Part of the Casswiki article series Books
Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar, and Survival is a book by T. S. Wiley with Bent Formby, published in 2001, which deals with the problem of “light poisoning”, disrupting sleep quality and unnatural sleep patterns - and the impact on health this gives rise to.
In this book, the author brings to point that the light is a physiological trigger that controls dopamine and hormones like cortisol. They agrues that due to the extension of the natural day through artificial lighting, resting/sleeping at the hormonal level is rarely adequate for optimum biological needs of the body. This causes both fatigue and unnatural appetite, which leads to weight gain, exhaustion and various diseases. Also, they discusses how the body’s responses are cyclical, reflecting the seasons of the year, and that the body’s needs vary seasonally (for an example, during the winter months, the body needs more sleep, and carbohydrates should be restricted as they would have been naturally during hunter-gatherer times).
It is important to note that the authors comes at the matter purely from the perspective of evolutionary biology, but if one keeps in mind that our “machines” are a product of this process to a great extent, it is very helpful to know these things for better tuning of the machine.
As Laura Knight-Jadczyk once wrote on the “Are You Getting Enough Sleep” thread:
It’s very important to have total darkness, not just in respect of your eyes, but your whole body. Your skin has light sensing cells too. Just a minute or two of light on one square inch of the skin will stop the hormones that secrete only in the dark and those hormones are crucial for all your body systems.