Full Spectrum Light | S2E7 (E017)
This week, Evie and Toréa are joined by Konrad Jarausch, founder of Sunlight Inside. Konrad graciously shared his immense knowledge about light spectra, artificial lights and how artificial light compares to natural sunlight. If you ever got confused trying to figure out lighting in a home improvement store, or if you just couldn't figure out what kind of lighting for inside was better for you than others, then look no further because Konrad shares a wealth of information in this episode. What kind of light do you have in your home?
In This Episode
How Konrad started Sunlight Inside (01:50)
Light engines vs light bulbs (05:31)
Pros and cons for LED lighting (05:51)
Why we have warm sunlight in morning and evening (06:57)
What about green light? (08:03)
Different kinds of light for different parts of the day (09:25)
CCT vs CRI (10:28)
Importance of overhead light (15:52)
F.lux by Michael Hertz (now Nightshift) (16:09)
Distance from light source makes a difference (16:45)
World recordings of natural light & Telelumen partnership (17:45)
Spectral power distribution (21:04)
How to choose a light therapy device (21:04)
Which light spectra is good for Seasonal Affectiveness Disorder (22:49)
Which lights are good for circadian rhythm (24:04)
How Sunlight Inside lamps compensate for shorter days in winter (25:31)
What is lighting purgatory? (26:45)
How SAD can strike in the summertime (28:52)
Resources Mentioned
Transcript
Toréa Rodriguez 0:08
Welcome to the Wildly Optimized Wellness podcast. I am your host, Toréa Rodriguez. And I’m joined by the lovely co host, Evie Takacs. Both of us are Functional Diagnostic Nutrition practitioners and we love working with women from all over the world, through our virtual programs, helping women not only feel better, but actually achieve that vibrant, no holds barred version of themselves, they’ve been missing for a long time, and how we actually get there. Well, that is what this show is all about. Now, please keep in mind that this podcast is created for educational purposes only and should never be used as a replacement for medical diagnosis or treatment. And if you like what you hear today, we would love for you to hit that follow button, leave a review in Apple podcast, share with your friends, and keep coming back for more. Let’s start today’s adventure shall we?
Toréa Rodriguez 1:08
Okay, welcome to episode seven. I'm super excited to have Konrad you're gonna have to help me how to pronounce your last name actually.
Konrad Jarausch 1:16
Yeah, it's Jarausch it's not an easy one.
Toréa Rodriguez 1:19
Jarausch, yes awesome. Thank you so much for coming. The reason why I invited you onto this podcast is that you are the founder of a company called Sunlight Inside and Sunlight Inside makes these wonderful full light spectrums, and so I thought, why not have Konrad come on and we can talk about full spectrum light and light in general and its effect on health, and so we're delighted to have you here today. Do you want to give us a quick little intro as to how that business came about? And how light became so important in your life?
Konrad Jarausch 1:50
Yeah, well, again, thanks so much for having me. Great to meet you both and look forward to talking about light today. Yes, Sunlight Inside was born out of I'm a technology guy by training and was very close to technology related to lighting, and all the wonderful things we can do with technology, and I'm a big outdoor person, right? I'm blessed to live in California and I, like many people feel better when I spend time outside and have a well rounded lifestyle, right. And knowing about the technology to recreate natural light, I started asking myself, why can't I have that experience of natural light in my own home? And so I spent some time I think you talked about it on a prior podcast, the Philips Hue, looking at tunable light bulbs, other products that were out there experimented with those in my own home.
Toréa Rodriguez 2:29
Yeah,
Konrad Jarausch 2:30
Was a little frustrated, I was really looking for something that automatically delivered the cycles of natural light, right? I didn't want to have to go in and use an app. But when I put some of those products into my home, my wife asked Where did the dimmer switch go? It's like, Well, honey, unfortunately, they don't work with dimmer switches,
Toréa Rodriguez 2:44
Right.
Konrad Jarausch 2:44
All these little inconveniences, right? I don't want to have to use an app to change my lighting, I wanted a lamp that just automatically changed with the time of day, the time of year and my location. And I couldn't find one. But I was connected to a company that made these wonderful high end light sources that change color and their use in hospitals and elderly care facilities and high end museums. But to get those installed into my house, I would have to do sheet rock and spent, you know, 10s of 1000s of dollars.
Toréa Rodriguez 3:10
Oh, wow.
