The Power of Sunlight: Protocols for Better Mood, Sleep & Happiness

Introduction to Episode

0:00This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify.

Talking About Weather

0:30I want to talk today in a very summer-like episode about weather. Specifically, I want to talk about sunshine. I grew up in Seattle, Washington, known for its gloomy weather. We used to say, well, the good thing about all the gloom in Seattle is that people from California can't handle it and they go back. Now, the question is, is that nature or nurture? Are some people just naturally attuned to the sun? Or is it that what you grow up with really, really matters? We don't entirely know, but there are patterns that are useful for all of us to understand so that we can adopt sunshine in our lives

1:01in a very productive way. And that's what I want to talk about with you. How do you use sunny weather in a way where you will get happier, but in also a way that it's safe? How do you get the best effect without making faulty decisions?

Welcome to Office Hours

1:20Hi, friends. Welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks, your host. This is a show about the science of happiness, how you can bring more of it into your life and how you can share it with other people. This is a show for happiness teachers, as a matter of fact. Maybe you never considered yourself one. I am formally. That's what my university pays me to do. But the truth of the matter is that most great happiness teachers are doing it in their ordinary lives. And that's what I want for you. That's why I provide this material. I'm very interested in public education just as much as I am in education

1:50inside my university. And that's the whole impetus. That's the whole motivation behind doing this podcast. Thank you for tuning in. I appreciate it an awful lot. If you like it, please do like and subscribe wherever you're watching or listening to this podcast. That helps us a lot. It also makes it possible for me to indirectly deliver to you future episodes of this without you even asking for them, coming right to your mailbox in a timely way. Please also recommend this to friends. No doubt if you like this, other people would as well.

2:21You can tell them about the show and we're naturally growing our audience mostly by word of mouth. So thank you for your recommendations and I hope that it actually is helping your friends as much as it is helping you. That's what we're here to do. If you have any suggestions about what we're doing, please do write to me at officehours at arthurbrooks.com. That's our email address. Leave a review on Spotify or Apple and subscribe on the platform of your choice. If you'd like to go deeper on any of this material, do please make sure that you subscribe to my newsletter. Every Friday morning to your inbox,

2:52you'll get three to five hundred words on exactly these ideas. That's at arthurbrooks.com. That's my website slash newsletter. And if you want to do more stuff in person with the community of people who are interested in this, we have a great internet community that's called the Meaning Membership. You can find that at my website. You can also find ways that you can get together in real life, IRL. That's retreats that we actually have. You can look for that at retreats.arthurbrooks.com. All together, we have lots and lots of ways to share these ideas. I hope you will continue to take these in

3:23and share them with others as well.

Sunshine and Happiness

3:24I want to talk today in a very summer-like episode about weather. And most specifically, I want to talk about sunshine. Now, I've done other episodes that touch on this, and I will do future episodes about weather in general, how you can actually find the place that's most in line with the kind of person that you are. But I want to talk about sunshine and how much you should get and how it actually interacts between psychology and biology in a way that you can use the nice weather, assuming that there's nice weather where you are, so that you can become a happier person.

Association Between Sunshine and Happiness

3:55Now, there's a general association between sunshine and happiness. In March of 1974, I realize most of you were not born at that time. I was 10 years old. You can deduce my age based on that. In March of 1974, the number one pop song on the charts was from John Denver, Sunshine on My Shoulders Makes Me Happy. That was just a generally understood truth, as a matter of fact. And I remember hearing that. Of course, I was living in a place that didn't have much sunshine. I grew up in Seattle, Washington,

4:26known for its gloomy weather, as a matter of fact. We used to say, well, the good thing about all the gloom in Seattle is that people from California can't handle it and they go back. Of course, when you live on the West Coast, you think any bad thing that's happening in your community is because Californians are moving in. That's certainly what we thought when we were kids. And it was a pretty gloomy place, I have to say. Now, it was okay in May. It was okay in July. June always had this weird weather pattern coming down from the Bering Strait. We used to call June Junuary, as a matter of fact,

