's dawn, we start getting that circadian rhythm and train in the right way, yeah, well, I'll double on that. So I think it depends also you guys on the age of baby, right? So, or like, when baby is just born, I think setting up these situations like that is the same is really important. But also, you know, the question we get a lot is, should we take Should I take my newborn and wake them up and take them outside with me? Well, I really think it's age dependent. And, you know, learning to be a new mom is stressful enough, and then doubling down on, like, Oh my God, no, I gotta get them outside. And, like, stressing about that is, like, never helpful, right? So using your intuition, and this is, like, how Thaddeus and I play off this, like, Yin Yan is, like, I always say, like, use your intuition, like, if you think, like, as mom, right? Like, go out and bring your baby in the sunlight, like this might help them go to sleep at a different time. Then, yeah, that might help, be helpful, or if, like, you know what, we've had a rough couple of days, I'm gonna let them sleep like we always, we always let our babies sleep whenever they can, right, like, that's kind of the rule as newborns. But I think, like, two, three months right now, we're down the line a little bit and getting baby out and starting, like, what Thaddeus was saying, starting that rhythm and syncing it with you, that's when you can really start installing that.

I had a question for Thaddeus earlier. You said that when we get outside, it's about 17 hours. And I had the first time I ever heard about this. I heard 14 to 16. And now I'm nervous, because I'm just thinking if, if a person goes outside at 8am and so many Americans do that because they're on their way to work, it's maybe around 8am Are you saying we don't start to really maximize melatonin production until like 1am or will the like I always thought, as the sun goes down, we naturally start to secrete melatonin? But can you just talk a little more about about that? Yeah, yeah, of course. So there's always a range. So you're you're more correct. I try to give a number, because sometimes that's just easier, but in a lot of the studies that they're looking at, they're seeing different numbers, and they tend to average a number to one number. So there, there is a range. And kind of my issue with a lot of a lot of published studies, is that's hard to control for various factors. When melatonin is released is different than when it's made. I think that's kind of an important thing. Like we make melatonin in our body all day long, and we make it from different amino acids. Well, one amino acid in the body that turns into serotonin, and then the serotonin turns into melatonin. So it's tryptophan. So you take this tryptophan, you're you consume it in some sort of a food, the body starts converting it in the gut into serotonin and into melatonin, and there is a cue that the body uses to release the melatonin. And into the blood to make us sleepy, to give us the benefits of sleep. And that melatonin, we kind of call it the conductor, because it sets up 10 additional hormones, including like insulin and testosterone and ghrelin and prolactin. It's the conductor of all of those. And when it's released is a set amount of time from when you sync your circadian rhythm in the morning. So So there's two factors that occur to release melatonin from the body. The first is going to be when you see the dawn sun or a really intense bright light. Your phone is not quite intense enough to set this the schedule. So if you're waking up at 5am or 6am in the summer. You know, we live in the northern area like you do, so it's light in the summer, 5am to 6am if you're not getting outside until 8am when you're on your way to work, that signal will be delayed for when melatonin will be released. Secondly, what you see at night is when the melatonin will be released. It begins to release after our eyes experience darkness for a certain amount of time, which means in the summer, because it's light longer, our melatonin won't release till later. So that's why you see some of the larger numbers of when melatonin will be released. In the winter when it gets dark here, at 435 o'clock in the afternoon, you'll start to produce or release the melatonin like five or 6pm assuming that you're not seeing blue light, because we have receptors in our eyes called melanopsin, the only thing they do is look at blue wavelengths of light, which comes from phones, tablets, televisions, overhead lights, they all have blue LEDs embedded in them. In fact, all LEDs since 2015 are based on a blue LED driver, and then they just filter it to give different warmth of light. So when we see blue light at night, any melatonin that was starting to be released is destroyed and stopped, and then you delay the release even further, so that timing of when you release melatonin after seeing daylight is dependent on the season, and it's dependent on the light that you see after dark.

So somebody recently reached out to us on our social media platform and suggested that we live only by candlelight or firelight after the sun goes down. Would you guys? I mean, I know that's extreme, extreme, and not many people are going to do that, but that truly would be like the optimal way to to be around light in the evening.