Konrad Jarausch 3:11
And I found that to be a dead end, at least on my budget and so I started working with that company and a friend of mine, who's also an engineer, and we created Sunlight Inside and what we did there was marry these very high performance light sources that just produce beautiful, full spectrum light, which we can talk about, with a controller that knows what time of day it is, what time of year it is and where on earth you are. And it basically tells the light source what kind of light to produce at a particular time of day, a particular time of year and particular location. That's called an astronomical clock, basically simulating what the sun does, right? And we can do that all with a computer program that's tied to a little clock, and that drives our little light source. So long winded answer to the question, but we make these lamps you plug them in we program for you before we deliver them so that you don't have to do any work. You just plug them in, turn them on like a regular lamp, and it checks the clock and it knows what time of day it is what time of year it is and it knows where on earth you are. And it produces natural light for you. So that was our vision and we wanted to make it simple and easy for people to have natural light in their home.
Toréa Rodriguez 4:09
Yeah, they're pretty amazing lamps. And I'm just going to show mine off because I have one. This is what it looks like.
Evie Takacs 4:15
Cool, do they all look the same? Are there different designs or.
Konrad Jarausch 4:19
That's a table lamp version. And we also make a desk lamp version for people that are in offices like where I am today under fluorescent lights, you might want something that make your little environment better.
Toréa Rodriguez 4:28
Yeah, and I just have to say it is one of the easiest lamps to use. Like Konrad said you just plug it in like it's already programmed to the timezone that we're on and so I will turn this thing on first thing in the morning when the sun is not quite up yet because I get up before the sun gets up and it's already at that morning, like warm glow, shade of light hue of light or temperature of light. We're gonna get into some nitty gritty terms here in a little bit but I love the ease of use of this lamp and it's been really helped for me in terms of making sure that my Circadian Rhythm stays on target with the sun that I live under, as well, as you know, seasonal effectiveness disorder and those kinds of things. We did have a podcast episode in Season 1, talking about Circadian Rhythm. So if you need to go back and catch up on that, please do so. But Konrad, tell us a little bit like your lamp in particular, what kinds of light source like what kind of light source? Is it? It's not a light bulb that I can get at Home Depot?
Konrad Jarausch 5:31
Yeah, that's right. It's a what's called a Light Engine. That's kind of a fancy industry term. So instead of a bowl that doesn't look round, it looks a little bit like a hockey puck. And inside the hockey puck is a collection of little different LEDs and we can talk about that for a minute. Because there are good LED light sources and not so good LED light sources.
Toréa Rodriguez 5:48
Yeah, let's talk about that. Because a lot of people are changing their homes to LED lights now.
Konrad Jarausch 5:52
That's right and I think there's a good reason for doing that. Right? They save a lot of energy and they last a long time, right and so efficiency standards are mandating that transition to LED light, the unfortunate thing is like everything is we're all trying to buy something that's as inexpensive as possible. And when you make a cheap LED light bulb, you often get flicker and a low quality of light, and so those are the trade offs, right? And that's something to be mindful of when you go to the store, and we can talk a little bit about what to look for when you have to go shopping for an LED bulb and how to think about making a choice that gives you a better LED bulb, even if it means you might have to pay a dollar or two extra. Now our bulbs are a little different because they actively mix together light from five different LEDs, right? So there's a different thing about the rainbow, right? When you put sunlight through spectrum, you get all these different colors. And so we basically do the reverse of that, where we add all these different colors together to create white light. And then during the day, we change the ratio between red and blue light to mimic what happens to sunlight, right. So when the sun rises, as you were describing early in the morning, it's actually being filtered by the atmosphere, and the atmosphere preferentially filters out the blue light. That's why sunrise and sunset are really warm, lots of red light and not very much blue light. And then as the sun goes higher overhead, you have less atmospheric filtering more of the blue light gets through and you get equal amounts of red and blue light during the day. And so that's the natural light cycle that we create by changing the ratio of lights on the different LEDs inside our light source. And so I'll pause there for a minute, we should talk about, that's not quite what you find in the store. So if you're ready, we can talk about that.
Evie Takacs 7:24
Yeah,
Toréa Rodriguez 7:25
Yeah, no, let's jump right in. Because I was just going to ask like, Okay, so can I just go get a red and blue LED light at Home Depot? And do this myself?