4:57because it tended to get all gloomy and et cetera. And the fact that I remember this is because precisely it wasn't sunny all the time, like in Southern California, where I now actually spend quite a good deal of time, a couple of months a year, as a matter of fact. Now, why do I spend a couple of months a year in Southern California if I was born and raised in a place that didn't have much sunshine? The answer is because I married somebody who needs more sunshine than me. My wife, Esther, is from Barcelona. Some of you may follow her work as well. We do a lot of stuff together, as a matter of fact. And Barcelona is like Southern California. It's sunny all the time.

5:27It's Mediterranean. And people from there, boy, oh boy, they just can't live without it. And the question, certainly true with my wife, by the way, when she's not around enough sunshine, she gets really, really grumpy. She doesn't like it at all. And that's one of the reasons that we like to spend December and January in Southern California. I notice it as soon as we, you know, as soon as we get there, you know, we leave our stuff and we go down to the beach. We like to stay in San Clemente, California. That sounds familiar. That's because that's

5:58where Nixon went after he was disgraced and impeached and had to leave town. He resigned as president of the United States. He went to San Clemente, California. Boy, do I understand why he went there. Probably he got there and said, it's great not to be in Washington, D.C. It's so beautiful. It's so nice. And we get there and as soon as we get there and go down to the beach, it's like a reawakening in my life. It's really wonderful. I like it too, but she really has a big, a big reaction to it. Now, the question is, is that nature or nurture? Are some people

6:29just naturally attuned to the sun? Or is it that what you grow up with really, really matters? We don't entirely know, but there are patterns that are useful for all of us to understand so that we can adopt sunshine in our lives in a very productive way. And that's what I want to talk about with you. How do you use sunny weather in a way where you will get happier, but in also a way that it's safe, in a way that it actually will be better for you? And then I want to talk, after I do that, I want to talk to you about what's more important than the weather and what are the sacrifices

6:59you shouldn't make to get sunny weather in your life? How do you get the best effect without making faulty decisions on the basis of it?

Mood Disorders and Sunshine

7:09Now, let's start with a basic question. Was John Denver right? Does sunshine on your shoulders actually make you happy? And the answer is, in general, yes. There's a number of good studies on this. One from the Journal of Sleep Research from 2021. I'll put this in the notes. This is an article called Outdoor Daylight Exposure and Longer Sleep Promote Wellbeing Under COVID-19 Mandated Restrictions. So this was actually data that were collected while people were, you know, stuck in the house and then they were given systematic exposure

7:39in more sunlight or less just to see in this kind of quasi-experimental set of conditions whether or not they would get happiness from the sunshine per se. Really well-controlled study, really well done. And what they found was that it is basically true. There are moderately positive effects of well-being from participants when they're subjected to sunshine systematically. So what this suggests is that almost anybody can have a mood increase with the right amounts of sunshine but that some people get more of it and that's one of the reasons that some people are more likely to go seeking it

8:10than others. There's both nature and nurture. There's environmental effects and there's probably also genetic effects that actually come from this. But just in general, yeah, good. Good. Now, your results may vary because of some certain pathologies and I want to talk to you about a couple of conditions under which sunshine is more important to you in a certain part of the population and certain cases where for happiness, not just for health benefits or skin cancer or something, that you should be wary of direct sunshine exposure. Okay, now the first is the one

8:41that you've all heard of. You might find that come February that life feels really bad. Now, I worked for a long time at Syracuse University earlier in my career. So in my 30s and some of my 40s, I was a professor at Syracuse University and one of the things that I found was that people would come there from other parts of the country. I mean, professors are on a national labor market and they would move to Syracuse and Syracuse is really, really cloudy and there's this cloud layer