You know our biology, whether you believe in evolution or you believe in design, right? It Right? It is set up to read blue light and change physiologically what's happening in the body based on blue light. So for all of human history before, like we electrified the nation in the 40s and 50s is when most people got electricity. Before that time, the only light we could see at night would have been fire light and the moonlight. And the moonlight does look a little bit blue, but it's not intense enough to make any changes. Fire light has very little blue light, and so there's been a number of studies. You can find some of the studies online, if you just type in, like blue light and melatonin, and you'll see a picture of LED light, a compact fluorescent light and a candle, and they show the amount of melatonin that's disrupted based on those light sources. And fire light disrupts less than 2% of your total nighttime melatonin, whereas, like an LED light disrupts 80% of your nighttime melatonin. So should we, you know, like we could live under fire, light and candlelight, probably most people, I do know some people that do this, most people are not going to do that. But is that healthier? Sure, but we live in a modern society. We want to watch a movie. We want to, like, look at our food and cook dinner without just using candles. So we have to use appropriate lighting sources, because you got to live in a modern society.

Hence the blue light blocking glasses. That's where, that's where these come into play. And can we just go back to the dawn comment for a moment too? Because I'd like to define dawn a little bit a little bit better, and how much it matters as to whether you are actually outside your home, or if you're just in a very well lit room with the sunlight coming in, and how long during this very early time of the day do you actually need to be outside?

So the first question is like, what time so dawn, the sun rises at a different time all year round, depending on where you live. So for example, here in Wisconsin, it's dawn around 530 right now in the morning, but in the winter, it'll be like 8am so the timing of that does change. And when we say Dawn, we're talking about within 30 minutes of sunrise. So you can look on, you know, your local app or or. Uh, the Weather Channel, and look at when sun rises in your location, and within 30 minutes means that there's no UV in the sun. And it is kind of a special time to be outside before there's UV in the sun. It does do different things physiologically in our body than when uv is present in sunlight, which is 30 minutes after dawn. So a when should you be out? Ideally, within 30 minutes of sunrise. However, I woke up late. What should I do? Should I still go outside? Yes, the most critical thing is, before you get involved in all your devices, even if it's past Dawn, including with baby, you would take your baby outside. You. You don't need to stare at the sun if you're seeing light and you can see the trees or the grass, the light's getting in your eyes, and it's doing its physiological job. So you just want to get outside when you first wake up, if you can't get outside at dawn, because that does set the circadian cue for nighttime sleep. Tons of studies done showing people that get outside when they first arise. Have better sleep at night. Now, how long? How long is typically minimum, between two and five minutes. It's not a long time. Five minutes is better. 15 minutes is ideal. So, like, if you can get 15 minutes, like, take the dog for a walk, take your baby in the stroller, and, you know, walk on the walking path, or whatever it is you do, 15 minutes is really, like the the great amount of time that most studies are showing that it has at the largest benefit. So we tend, tend to recommend, like, five to 15 minutes. And then your final question is, if I'm indoors, but like me, I've got four windows around me, and Heidi's got five around her. Like, isn't that good enough? Windows block 50% of the red light, 50% of the infrared, almost 100% of the UV. So what you're getting through window light is a distorted spectrum of light, and it's also not as bright as being outside. So my preference, 100% of the time, is, if you're in a car, roll the window down to see the dawn sun or to get your 15 minutes. If you're indoors and have the ability, like corporate headquarters, maybe you can't do it, but just, you know, open the window because the light coming in through the screen of the open window is very different light than what's coming through a closed window.

Here's a here's a funny little tidbit on that. When we're driving in the winter, we have our windows down. Thaddeus hands. Everybody a blanket in the car. He's like, It's okay, just bundle up. You'll stay warm. We're gonna get sunlight. Because he knows the, you know how the how the windows block all those healing infrared and red are the most healing rays.