Evie Takacs 7:33
Yeah. So it's a, it's a little tricky, right and you guys have alluded that the most popular color changing bulbs out there is the Philips Hue, and they've done a nice job, they mix together lights on three different LEDs. So not quite as much control of the rainbow as we have. But but it's pretty good. Some versions may even use four LEDs. But the tricky part is what you find in a hardware store is just one collection of it's one LED that's creating mostly green light with a lot of blue and let's talk about that for a minute.
Toréa Rodriguez 8:00
Oh, fascinating. Yeah, cause green spectrum is one of those spectrums that can suppress melatonin production.
Konrad Jarausch 8:07
Yes, exactly and so the way the way to think about is your eye response curve, not to get too scientific here, it is most sensitive, you can, it's most sensitive to green light, right and the reason if you want efficiency, and human eyes are really sensitive to green light, then you want to pump a lot of green light, because it means fewer electrons in produce more light out. And so, because of this efficiency, business driving bulbs to cheaper price points and higher efficiency, they're very high in green and then the LED itself emits blue light, and the blue light is converted to green to make it look like white and they sometimes add a tiny bit of red, sometimes they don't even bother. And so that's what makes your average LED bulb look kind of off because it has a lot of green light and the underlying pump or the underlying LED is blue and that's what makes your typical LED bulb disruptive. Now there are things you can look for to make that better, we can talk about that next.
Toréa Rodriguez 8:58
Sure, go straight in.
Konrad Jarausch 9:00
So the way to think about it is as you've talked about in your Circadian Rhythm podcast, and as we just talked about for natural light, right, you want that blue, bright light during the day. There's nothing wrong with that. The challenge is you don't want that in the evening and you don't want it when you're trying to sleep right and so when I go shopping for my home, right, if I'm looking at areas like the kitchen or my study where I mostly am during the day, then I look for a bulb that has a cool color temperature, so something in the 3000, 4000, 5000 Kelvin range. So color temperature, if you look at the Lighting Facts label on the back of your light bulb in the hardware store, it'll tell you what the color temperature is. CCT is the acronym. It's measured in Kelvin. So you'll see a little k after that number and the higher the number that is the more blue light comes out from that light and so those bulbs are okay for daytime, but mostly in the bedroom or in your home right gets talked about using red light or warmer lights in the home or lamps to make that change automatically. But if you're shopping there, right, the old incandescent that we all grew up with and learn to love, they have a color temperature of 2700 Kelvin. So much warmer. Ironically, the lower the number, the warmer the light, it relates to physics. But we'll leave that out for now that lower number is better for your bedroom for your living room for places where you want to spend time in the evenings. And then a final comment is right, this whole discussion about making lots of green light with a little bit of blue. If you want something that looks a little better, look for a high CRI. CRI stands for Color Rendering Index. And when that number is above 90, it means the spectrum of light is pretty good. And it means your skin tones will look natural. The paintings on your wall, your fabrics at home will look natural. Many of the less expensive bulbs will have CRI is down in the 70 or 80 range. And they'll make your colors look a bit off and make your skin tones look a little bit off. And so those are kind of things to think about when you're shopping for products, right look for higher CRI and look for the right color temperature, depending upon the use case that you have in mind.
Toréa Rodriguez 10:58
Wow, I'm so glad that you just gave us those definitions because we did a bathroom remodel and we were purchasing new vanity lights and I didn't quite understand CRI. So I just kind of guessed and I guessed at a temperature and we installed that light. And man, I felt like I was in the hallway of a hospital like it was just my skin turned yellow. Like it was just so bad. My poor husband, I had to tell him we had to take it out, return it, do it all over pick something else. But yes, that's so important to understand those different variables now that these are the kinds of lights that are available to us when we're trying to outfit us
Konrad Jarausch 11:38
That's right. No, I mean, worst case scenario, right? How do you look in the airplane bathroom mirror? Right? That's like, for me, it's like, it's a terrible look. Right? And that's a low CRI and a very cold light. Right? So it's not not very appealing.
Toréa Rodriguez 11:49
Yeah, no, that's a good analogy. For sure.
Konrad Jarausch 11:53
Definitely don't want that in your in your bathroom vanity.
Toréa Rodriguez 11:55
None at all. So I'm curious, you know, when you decided to create this lamp, why was it so important for you to have a lamp that was able to do all these things? Why not just have a lamp that you could, you know, put your lower Kelvin lights in the bedroom, for example, and your higher Kelvin lights in the living room in the kitchen? Like, why have a all-in-one.