9:11that comes from the Great Lakes. So January, February, and March, it snows all the time. It's not these big two and three foot snows. It's like six inches a day. Syracuse gets 120 inches a year. I mean, contemplate that. In big years, a couple of hundred inches, but that's just five, six inches at a time and that means it's cloudy a lot because it's snowing and you don't see the sun for a long time. Now, that lends itself to all kinds of great and not so great things, but when it comes to the sun exposure, what I found was

9:41that people became unproductive in February. So I would be co-authoring with other professors and you know, I'm a Seattle boy, I can put up with it, but those are actually from California or wherever. In about mid-February when I was co-authoring an academic journal article or something, they wouldn't be getting their drafts in on time. Their work would be notably sloppier. They would be kind of looking disheveled and bummed out. They wouldn't shave. And they're like, what's wrong with you? And the answer is that they were depressed. Why?

10:12Because a non-trivial number of them had a pathology,

Seasonal Affective Disorder

10:16had a disorder called SAD, Seasonal Affective Disorder. Isn't that a clever acronym? SAD. And that's actually what we find in good academic studies. There's one from the actual National Institute of Mental Health from 2023 called Seasonal Affective Disorder in the United States. Like always, all the stuff goes in the show notes. So you don't have to remember that or write it down. And it found that about 9% of Americans have this Seasonal Affective Disorder, which makes them more exposed to mood disorders

10:47when they haven't seen the sun in a long time. And they actually get more benefit from seeing sunshine, especially during winter months. So 9%, that's a lot. That's not as many as people who actually like to see the sun and actually get a mood boost from it. But these are people who get especially depressed during long periods, including some of my colleagues. So if you think you have it, then you need to take care of that. I'll talk to you in a minute about actually how to deal with that because there's actually some interesting studies out of Scandinavia where people don't see sunshine for a really long time

11:18and they've figured out new technical ways to get around it. So more on that in a second. Is it more prevalent in higher latitudes? In the wintertime, the answer is yes. And so you see some studies that show that places like Scandinavia have more like 12% of the population with seasonal affective disorder and you get closer to that. You get down to Florida and it's like, you know, more like 5% or something like that. I don't exactly remember the numbers, but it really does vary with respect to how far north you are. And probably it has to do with diagnosis more than the underlying

11:48genetic tendency to have this. Okay, good. Know that about yourself. It's really important. So what have we established so far? Most people, practically everybody, gets somewhat of a mood boost by getting more sunshine. Some people really, really need it or they're going to fall on the wrong side of an actual mood disorder. All right. Okay, that's what we've established so far. Let me let the plot thicken a little bit because there's new research. This is over the past 10 years that finds that some mood disorders are provoked by direct sunlight.

12:20Okay? Now it's not depression. It's actually anxiety. And this is the cousin mood disorder. Generalized anxiety is a cousin disorder of clinical depression. And what you find is that some people, they really struggle with their anxiety in really bright, sunny times during the summer months, for example, or when they're spending a lot of time outside. It raises anxiety for them. And there's a hypothesis as to why that's true. This comes from interesting research, an article entitled Why We Need More Nature at Work, Effects of Natural Elements in Sunlight, Employee Mental Health

12:50and Work Attitudes. That's in PLOS One, which is an Apex science journal. And the scholars hypothesize that it can stimulate certain neurobiological effects having to do with alertness, which disrupts sleep and they actually exacerbate attention and anxiety. You're too attuned. In other words, it's turning up the dial a little bit too much on you. So that's an important thing to keep in mind. And I have met people who get really stressed out during the summer months and they don't know why, probably because they're getting too much sun. Okay, so in other words, it's a double-edged sword.

13:22Do we know if that's as prevalent as Seasonal Affective Disorder? No, probably not is what we find. But if that's you, it's important for you to know about that more in a second about how you can use the sun and have the sun not actually be stressing you out along the way. But it's worth pointing that out. Okay, so we've established another pattern here. Let me go back to the first basic point, which is most people get a moderate mood boost. Why is that? And people who are non-pathological, why is sunshine actually generally good

13:53for your mood before we get to how you can actually use the technology at hand in our lives and actually just use the sun better. One theory about why sunshine boosts mood is that it interacts with eyes, interacts with your eyes, which are intrinsically photosensitive in the retinal ganglion cells. And in so doing, that affects brain regions that regulate mood and indirectly through the regulation of circadian rhythms.