My kids will have fun stories to tell when they get that's so healthy. It's so great. I do have a question. Thaddeus, you were saying that after that 30 minutes, the UV does have a different effect in the body. And I'm very curious about that. And then I have kind of a maybe this will amuse you, but I'm also wondering, just theoretically, I once I'm I'm a morning person, so once I'm up, I'm why I naturally wake up in the morning, not at sunrise, but my natural wake at time, if I'm rested, is between 615 and 630 let's just say, for kicks, I decide to start getting up at sunrise, and let's just say it's at 545 And I go outside for 15 minutes, and this is very unlike me. I'm just it's a theoretical question, but let's just say that I said to myself, well, I'm going to do that, and if I'm tired, I'm just going to go take a 45 minute nap. Does that still get you on the right circadian rhythm if you go back into your home and just lie down again, because basically you established that timing of the yeah that cue is. So I think the answer will be yes, but I just want to confirm that. Or does that mess things up? How does nap affect things?

So to your Yeah, your last question, yes, definitely. Cynthia, getting outside and getting that circadian cue is what's required for the body physiologically to start building the melatonin to sync circadian rhythm to where you live on the planet, to give you better sleep at night, you can then take a nap at any time, including right after that, if you wanted to go back to sleep. So napping is totally fine. A lot of the sleep experts and all the studies are showing that many people benefit from naps, and it only starts to mess with your they call it like sleep inertia, when you try to go to sleep at night, if you're getting like a greater than 60 to 90 minute nap. So a beyond 60 to 90 minutes nap in the afternoon, not in the morning, this might be different, but if you were to take a nap in the afternoon, there's lots and lots of benefits with like lowering blood pressure and cognitive benefits. So NASA has studied this quite a bit as well, but if you're getting it to that 90 minute mark for your nap, you may not be as sleepy at night, and going to bed consistently at the same time every night is more important than taking a nap during the day, from what the research says, for sure, I've heard that. And then, just to my first question as well, the UV. How does it change once that UV light starts to enter? The light rays when the sun has risen? So the UV is based on the angle of the sun, and that's why, at dawn, the angle of the sun is not steep enough for UV to enter, because it's always coming from the sun. We just don't get any on Earth at dawn. So what's happening is a couple things we know. A lot of people are having trouble getting pregnant these days, and a lot of that's due to hormonal imbalances. A lot of those hormonal imbalances can be corrected in some manner, through proper circadian rhythm timing, because of this master conductor, melatonin that's helping with testosterone and estrogen, it's kind of turning them off. So example, like melatonin turns off the sex steroid hormones. So we don't want those running at certain times of the day or year. We don't want them running all the time and just blasting out those compounds. So in the winter, you'll notice almost no animals have babies during the winter, except humans. That's because melatonin is higher in the winter, and it's stopping those sex steroid hormones from from coming on and allowing people to get pregnant animals, people could do the same thing if we experience darkness of winter. So when we're outside at dawn, no UV that red and infrared light is turning on the hormones in the body. It turns on the sex steroid hormones. So it gives a signal to the cyclical amino acids. So there's there's amino acids, they have the structure. They capture photons of light, and it starts to inform the body of how to turn on different hormone cascades. And the hormone cascade is the sex steroid hormones from morning light, but when UV light comes out, it starts to shut off some of the production of testosterone and estrogen, the sex steroid hormones. So it starts to change some of the amount of those hormones that are released. And it's going to release nitric oxide from the blood vessels, which tends to reduce blood pressure, and then it also imparts vitamin D, or hormone D, into the body through sulphinated cholesterol on our skin. So our skin can produce way more vitamin D in one sun session than you can get from a pill. But you get that only when UV B light is present, which is not year round. For most people that live in a northern climate.

Would you yourself, ever take melatonin? Either of you do you give melatonin to your kids? What do you think about melatonin? It has never felt right to me to take melatonin. I've never taken it. I don't let my children take it. I think you melatonin is something that you need to let your body develop through the right sort of habits, but tell us about it.

