Scientists from the University of Colorado in Boulder in 2011 conducted an experiment to identify the effect of sunlight on the body’s biological clock. The results were published in the journal Current Biology.
Eight volunteers with different biological rhythms (there were “owls” and “larks” among them), at the request of specialists, went to the desert, where they spent a whole week without using artificial lighting. The organizers of the study banned the wards even use the backlight of mobile phones. The participants in the experiment lived in tents and focused solely on sunlight. Sensors on the wrists recorded their condition.
As it turned out, after a week of living in nature, people’s internal clocks are synchronized, regardless of what preferences they had on the daily regimen. In addition, all subjects begin to feel rested and well slept, forget about the previous insomnia.
Scientists believe this conclusion is very important, and associate the result with the influence of sunlight, “charging” the human body. It is known that the stronger the life schedule differs from the natural one (sleep in the dark, wakefulness during the day), the more problems with sleep accumulate. Sunlight regulates the level of melatonin (the hormone of the pineal gland responsible for circadian rhythms) and saturates the body with energy. As a result of this, the biological clock works without failures and allows us to be awake and sleepy. Artificial light, on the contrary, does not provide enough energy (about 200 lux against solar 10-100 thousand), but it allows you to extend the active phase of activity at night, when the body is supposed to relax. This alignment forces the internal clock to malfunction, which manifests itself, inter alia, in the form of insomnia.