Konrad Jarausch 12:16
Yeah, that's right, no. And I think for me, it's, I tend to spend time in my different spaces independent of time of day, right? So there are times where I might want to read in my bedroom during the day, or I might want to work in my office late at night without being disrupted, right and so having these lamps that automatically follow the rhythm of the Sun means that any space that I inhabit will automatically have the correct lighting. So that's that's a big reason. And then the other reason is what you describe right? Waking up in the morning isn't easy, right? And having like a morning sunrise effect, where you have a little bit of that extra warmth that you get in Sunrise, but you still have enough blue to kind of help you get out of bed in the morning. And so if you have nothing but red or dim light in your bedroom, it's hard to get going in the morning and we actually make a small version of the lamp for nurseries, right? Because when my kids were young, right, I did what most parents do you close all the curtains, it's a permanent cave, right. But the other thing a little kids do, right? They wake you up night and day, you're trying to teach them their Circadian Rhythm. And so if you keep them in a cave with nothing but dim light, then they don't learn that their own Circadian Rhythm, right, and children are born without that it tends to form in the first I think three to nine months. And so without that stimulus, right, I was a tired sleep deprived parent, I wasn't opening the curtains during the day to let the room fill with natural light. That's a good habit to have. Right? It's like you don't want to raise your children in a cave because they won't learn that cycle. And so that's another reason why you would want a lamp that changes with the time of day.
Evie Takacs 13:39
That's so so interesting. I had a question about the lamp, I know that you plug it at you program it depending on where the consumer is right? You have it Oh, I know that you're for example, I'm in Cincinnati. So you'd have it set for whatever I am here. This is what the Sun is doing at this time is that program to also run like, let's say you are up in the middle of the night. So you could plug it back in if you do get up at night and it would still like what would that light look like at that time?
Konrad Jarausch 14:02
Yeah, so in the middle of the night, it's a very warm, completely blue depleted light. So there's no blue light, and I've had my own bouts of insomnia. So at 2am when I'm awake and I want to read I want enough light to read and I'm old fashioned. I still read print, like books and that sort of thing. But it's I want a light that won't disrupt my sleep pattern and the lamp will in so we talk about it without the technical terms, right? We give sunlight during the day sunrise and sunset and then in the evenings we go to candlelight and then in the middle of the night, it's really a fire light. It's down around back to the technical term 1700 Kelvin, all very very warm light, right and so that light is enough to read by but there's no blue there so it won't disrupt your circadian rhythms.
Evie Takacs 14:44
Okay, that's really interesting and I know that you listen to that podcast of hours on Circadian Rhythm and you mentioned it before but I've been using an actual red light bulb in my lamps in the evening. So I that's kind of the light that I'm used to and I will say that it has made a huge difference. With my nighttime routine, I feel like I sleep better, I fall asleep faster, it's much more relaxing. And then when I heard about your light from Toréa, I was like, Okay, this is probably the next thing that I get because I'm very fascinated by this light and the Circadian Rhythm and it's made such a difference in my in my own health, but this is really cool that it's programmed to where you are on earth. I think that's something that is definitely attractive about that. It's not something that like you have to fiddle with or mess around with and the fact that you guys already take that guesswork out is really cool.
Konrad Jarausch 15:28
Well thanks. I think physicians in general, they talk about, you know, minimize exposure to blue and bright light for about two hours before bed. And that's not an easy thing to do in the modern go,go,go world, right. And so your red light bulbs a great idea, I think, you know, there's simple things you can do right, you can dim your lights, you talked about fewer overhead lights at night and more sort of lighting at the table level, the the photoreceptors that are sensitive to daylight, they're near the bottom of your eye. And so overhead lighting is what they're most sensitive to. So there's some basic things you can do at home just to make it easier, which is Dimming the lights using lamps instead of overhead lights in the evening and trying to minimize your exposure to blue light before bed and I'll put a little plug out there for F.lux, Michael Hertz pioneered this, it changes the color of your screen with the time of day, after many years of lobbying, Apple has introduced that feature as nightshift. So it's free, you can turn it on on your iPhone, if you have to use a phone at night, it'll change the color of your screen, it's not as good as blue blockers, right? I've done the measurements, you can still get blue light from your phone, but at least it reduces the amount of blue light from your phone. And there's similar tools available for your laptops and your PCs. So just look for those tools that automatically adjust the color temperature of your screens at night. And they'll help as well.