Yeah, I'll let Heidi respond on whether she'll take it. I mean, melatonin is a Trisha, it's a hormone, right? So, like, how big into hormone therapy are you and do you want your kids using? So that's a question you should always answer for yourself, because it's a hormone, like, like vitamin D, people call it a vitamin but honestly, it's a hormone. So I'm also very careful with what I would take in terms of supplements, because I'd rather get them naturally. So my opinion is you should always if you can get your melatonin naturally, and there's very natural ways to get melatonin in your body and have it be released. And it's it's not that hard to do, but the way we're living in modern society is almost destroying everybody's melatonin today. So most people are like, Well, why shouldn't I just take it as a pill? Cuz it's available in every Walgreens and Walmart and everywhere else, right? And there's two different sides to that debate, and they both make a lot of scientific and logical sense. So I'll just present a couple of the sides, and then I'll tell you what I do. And so one side says it's natural, it's it's something your body makes, and you don't want to take it exogenously, something from outside your body that you're putting in, so let your body make it. But the fact is, most people aren't making enough, or they're having it destroyed when they see the wrong type of light at night. And as we age, melatonin production slows down and becomes more difficult. So there's a group of people that probably would benefit from taking melatonin, and that would be older adults, 50 plus, but certainly 60 plus that probably does have a benefit, based on all the studies, without much downside, people that are really sick or have cancer. There's a lot of studies out there. I'm not a medical doctor, but you can see that high dose melatonin does have a really significant impact on some of those things. That would be something I would look into if I was in that camp, the plus side says that, you know, you can take melatonin and it won't change the amount that your body produces. And if you take it one day and not the next day, your body won't have, like, a rebound effect, or an effect where you turn down the receptors that make melatonin. So people are saying, like. You can take as much as you want, and there's not a downside. I'm not sure what the right answer is, because the research is still out on a lot of this. So the other thing that I want people to know is, when your body makes melatonin, it makes it makes it at the rate, for the whole body, for a night, at like 0.3 milligrams, the supplements sold today are typically five to 12 milligrams. So what I tend to do is, yes, I've taken melatonin for jet lag when I'm flying across continents. There are other ways to kind of get your melatonin straightened out, or if for whatever reason. So I'm someone who has suffered for decades with insomnia and anxiety, and I solved that problem about 1015, years ago, learning these things about light. But when I had massive insomnia and I just couldn't find any way to go to sleep at night, and it's 3am and I still wasn't getting good sleep, I would take low dose melatonin. I take a one milligram tablet, so sometimes it's hard to find one milligram. These days, I'd break it into four and I would take one of those, and that worked extremely well for me to help me fall asleep. And I figured, to me, the benefit of getting sleep and taking a little dose of melatonin was better than not getting the sleep, because sleep is so important.