14:24In other words, it actually will affect your limbic system to give you more positive affect. And at the same time, it will make it such that when you're getting sunshine at appropriate times over the course of the day, that you're more likely to sleep when it's dark and be awake when it's light. And that circadian rhythm makes you sleep better. And when you sleep better, you're happier. Those are the two mechanisms that actually have to do with the retinal ganglion cells in your eyes. And Andrew Huberman talks a lot about that because he actually teaches in the ophthalmology department at Stanford.

14:55He's a professor of ophthalmology, as a matter of fact. And so he talks an awful lot about how the eyes, which the eyeballs are the only part of your brain outside of your skull, as a matter of fact. And so you can consider that a direct effect on your brain itself. So that's the first reason that sunlight is important for your mood. The second has to do with what sunlight produces biologically, and that's vitamin D. We all know that vitamin D is produced by sunlight exposure, and that has antidepressant and anxiety-reducing effects

15:25for most people. The anxious people aside that I just talked about a minute ago. It's interesting because we've always known that vitamin D is produced endogenously by the body when you're exposed to direct sunlight on your skin. But of course, a lot of people, especially at high latitudes and who live in gloomy areas, they have to supplement with vitamin D. tablets. There's some people who believe, there are some, not just nutritionists, but some scientists actually believe now that taking vitamin D in this way

15:56is not very effective. That's probably not the mainstream view and everything in this is contested. But what they would suggest is that you need that vitamin D for sure for mood benefits and other physical benefits. But the only good way to get it is actually through the sun as opposed to simply taking vitamin D pills. I take vitamin D pills, I get 5,000 IU per day and I think it's really important also for hormone balance. But the whole point is that it might not be a perfect substitute for getting out in the sun. Okay, now, why would this actually work?

16:26The mechanism has not been proved, but there are some candidates for why it might occur, why the mood boost might actually occur. That talks about the antioxidant activity and improved levels of monoamine neurotransmitters such as serotonin and dopamine. In other words, the vitamin D3 might directly affect serotonin levels, keeping more serotonin in the synapse in your brain, which means you're less perseverant, you're less likely to ruminate on things, and you have higher levels of dopamine, which gives you more anticipation of reward, makes you less anhedonic.

16:58And anhedonia is a tendency to not enjoy things. And so you'll just find that you ruminate less and you enjoy more when you have more D3.

Vitamin D and Mood

17:08That's probably the most likely reason that sunshine indirectly through vitamin D is mood boosting. Okay, now, question. How much? How much sunshine do you need to actually get these benefits that I'm talking about here? And the answer is less than you think, actually. For simple vitamin D synthesis, for example, the estimates range from between 9 and 15 minutes a day of direct sunlight. That's not very much. That's not enough to get a horrible sunburn unless you're really, really super sensitive because of your skin. That depends on season, of course, and location,

17:39and self-evidently that depends on skin type. And this is something also that Andrew Huberman has talked about, about not needing more than a few minutes a day of direct sunlight. More than this, and the effect probably does not increase. You probably don't get benefits from it, from that. And that's not very much, of course. Many people get a lot more than this. A lot of people, maybe some of you who are watching this, you like to lay out in the sunshine, like lie around the pool. I mean, Mrs. Brooks, she likes lying

18:10around the pool, trust me. And, you know, we live in northern Virginia most of the time when we're not in those couple of months of year in Southern California. And we have a nice pool and it's really great. And in the summertime, she's out there. She really, really likes it. She gets more than nine to 15 minutes today, suffice it to say. And she has a skin type that doesn't get easily damaged by the sun because her skin is a little bit darker, certainly a lot darker than mine. But some people are just real sun worshipers. They take that to a real extreme. Now, here's the obligatory dermatologist warning.