Toréa Rodriguez 16:35
Yeah, super cool and right before we came on here, and before we hit the record button, you were talking to me about the distance from the screens and how the distance is important. Can you elaborate on that?
Konrad Jarausch 16:45
Yeah. So the thing to think about here, right and this is important for therapy lights as well, right as your eye perceives the strength of light as flux, right, so how many photons are hitting the eyeball per unit area per time. And if you can imagine the closer you hold your phone, the more light is getting into your eyeballs. And so if you hold your phone further away, you're getting less light exposure aand what makes phones particularly disruptive before bed is that we hold them close to our face to read write or to watch, right? And I would say, you know many of us grew up with television across the room much less disruptive, right? Because those photons have to travel much further to reach your eyeball. So there's a lower flux, iPads and laptops not so great. Because again, we hold them, we tend to hold them close. But just be mindful. How bright is your device? How close are you holding it to your eye? Right? That's going to influence how disruptive It is to your nighttime routine.
Toréa Rodriguez 17:31
Yeah, love it. And so when you were developing the Sunlight Inside lamps, were you studying a lot about the actual light spectrum of the sun to model your lamps out of that?
Konrad Jarausch 17:45
We were Yeah, there's actually there's actually a guy named Steve Paolini, who travels around the world making recordings of natural light and so he records.
Toréa Rodriguez 17:54
Oh fascinating!
Konrad Jarausch 17:54
Yes! He records. He's also local Californian so he's recorded the way natural light looks and all these different parts of the world. And his company is called Telelumen and their whole idea is to record and playback natural light and so we have a partnership, and I studied many of his recordings. And so we literally looked at what do sunsets look like? How can we recreate that with our lamps? What is sunrises look like? What it's what is daytime light look like? And we could take that even further. But that's the sort of quick answer for your question.
Toréa Rodriguez 18:19
Yeah, no, that's fascinating. Because my my question really was that we see this term Full Spectrum Light now on a lot of Light Therapy Devices, right. But that doesn't necessarily mean full spectrum like the sun full spectrum. Can you elaborate a little bit on that term? And we all know, we've talked about a lot of other things that are similar in health, that it's not really regulated. So you kind of have to understand and educate yourself a little bit about these terms.
Konrad Jarausch 18:46
No, thank you for bringing that up right. And so, so if you look at the sun, right, and I should have brought a graph for you today, but okay, all the different wavelengths of light back to the rainbow analogy, right, all prisms are good analogy, right? When you hold a prism up to the sun, you get all the different colors of the rainbow, there's nothing missing. There's no gaps in that spectrum. That's true full spectrum light. That's what we evolved with. That's what makes skin tones look their best. It's also provides the balance that we need for our eyes. And for our skin to be healthy. It contains nonvisible light as well, right, which is infrared light, that's warmth, right? The sun feels warm on your skin. It contains UV light, which is both bad for skin cancer and good for vitamin D. So it has all these different wavelengths, right? When we recreated artificial light, right? We focused on something different, which is how can we see and we took a lot of shortcuts to do that, right? We talked about that with LED lights, which are mostly green and a little bit of blue.
Toréa Rodriguez 19:36
Right.
Konrad Jarausch 19:36
Fluorescent lights are even tougher because they have just very specific bands of light and so they have like anywhere from three to five specific wavelengths and none of the other wavelengths. That's why fluorescence are kind of so off putting when it comes to the look and feel right and so the challenge with the term like Full Spectrum is that was a marketing term originally pioneered by the florescent industry and instead of having three or four bands of light, they had five or six bands of light, and they patted themselves on the back and call that full spectrum. If you hold a prism up to it, it's no, it's no kind of full spectrum. I mean, no disrespect, but it doesn't include all those different wavelengths of light, nor does it include a very natural balance of the different wavelengths of light. And again, to your point, this is not regulated, so you have to do your homework and look at the different manufacturers and how they create the light that they're providing for their therapy lamps. There are people who really care about this CRI is one good metric for this, the higher the CRI, the better, it's not perfect, then you can do more research and read about the manufacturer of the light to understand what they mean by full spectrum. So unfortunately, that term gets used a lot and it can have very different meanings depending on the product.