Yeah. And we also have a friend who's a biohacker, and he takes 25 milligrams at night. And I think, like, that's crazy. So I mean, guys, they're so extreme. Like, some people are like, No, you shouldn't do it. And other people are like, taking and every night like that. That's really extreme, right? So I think there's a, like, a one size fits all answer for that question. It's kind of like, back to intuition. And I know, like, if I take melatonin, if I'm having a hard time falling asleep, and I take, like, you know, we cut one up, or whatever, my heart starts racing. My body starts freaking out. I'm like, Thaddeus, I'm like, that made it worse. And so I think there's a time lapse too. So you're supposed to take it, you know, before, before you start getting ready for bed, and maybe that would be more helpful. But honestly, I always say too to like do the free stuff first, and the free stuff is morning sunlight. So I we track our sleep, and I know that when I'm getting out consistently, we have a pact between the two of us as part of our marriage, actually, is to never miss another sunrise for the rest of our lives. So every single morning we are out, getting morning sunlight, whether it's like, right below the horizon, or it's just, you know, within that half hour window, and we it's been seven years and we haven't missed one morning. But I know that, like, I go to sleep really well, and so much better when I'm earlier in that sunrise and I'm out longer, I've noticed it's just so interesting how this your body makes melatonin, and the benefits are, there are 1000s of studies. The benefits are so obvious. It fights cancer. That's why we're supposed to sleep. As much as we sleep, our bodies are not supposed to develop cancer. It was estimated that over 100 years ago, about one per 100 people got cancer, and now it's one in three. And we know it's our lifestyle. We know it's how humans are living. We used to walk. We used to be outdoors all the time. And the fact that we are so tempted to see the benefit of melatonin, because it's such an extraordinary benefit, and to think, well, I'll just do 25 grams of it. Then I understand that appeal, but it almost made me think about how they give women Pitocin in labor. We're neglect like, oh, oh, the body secretes oxytocin and labor, and it makes labor go really well, and it's really effective. So let's just make let's manufacture oxytocin and give it a name, Pitocin, and just give it to women so they can go into labor. What it's neglecting in both cases is there is such a complex biofeedback system in the body, it's not just like an on switch, and now it's melatonin time, and oh, you're in labor, so now you're just getting oxytocin. So many things happen before Labor begins that we're not even aware of. So many things happen that we still haven't even studied nor understand about childbirth. It's the same thing. It's just we can't explain everything, but what we have to always do is respect the body and just respect how humans have lived up until about 100 years ago. We don't want to. We'd much rather take melatonin than get up at sunrise every day. I think until people start doing it, I have a very close friend who healed her child from a very serious illness because she's brilliant and did a tremendous amount of research, and everything pointed to melatonin. And they actually uprooted their family for several months last winter and moved to El Salvador because it's so close to the equator, you're smiling, because you must understand this very well. And they lived there and got up at sunrise every day, and there was a dramatic change in their child. All the they went to like eight different doctors and spent almost $100,000 trying to heal their child. Turned out, all they had to do was start getting up at sunrise their back. Connecticut and right? Like every day of the year, they have the same pact. They all get up early in the morning and they go outside for sunrise. So, you know, while we feel tempted by that supplement, the people who are getting up at sunrise, they know they're living the best life. They know they're loving their like, Do you love? What do you love the feeling of being up early and just, you know, it's not as hard as it sounds, right, once you start doing it, definitely. And when, when you're Oh, when you're synced to the sun, like somebody asked me yesterday, I was at a retail store, and we have this conversation because they're gonna start working with us in our glasses. But she was like, wait, you get up, what time do you get up in the morning? I said, well, with the sun. And she's like, well, what time do you go to bed? I'm like, well, with the sun. I'm like, There's no set time. We live in a very fluctuating culture in the northern hemisphere, right? So in the winter, that is nice sleep. We go to bed at 730 like we sleep so much in the winter. He actually wrote a book about that. And then in the summer, like, we don't need as much sleep, right? So it's, it's like, we are our bodies, like you were saying, Cynthia, our bodies are synced to nature. They're infinitely intelligent. It knows. I was in a friend's house at a cabin, and I had a bedroom, and there was no windows in this bedroom just a couple weeks ago, and my body, it was all black, dark, you know, like no window. My body knew it was sunrise. I was like, That is so cool that my so in sync with the sun. I don't even need the light cues anymore. It just knows. It's that quantum thing. It's so cool. I want to just reiterate what you said about going to sleep with the sun, and especially in the winter, when the sun goes down earlier. For new mothers, it's so important that they go to bed with their babies, and so few of them are doing that, and it could be so incredibly beneficial and really reduce the sleep deprivation that new mothers feel, if we could just sort of accept going to bed with our babies. I understand how challenging it is, because I was there too. I've been there a few times. You know, once the baby goes down, it's finally time to have some me time. I can watch a show, I can hang out with my partner, I can do some whatever laundry, talk to friends. But if you can just get in this cycle of going to bed with your baby and waking up with your baby, it is just a completely different world for sleep.

Yeah, and there's, there's always this argument of, well, I'm a night owl, and so I do better. I get more energy, and I get all my work done at night. The fact is, like our biology is diurnal, so we have this biology that's not nocturnal biology like rats and mice and bats. So you can go against nature for only so long before there's consequences, and the more in this modern society where, you know, we have lights, bazillion lights blazing in the middle of the night, and go to the gym and work out 24/7, the question should be like, is that beneficial to you? And so rather than push yourself to do more and more work and produce more and watch more things like, maybe you'll have a better life experience if you're really healthy and you feel really good all the time. And I tend to find for most people, that means like going to bed and waking up with the sun. So, you know, we had a friend who was a nutritionist and knew, like, all this stuff about health and wellness, and just couldn't lose the last 45 pounds that he had. And finally, he sends me this email a couple months after I saw him a few years ago, and he's like, I lost 45 pounds. Finally, the only change that I made was going outside at dawn. Like it can make a huge difference to people more than you think. And what I tend to find is it's free and it seems so simple. And like, why would I do that when I can buy this supplement, which has all these studies and like, there's all these commercials and they and people say it works. Sometimes we ignore the free things that can be really powerful,

