If your morning routine consists of several snooze buttons, copious amounts of caffeine, or preparing for your day while still half asleep, keep reading. Too often, people "wake up" but spend the next several hours of their day effectively asleep. Seeing as there are only so many hours in a day, spending your most productive ones half asleep is a habit worth kicking. Luckily there are some easy bio-hacks you can do first thing in the morning that will fill you with energy and prepare you for whatever the day brings.
Light is key in the mornings, and you can get exposure before you're even awake. A dawn light is a device that sits by your bed and exposes you to incrementally increasing amounts of light before you wake up. Clinically, this has been shown to reduce feelings of sleepiness in the mornings (1). I have been using one for over a year and can attest that it makes a tremendous difference in my ability to get out of bed. It's set so that 30-minutes before I wake up, it begins exposing me to a very low-intensity red light. As that 30-minutes progress, the light smoothly becomes brighter and brighter until I wake up. When my alarm goes off, if I haven’t already woken up, I’m sitting in moderately intense white light. Compared to waking up in darkness, this can make it noticeably easier to not hit the snooze button and get out of bed. Once out of bed your next step should be walking around and turning on all the lights in your house. This large amount of light exposure may be slightly uncomfortable, but it plays an important role in kickstarting your brain (2).
Melanopsin Ganglion Cells are a set of neurons that sit in the lower part of your retina and connect directly to your brain. Unlike other photoreceptors in your eye, these cells don’t make out color or shapes but function to communicate to a part of your brain called the SCN. The prime purpose of these neurons is to inform your body of varying amounts of light exposure. With this information, your brain can infer where it is in relation to the 24-hour day. This allows it to alter your level of alertness. The bright light exposure you experience from the dawn light and your house lights stimulates your brain. This can lead to increased levels of alertness(2).
Next on my list is 16-36oz of lukewarm water. The reason behind this is that most of us wake up in at least a partially dehydrated state. This is an issue as studies have shown that even being slightly dehydrated can reduce levels of alertness, decrease cognitive performance, and diminish energy levels(3). Chugging this water can be uncomfortable on an empty stomach, so I typically set aside 10-15 minutes to slowly sip it down. During this time, I’m typically on my phone which for once is not a bad thing.
Believe it or not, the way our eyes focus on different objects relies on ciliary muscles to bend a lens behind your cornea. The activation of these muscles requires neural stimulation stemming from the brain. As with many processes in the brain, the action of stimulating one area often affects other functions. For example, focusing or relaxing your vision can chemically alter your levels of alertness. Therefore, focusing on something close, like tying a fishing knot or sitting on your phone can put you in a more focused state(4,5). Try to avoid relaxing your vision such as looking out over a distance, as it will have the opposite effect. This explains why it’s relaxing to look over a city or a vista. Keeping this in mind, most of us wake up grab our phones and slump into the couch with our heads down. Much like bending the lens in your eye, the position of your eyelids and head are controlled by musculature. The position you are likely viewing your phone from is with your chin close to your chest and your eyelids slightly drooping down. It is no coincidence that this is the same position you default to as you begin dozing off in that boring meeting or class. Your brain associates this position with being sleepy which signals for a decrease in your level of alertness. Since you are trying to wake up, you can counteract this by lifting your chin up, and looking upwards. Functionally this means as you sit and focus on your phone or whatever you are doing, try to keep your chin from dropping and look directly ahead or up. Simply looking at the ceiling with your eyes wide open for 15 seconds can create a noticeable increase in energy.
If all of this is still not cutting it, I turn to my secret weapon, Tumo or Wim Hof style breathing. These are excellent ways to increase adrenaline levels while remaining amazingly calm(6). To begin this, sit on a couch or chair and take a deep inhale through your nose, followed by a sharp exhale through your mouth. Focusing on making the inhale longer than the exhale. Repeat this practice 20-25 times in a row, and on the last breath blow out all your air and hold for 15-20s. You will notice a very powerful focus come over you, but will still feel calm. This is not something I use every morning but is a handy tool for when you need that extra little kick.
Whether it is one or all of these practices developing a morning ritual is the real secrete to avoiding those groggy mornings. Everything mentioned above takes about 20 minutes but gives hours of productive time back to my day. Once you have mastered the first 15-30 minutes of your day the next step in optimizing your biology is a morning walk. This has been one of the most important habits that I have developed in improving my sleep, recovery, and energy. To learn more about morning walks, check out last week's blog post linked below.
https://www.grimmelbiometrics.com/post/how-to-optimize-your-day-with-neuroscience-morning-walks
References:
1) Arakawa, K., Shirakawa, S., Kobayashi, T., Oguri, M., Kamei, Y., & TUMURA, A. T. (1998). Effects of the gradually increasing dawn light stimulation on sleep feeling. Psychiatry and clinical neurosciences, 52(2), 247-248.
2) Chiara La Morgia,Valerio Carelli,Michele Carbonelli. Melanopsin Retinal Ganglion Cells and Pupil: Clinical Implications for Neuro-Ophthalmology. Front. Neurol., 07 December 2011
3) Jéquier E, Constant F. Water as an essential nutrient: the physiological basis of hydration. Eur J Clin Nutr. 2010 Feb;64(2):115-23.
4) Noudoost, B., Chang, M. H., Steinmetz, N. A., & Moore, T. (2010). Top-down control of visual attention. Current opinion in neurobiology, 20(2), 183–190.
5) Baluch, F., & Itti, L. (2011). Mechanisms of top-down attention. Trends in neurosciences, 34(4), 210-224.
6) Kox, M., van Eijk, L. T., Zwaag, J., van den Wildenberg, J., Sweep, F. C., van der Hoeven, J. G., & Pickkers, P. (2014). Voluntary activation of the sympathetic nervous system and attenuation of the innate immune response in humans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 111(20), 7379–7384.
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