Toréa Rodriguez 20:41
And so, will certain manufacturers have, say, third party test results, this is something we see with like CBD products and that kind of thing. You're looking for third party test results, so that the claims of Full Spectrum, whether it's cannabidiol, or you know, light, we want to make sure that that's there. Is that something that is easily to find, or is it not?
Konrad Jarausch 21:04
No, I wish it were it's a great suggestion. I mean, the the the industry term for this is you, you look for their spectra, or their spectral power distribution, which tells you how much power they have at every wavelength.
Toréa Rodriguez 21:16
Okay.
Konrad Jarausch 21:17
And if manufacturers would publish that, then you would have a very quick and easy way to check. Yeah, unfortunately, they do not. So we've done some of our own measurements and posted those on the website. But it is not unfortunately, something that is widely reported in the industry.
Toréa Rodriguez 21:29
Got it, got it. So how can people be more of a informed consumer when they're looking for some kind of light therapy to help them with circadian rhythm or to help them with you know, this kind of thing? What are your best tips to give people?
Konrad Jarausch 21:41
Yeah, it's a little tricky, right? It depends upon what you're planning to use it for. Right? Strictly speaking, light therapy devices are really targeting that one blue light receptor that you have in your eye. Right. So we all high school biology, red, green, and blue. Turns out you have another kind of photoreceptor that's looking at what is going on around you. It's not a visual thing. It doesn't form an image, but it tells your body what time of day it is, and light therapy products, they're oriented towards that one receptor. And that is a very, it's a very blue light sensitive receptor.
Toréa Rodriguez 22:09
Yeah.
Konrad Jarausch 22:09
And so the most important thing you think for therapy lights is that you have that strong bright blue light, and that you sit close to that lamp to get that dose and the clinical studies that are pretty good, you can get the benefits of a therapy light, even if the light looks pretty crappy. This is the next question, right? How does it look? How does it feel to sit next to, and there's an argument there, it's not a balanced light source, right? If it's just blue, sunlight has a natural balance, equal parts red, equal parts blue, and blue light only can be a little bit of an eye strain can be a little bit difficult to sit near. And so I'm not a big fan of the blue light only therapy lamps. But clinical trials, I have to say they do show they're effective for seasonal affective disorder and so it's a little bit nuanced, right, you have to think about, are you willing to sit next to kind of a glare balm that is blue rich, for half an hour to an hour each morning to avoid seasonal affective disorder. And if you can do that, and you can integrate that into your daily routine, that's great, that should help you with your seasonal affective disorder.
Toréa Rodriguez 23:02
I've tried those lamps,
Konrad Jarausch 23:03
They're not so comfortable to sit next to right, I understand why you're chuckling. I just want to be clear, right? That the the data, the clinical studies do say those work, they're just not pleasant to sit next to and they don't offer a natural blend between red and blue light.
Toréa Rodriguez 23:16
Right.
Konrad Jarausch 23:16
And so there I think is where you have to do your research and look for lamps that have higher CRI. Right? Again, this color rendering index, because a blue light only lamp won't have a higher CRI.
Toréa Rodriguez 23:27
Yeah.
Konrad Jarausch 23:27
And I think in general, I'd have to do some more checking, but the LED versions of the therapy lights tend to have more wavelengths of light than the fluorescent versions do. And so I would look, you know, again, I don't want to bias because it's there's so many different products on the market.
Toréa Rodriguez 23:39
Right.
Konrad Jarausch 23:40
Look for a higher CRI product or email the manufacturer, ask them if they have equal red and blue light, because that'll be much more comfortable to sit next to.
Toréa Rodriguez 23:49
And if your intention wasn't a therapy lamp that's used mostly for things like seasonal effectiveness disorder, you're really looking for something to help you either with sleep, or to help you with, you know, balancing out and recalibrating your Circadian Rhythm. Is there something else that you would look for?
Konrad Jarausch 24:04
Yeah, I think you know, this is where you don't necessarily have to get a dedicated therapy lamp. If you can spend time in a brightly lit, blue rich environment each morning, it will help you sleep as you guys talked about in your Circadian Rhythm post right actually suppresses the melatonin during the day, which is what you need to have a better melatonin response at night stimulates your cortisol production during the day. So all those hormone cycles that are core to your Circadian Rhythm. So just back to the hardware store discussion if you go and shop for a higher color temperature, so 5000 or 6000 Kelvin, and then it's the brightness that matters and how close you sit to it right. And so brightness is measured in lumens and so a regular 60 watt bulb that's an 800 lumen equivalent. And so you could look at getting something that's more like 1000 or 1500 lumens that would make your bulb a lot brighter. And then where do you sit near it right? You want that light to be somewhat at eye level or higher than your eye because again, that's what it's going to stimulate your response. So if you have a space where you like to sit in the morning and read or start your day? Have that space be brightly lit with cool, bright light, the cool being blue rich, and that will help you start off your day.