and people don't take the free things seriously. So it's like, oh, the more you pay for something, the more it's going to work. Well, this is like the opposite. So not a lot of people are actually doing the things that we're recommending. One thing I want to add, too is if you're trying to get pregnant, my mom had, we used to have horses growing up, and she wanted a horse that was born at a certain time of year for like, showing purposes or whatever. So if she wanted it to be born in January, as close to January 1 as possible, and we were, we were showing her around our house after Thaddeus and, like, biohacked Our house after, after we got married, and we have all these red lights and candle lights. And she was like, I see a little light bulb in her head. And she goes, Oh. She goes, that's how I got a horse pregnant. Was by light and and I was like, what Tell me more? And she said, Yeah, I would put a light in her stall so that she would go into heat at a different time. And the horse, who hadn't gotten pregnant for two years got pregnant that year because she had a baby and had a baby in winter when they normally wouldn't. Yeah, just by the light. So I think it's something like, you know, people that are like, trying to get pregnant. It's like the thing. Know that we don't think about, and it's probably the most important thing, is light.

Wait. Would you say that's an argument for explain that a little bit more about where, when the light should be, because the really the light should be removed after sundown, isn't it? The UV light?

Yeah. So if you Yeah, the thing with with men and women is we can get pregnant at any time of the year, because we're exposed to artificial light cues if we complete so if you're trying to get pregnant, maybe you want to keep your lights on at night until you're pregnant, because having blue lights on until well into the dark of the night keeps our sex steroid hormones turned on, and so the melatonin, which would shut them off, doesn't flow, so you're going to get worse sleep, but you'll still have those sex steroid hormones pumping through the body and allow you to get pregnant more easily based on the light being on.

Are we talking about women having better arousal and interest in sex, or actually their fertility is heightened fertility, specifically fertility. That's fascinating, because I would have thought and assumed that, because infertility is so prevalent, there's obviously many reasons for that, but light being one of them, and the exposure to all the blue light, I would think would be inhibiting that.

So I think that you're right, and I think it's because it so a lot of the research studies, and this is summarized really well in the book lights out by Ts Wiley, from 1999 so she has, I think her research section, with all her reference studies, is bigger than the book itself. Really easy to read and digest book, but a lot of that research shows that the blue light keeps the sex hormones turned on, which allows us to get pregnant further into the year than other animals. However, because we never turn the lights out and experience darkness and go to bed when it gets dark, we start to i It's not a technical term, but like, burn those hormones out, so they're always on all the time, and we get this dysfunction or dysregulation so that they can't function well, because we never give them an off season. And that's where I think there's a number of reasons for infertility. That's just one reason. But I think if you are getting good sleep all year round, and then turn the lights on at night. You'll have success if that's the issue. If you have lights on all the time and you're constantly getting the signal to turn on these hormones, they're eventually going to be dysregulated and not function the way they