18:40I'm not a dermatologist, but we've all heard this since we were kids. There's tons of evidence that too much sun exposure leads to skin damage and aging and various cancers. So, you know, sitting out there without any sunscreen for a really long period of time is probably not ideal. But the research has, you know, it tends to, we tend to take things to a really extreme degree. You know, when we find out that something's bad for you, then everybody doesn't eat it at all. I remember from the 1990s when it turns out that when we demonized

19:10fat in the diet and nobody ate fat. Stop the insanity. Stop eating fat and everybody stopped eating fat. In terms of that, it was horrible for people. People got more osteoporosis and they got all kinds of weird body dysmorphias and it affected their brains in some optimal ways and that was bad advice. Don't eat too much fat is what it should have been, but that's not catchy. Is it? So when people started talking about how bad the sun was, then of course, parents were just lathering their kids up with tons of sunscreen

19:41and then they started to get vitamin D deficiencies, et cetera, et cetera. We need to be balanced and sane about these types of things. And so don't take the possibility of skin cancer to be any indication that you should never have any direct sunlight. You just need to not get sunburned, for example. Be normal is the bottom line of what I'm talking about. Now, here's the question. Why is it that some people they just, they want way, way, way more than they need? One obvious answer is that in our culture we've decided that having a deep,

20:12dark suntan is a sign of good health and it makes you really attractive and people want to be attractive and look healthy. These are reproductive fitness cues, especially in women is what you find. And, you know, I've talked a lot about this, about the evolutionary biology of basic attraction between members of the species and reproductive fitness and youth and signs of good health are something that we really want to exhibit, which is one of the reasons that people want long, glossy hair. Women do. White teeth, for example, a symmetric face,

20:43waist to hips ratio. These are all sort of calculations and things that members of the species, opposite sex members of the species notice. And one of the things is actually having a lot of vitamin D, which is, you know, exposure to the sun is good. And so a little is good. And so people have taken it and a lot is better. And so I think a deep dark tan is considered to be an attractive thing for all of the evolutionary biological reasons that I just covered. That's one reason. But there's also the possibility that this is a genetic

21:13tendency to sun worship. And there's really super interesting research that suggests that that is exactly the case. Article from the Journal of Investigative Dermatology. Yes, there is a Journal of Investigative Dermatology. For all you forensic dermatologists out there, this is from 2021 that's looking for the genetic predisposition to exposure to sunshine. And it turns out that some people almost certainly have a genetic tendency to do that. And the way that you look at this, by the way, is, of course, by looking at sibling studies and twin studies

21:44and identical twin studies and parent-child studies to see, and there's all kinds of good statistical techniques techniques to net out what part of almost any behavior is nature and what part is nurture. Anyway, this study suggests that 58% of sun worship, of sunbathing, is actually based on a genetic tendency to want to do so. Okay, so why? Why would that be the case? Here's an interesting clue to why somebody might be genetically interested in taking a lot more sun

22:15than they need to. That genetic tendency is highly positively statistically correlated with a tendency to overuse drugs and alcohol. Huh. Especially cannabis. Cannabis and alcohol use. If you want, if you crave, if you like to get high, you also more than likely like to take a ton of sun. What's that all about? Now, one possibility is that as excessive drug and alcohol use are a risky behavior that people will engage in because they have a low aversion to risk.

22:48They're kind of, this risk-seeking is, which is also genetic, generally, that those are risky behaviors. And sunbathing is a risky behavior and all risky behaviors go together. So that's one hypothesis. You take all kinds of risks like smoking dope and getting drunk and laying out for three hours a day. That's one interpretation. Another interpretation that I actually favor that I think is actually more plausible is this. Sun exposure probably soothes people with natural substance use

23:18and mood disorders. Now, one of the things that I've talked about in this show and that is sort of common sense is that people who drink a lot and like to use drugs, they often are self-treating natural levels of mood disorder. Maybe not mood disorders