Toréa Rodriguez 25:09
Excellent. And then one last question. With regards to all of this. We've been talking a little bit about seasonal effectiveness disorder that normally happens in the northern hemisphere during the winter. Yes. And it will happen in the southern hemisphere during the summer, your lamp specifically, do they adjust based off of that natural shortening of days? Or lengthening of days? Do they adjusted to that or not?
Unknown Speaker 25:31
So they do, our days are longer in the winter and shorter in the summer. But as a person who used to live in Minnesota, we made a little decision here, we shipped southern light to points north and so if you're in Minnesota, and you buy one of our lamps, you get light from the Gulf Coast. So the days are longer in the summer and shorter in the winter, but not as extreme as you have in Minnesota. Because you know what it's like when it's dark outside at 5pm. It's really tough are when you're trying to wake up in the morning and it's dark outside and so you get a longer day than you would have outside your window. And we do this to support people that live in those northern climates.
Toréa Rodriguez 26:03
So if there were a client that lived in Alaska, Fairbanks, for example, that lands Southern California, much more extreme.
Konrad Jarausch 26:11
So yeah, so So
Toréa Rodriguez 26:12
Okay, that's cool!
Konrad Jarausch 26:12
If we shipped we shipped Alaska light, right, they would only have three hours of daylight during the winter, not very satisfying, right, you're going to spend money on a lamp, and
Toréa Rodriguez 26:19
That's terrible, no.
Konrad Jarausch 26:19
Then you can only get three layers of bright stimulating light. So we we deliberately shipped Southern California light to people in Alaska for that reason.
Toréa Rodriguez 26:27
That's amazing.
Konrad Jarausch 26:28
And I will point out one important detail, right, I was surprised how many people need support that don't live in northern latitudes, right. So one thing that's not well understood is the lights that we have in our offices in our home. In the lighting industry, they call this lighting purgatory, right? They're not stimulating enough to provide that awaken alert response. They're just there to make you able to see, right and so you can go to the office every day and feel like a sloth.
Toréa Rodriguez 26:52
Oh man.
Konrad Jarausch 26:52
Because you're not getting that awake alert signal.
Toréa Rodriguez 26:54
Yes.
Konrad Jarausch 26:55
Right. So this is what you guys talked about. So important to get outside. Even if you live in the northern place where you live in Southern California, people deal with struggle with seasonal affective disorder, even in Texas, even in Southern California, because they spend their days in an office, right? And yes, there it's lit in the office. But it's it's almost 1/10 as bright or 1/100 as bright in an office as it is outside. And so your body never gets that cue that it needs to say it's time to be awake and alert. So as you guys say, all the time on your podcast get outside in the mornings, your body needs it right at the office is no substitute for sitting outside.
Toréa Rodriguez 27:28
Absolutely.
Evie Takacs 27:29
I was just going to ask because the lights that most offices have they are LED correct, which we said is mostly green light with a little blue mixed in it. But isn't that
Konrad Jarausch 27:38
Yes, or flourescent.
Evie Takacs 27:39
Okay. But that is that is stimulating, though, right. But you're saying even though that's stimulating,
Konrad Jarausch 27:44
It is stimulating
Evie Takacs 27:44
Not the same stimulation as the sunlight,
Konrad Jarausch 27:46
It's not bright enough, right. So the two things you need is you're right, it does provide blue and green. So it's purgatory, because it's just enough light to keep you from being able to sleep at night. So if you work in those offices at night, it disrupts your melatonin. But it's purgatory, because it's also not enough light during the day to really stimulate you. So it kind of leaves you hanging on both ends, right? It's too dim during the day to really drive that response. Lux is another measure of that lumens and lux are two different ways to measure the brightness of light lux is the is the flux hitting your eye and offices are just not brightly lit enough to provide that awaken alert signal. And they're too brightly lit to let you relax in the evening. So they're kind of stuck in that middle where they don't tell your body to be awake and they don't let your body relax. So they're stuck in that horrible middle.