should. Well, probably, rather than even looking for a hack to improve fertility, probably, again, we should just restore ourselves to what humans always did. It's getting up at sunrise, and it's not just five to 15 minutes outside. They're outside. So when that UV light comes in, that right there is the benefit to their fertility. So we don't even have to hack it and say, keep your lights on dark late at night, because then they do lose the benefits of that serotonin and then the increased melatonin at night. It's go ahead, Trisha, jump in or maybe around the few days that you ovulate. Just for those few days, keep your blue light on, keep your lights on a little bit longer. I never like to give women the message of hacks either, because if they were doing that like, it sounds like fun, and it's kind of, I mean, kind of like laughing as I say this, but if they do think in terms of, like, I've never been a fan. I know no one's going to agree. Anyone listening to this episode is not going to probably agree with me, but I've never been a fan of taking the temperature, seeing when you're obviously ovulating, Okay, it's time to have sex. Okay, turn the lights on. I happen to feel that whole approach is an impediment to conception, and, like, when in doubt, just restore to what we're supposed to do. And as far as conception, we forget it's supposed to be really fun, like sex is supposed to be really fun and satisfying. And I'm convinced the more we look for hacks, the more we're just taking that edge off of exactly what causes fertility in the first place, and and just to, just to follow that up, in the summertime, I think this is what TS Wiley was saying in her book, in the summertime, if you think about in northern hemisphere, like the the sun is longer, right? So we carry on. It's kind of like festival time. So we're up later, we're in the light longer, and that's when, like, we get pregnant in the summertime. And so that's what she's saying, is like. And then your gestation period is through the winter, then you give birth in the spring, right? So that, I mean, it's all synced back to nature, of course. And so when we say with the light and also like it what you're saying too, Cynthia about sex, when you're sleeping better, you are you're, I mean, melatonin, you guys, is precursor to oxytocin. We want to all be oxytocin dominant, right? That's the thing. So that's why postpartum women don't want to have sex. They're so tired, they're just their hormones are completely thrown off from the lack of sleep alone, much more than anything else. Probably well and. By nature again, right? Like, you're not supposed to be interested in sex after you have a baby. Like, that's brilliant, you know, like, our bodies are so infinitely intelligent, but really, really getting your sleep dialed in, and then wanting to have sex and being in that oxytocin flow and having babies. You know, like, out of I always think, too, like people that are really trying hard. It's like, it's like grabbing water, like grabbing sand in your in your hand, and it just like, it goes, it falls away really fast, right? So, like, we're trying so hard to get pregnant, I mean, but honestly, like, sleep is such part of that, because we all know when we're sleep deprived, I don't feel pretty, I don't feel desired, I don't feel like all of that. So sleep as the foundation to all of those things. And I think one thing that we really haven't talked about, which I think Thaddeus could really speak into, is like, why do we want melatonin? And melatonin is, like, is such an amazing thing that we know very little about. Actually, Dr Joe Dispenza talks about, there's so many other things that with pineal gland elevation that, you know, it turns into 10 different things.

