#151 - Red Light Therapy for Sleep: It Works!
“In the morning you can do red light therapy on skin, you can do it on eyes … Will it wake your system up? Will it provide the kind of cortisol increase - which by the way, you want early in the day, and adrenaline and dopamine increase that sunlight can provide … the answer is … NO.”
After almost 5 minutes, Andrew Huberman finally answered a viewer’s question in his AMA (Ask Me Anything) podcast that dropped last week.
The viewer’s questions was:
“OK. Tom M asks - Light therapy recommendations for those who live in Northern Regions with limited morning light or too cold to get outside for morning light. Dark when waking. Do red light therapy? Great question!”
Yep, another great question about sleep - followed by a(nother) wrong answer about sleep by Huberman.
This is what can happen if one tries to comment on areas of expertise that they’re not an expert,
Which means the episode should be ‘called …
AMA about Ophthalmology
In 2014, Cele Richardson embarked on her PhD investigating the benefits of morning light therapy for adolescents and young adults.
The tool she was going to use for bright light therapy were the Re-Timer LED glasses. These glasses had, at the time, been commercially available for just over a year. They had two LEDs per eye, that emitted green light. They weren’t just some bullshit gimmick some angel investor brought to life - but the real deal. A piece of sleep tech that was based on peer-reviewed science (published in the early 2000s).
Cele was going to do the world’s biggest randomised trial of morning bright light therapy for young people. This meant she needed a control group.
Control groups come in different flavours.
For example, you can have a waitlist control group. These guys do nothing, but complete assessments every once in a while, and after their data are collected it is compared to the therapy group … and then the control group get the treatment.
However, a better control group would be one where they believe they are getting a treatment, but the researchers think they aren’t.
And that’s what Cele did.
You see, the early research that spawned the Re-Timers showed that green light was effective, but red light wasn’t. And because of this earlier study, Cele and I decided that the control group would receive red light therapy.
Easier said than done!
We got a pair of green Re-Timer glasses and attempted to colour the green LEDs with red texta. The plastic that covered the LEDs ended up being a nice tint of red. But when we turned on the Re-Timers, the green light shined through the red plastic.
Epic fail #1
We then thought to get some red cellophane to put over the green LEDs. We turned them on - the same thing happened.
Epic fail #2
Then, Cele happened to accidently meet a guy who worked at the factory that made the Re-Timers. We caught up with him at the factory, and he had some red LEDs for the Re-Timers just lying around. It was like something out of the Steve Jobs biography by by Walter Isaacson.
So Cele ends up pulling apart a bunch of green LED Re-Timers - and replacing the green LEDS for red LEDs.
Epic success #1 …
I guess we will skip to the end, and describe what Cele found. I mean after all, you’ve only got a few minuites to spare to read this article, right? Not the seemingly endless years of time and energy that it took to recruit, screen, organise appointments and matching participants to therapists, search for participants who get lost wandering around the university, and ensuring all data were collected at each time point, downloading and scoring hundreds of hours of wearable data, and entering that data into a database, and working out technical issues with our IT guy (Ben) … you know, the sort of stuff that gets dismissed when a guy on the internet says something counter to the actual science - and it only takes the guy 60 seconds to do it … No wonder nature gave the male species the guaranteed orgasm during sex … I mean, with their general lack of attention, the world’s population would decline if they weren’t built that way.
Anyway, back to Cele’s findings …
Red light therapy worked
There were no differences in the sleep, circadian rhythm, insomnia, cognitive performance and mood benefits between those assigned the green LEDs and the red LEDs.
The benefits were so substantive, that we could not claim that red light therapy was a placebo. Even though that’s what we intended.
And we weren’t the only ones in the world that ended up discovering that red light therapy works!
Thankfully, a bunch of the WINK Sleep members who undertook our online course “Treating Teen Sleep Problems” also learned this information from us. And it’s been so pleasing to hear of their successes treating teen clients. Seriously turning the sleep and school attendance of their teen clients around - 180 degrees.
That’s true Sleep Science Translation!
Conclusions?
So while Huberman does NOT have the knowledge about the benefits of red light therapy for sleep and circadian rhythms, he DOES appear to know about the benefits of red light therapy for human skin.
And it also appears that a lot of sleep scientists are NOT aware of the red-light-skin-benefits. And I think they should, because it has to do with a sleep-related thing in our bodies.
Melatonin.
But that’s another story for another time …
In the meantime - Read Deeply, and Read Broadly!
If you haven’t got the time to do that -join us at WINK.
Prof MG