Evie Takacs 28:29
That's good to know. Thank you for clarifying that.
Toréa Rodriguez 28:31
Yeah. And I just wanted to say that I'm so glad that you brought that up. Because a lot of times people think well, it's summertime, I don't have seasonal effectiveness disorder that only happens to people in a seasonal winter. Yet it could absolutely be happening to them. If they're, you know, like you said at a lower southern latitude like Texas, and they're working in an office all day long.
Konrad Jarausch 28:52
No. And I you know, I joke about right how do you feel if you go to a conference, right, and you spend a week indoors in a poorly lit hotel right now? It's terrible. Now that could be the food, it could be the alcohol it could be other factors there but, but a lot of that is like a dimly lit hotel ballroom is a disaster.
Toréa Rodriguez 29:07
Sure.
Konrad Jarausch 29:07
Like you're there for three or four days in a row. You're dragging, right? That's your body begging, you've been stuck in a cave. It's your body begging for some contact with the sun. Right? So get outside even if it's just a half an hour in the morning. You'll feel better.
Toréa Rodriguez 29:18
Oh my gosh, yes. So much. We preach it all the time. Get outside. Evie, do you have any other questions for Conrad? While we've got his brilliant brain here.
Evie Takacs 29:27
I don't know if I have questions. I just really appreciate you using your expertise to actually provide something for people like this right? It's one thing to know this but then actually do something with that, and to provide such a good product for people like, that's amazing. I can't wait to get mine. This is definitely on the list of things that I want to get because I mean I do I do the sunlight in the morning I do the evening walks I do all of that stuff. I have the red light bulb I have the blue light blocking glasses and all of that but this is just this is huge because like I said, I'm in Cincinnati, Ohio so the winter is rough. And when you were saying it gets dark at five o'clock. I'm like, I know I hear you like it is it is rough, you know, those first few days, like those days in March, where it starts to get a little bit, you know, brighter longer, and it's a little bit warmer, like, we don't know how to act at that point, because we've been stuck inside with so you know, just artificial light and not a lot of fresh air. And so just to know that I have that available for the winter. I think that's gonna be huge and really help a lot helped me and hopefully a lot of other people that listen to this, too. So thank you for that. Very impressive.
Konrad Jarausch 30:28
Well, thanks for this is a labor of love for us, right? We're a small company, we build everything right here in Northern California, and we're really focused on building products that last right, so our goal is to build a lamp that lasts 10 to 20 years, we don't want to contribute to the landfill, and we hand build our lamps. So we're not into mass merchandise. We're trying to help one lamp at a time.
Toréa Rodriguez 30:46
Yeah, they're beautiful. I mean, you can customize the base of it to match the decor of your home like a really beautiful product. So yeah. Konrad, we really appreciate you coming and sharing with us all of your knowledge that went into the development of the lamp and everything that you know about light and how important it is and get into the nitty gritty because a lot of our listeners do like to get into the sciency geeky stuff. So thank you so much for that. We really appreciate it. We will absolutely be including a link to your website so that people can check it out and maybe purchase a lamp. Is there any other place that they can find you or learn information about you or your company that you want us to put in the show notes?
Konrad Jarausch 31:27
No, the websites the best place to go. Like we started with Amazon for a while. But we're right now we're just selling direct on our website. And thank you so much for helping us spread the word and you know any of your listeners if you have questions to please feel free to reach out.
**Toréa Rodriguez 31:38 ** Perfect.
Evie Takacs 31:38
Thank you.
Konrad Jarausch 31:39
Thank you have a wonderful afternoon.
Toréa Rodriguez 31:41
Perfect. Thank you so much.
Toréa Rodriguez 31:48
Hey, thanks for joining us for this episode of the Wildly Optimized Wellness podcast. If you’re ready to dig deeper into your health, stop playing the Whack-a-Symptom game, start testing to get better guidance, you can find more about Toréa at torearodriguez.com and you can find Evie at holisticallyrestored.com. Want a peek into what it’s like to work with us? Come join us at our Optimized Wellness Community. You can find the invitation link in the show notes below. And if you have a question for the show, you can submit your question under the podcast section of torearodriguez.com. Finally, if you found something helpful in this episode, don’t forget to leave a review, hit that follow button or share it with a friend. They’re gonna love that you thought of them. Until next time, see you outside!