This was my point about the biofeedback system in the lab. This is exactly my point. And there's so much we still don't even understand, and that's why, like, oh, the melatonin is good for me. I'll just take a supplement of melatonin. We're missing out on everything that's supposed to be connected to that that creates it, that makes it wane. So the education is phenomenal. And thank you both. This is so great. But you also sell really great, cute glasses. And can you explain why you wear these glasses? What the benefits are, how yours are potentially different from the others that people are starting to see everywhere, like, what tell us about these glasses that you make? Well, first of all, we know, we know they're cuter. Yes, let us speak into the first part of that, and I'll, I'll talk about the cute part and why we made them. But you guys, he did a TEDx talk on blue light blocking glasses. And so he's like, I mean, he's like, expert in blue light blocking glasses. So well the whole reason, as I said before, like, I had decades worth of insomnia and anxiety, and I was like, looking for a solution, and I I went the pharmaceutical route, and that's not what I wanted to do. So I weaned myself off within a year and a half of the pharmaceutical anti anxiety medication. And I was like, what are the natural ways to reduce insomnia. And what I found is like this blue light, right? So if the blue light, it's just one wavelength of light, but it's in all of our devices and all of our overhead lights now, and the car headlights are so bright, even the American Medical Association says they're dangerous. Like I'm sure you've noticed oncoming cars can kind of blind you a little bit with how bright those lights are, and so the blue wavelength of light reaches the melanopsin receptors of our eyes, and then it starts to shut down the melatonin and our sleep. And even if we are getting sleep, sometimes we wake up after eight hours and we're like, Man, I don't feel like I've slept at all, but I got eight hours of sleep. You're not getting the benefits. So these glasses what they do, and I hope you see people wearing them. But honestly, like with 1000s of research studies, and with the National Institute of Health, back in 1995 has been studying this and said, like we know, blue wavelengths of light, and they they code named it, Allen, artificial light at night, a l, a n is associated with heart disease, diabetes, cancer and obesity. We know all these things, and we know it disrupts sleep. Why doesn't the American public know more about it? So why aren't more people wearing these what the glasses do is they block, really simply, the blue wavelength of light from ever hitting the melanopsin receptor in your eye, and therefore, after dark, if you are wearing these, your brain will think that it's night, it will release the melatonin that it is supposed to and you get the benefits of sleep. There's a group of people in the world that don't know about this technology that's really simple to use and has a massive impact, and no one's talking to them about this, because the NIH is silent about it, and the American Medical Association publishes their papers, but your doctor is not telling you about it, even though they could be. So honestly, I would love to see everybody in a modern society where blue light blocking glasses if they're awake after dark, which most of us are in a modern society, because lack of sleep is one of the biggest health crisis of our entire society right now, even in the biohacking world, one of the things that the first thing that they will tell you is like, put the amber glasses on. I'll just show you real quick what I'm talking about. So these are the amber glasses after sunset, and that's to protect your melatonin, right? And so melatonin, we didn't really answer this, but it's anti cancer. It's anti aging. If there's, like, a whole set of things that melatonin, like we want to be melatonin, it also, it also helps drop your body temperature during night, which helps you fight off bacterial infections. Some. Thing that I just learned recently from a new study, yeah, and there's, there's so many benefits to back to melatonin. So what we what we found is, even in the biohacker community, you guys, that people still weren't even wearing them. We and so when Thaddeus, I travel, we don't care if we're in a restaurant, we don't care if we're in a hotel. We don't care where we are. In seven years, I have not missed one night of wearing these glasses after sunset in seven years, not one you said you got your teens to sleep better. Is that just because you told them to start wearing them at night? Or what exactly happened? Yeah, so they were wearing the glasses, and they're like, hit and miss, right? Like, it's like, oh, they're kind of cool. They're kind of cute, but I don't know, but what we did in our environment is, is back to the red lights. So a lot of people will switch out for amber lights, or the Himalayan Rock, rock lamps, those types of lamps right at night. So not turning on overhead light, because if you think about the overhead light, it's actually mimicking the sun, and your pineal like it knows that. So even just turning on lamps at night is like, kind of like a easy way to step into that. And we always tell people, like, put on lights, even on the ground, or lamps, and then switch your light bulb out to an amber light, so the amber has no blue light frequency in it. And then what we did, well Thaddeus did, is switched them out to red light. And so red we have red light in all our bathrooms. We only have red light in our bedroom. So when we started putting those lights in our house and that, that was the only thing you guys that that comes on after sunset, our teens started going to bed at like 10:30 or 11 o'clock.

So Amber is better than the white lights people are using in their homes, and the red is even better than the amber is. That is Amber still good, but red is the best in general. When you get a bulb at home, almost all your bulbs are going to have blue wavelengths of light. That's the spectrum. It's got, like, a wide variety of different colors of light, but blue is a predominant frequency or spectrum or wavelength, and what you really want to do is find a light bulb that has as a little or no blue wavelength of light coming from it. You can get things like the amber bulbs. That'll look more natural. It'll be like this warm yellow light without the blue wavelength, and that's going to be much healthier than anything else that you can put in your home. So without, with all that said, I like to go back to what Heidi originally mentioned is like, don't stress out about all of this stuff, because we know that cortisol is the antithesis to melatonin. So if you're really stressed, you're not going to produce melatonin either. So you really want to just think about what are the ways you can start incorporating things into your life today. Could you wake up a little bit earlier and get out at dawn and do these really simple, natural, free things that all of us have access to, opening your window, getting out at dawn, and using lower levels of light at night and trying to sleep more in sync with where you live on Earth, and I really think you're going to be much healthier because of that. 

Thank you for joining us at the Down To Birth Show. You can reach us @downtobirthshow on Instagram or email us at Contact@DownToBirthShow.com. All of Cynthia’s classes and Trisha’s breastfeeding services are offered live online, serving women and couples everywhere. Please remember this information is made available to you for educational and informational purposes only. It is in no way a substitute for medical advice. For our full disclaimer visit downtobirthshow.com/disclaimer. Thanks for tuning in, and as always, hear everyone and listen to yourself.