The Missing Link: How Your Light Environment Can Impact Impact Your Posture & Pain
Did you know that your light environment shapes your health more than you think!
🌞 How Light, Vision, and Posture Impact Chronic Pain
Have you ever considered how the way you see the world might shape how your body moves—or even how it feels? It might sound odd, but the connections between your vision, posture, and natural light exposure hold the key to understanding many chronic pain and movement issues.
In my practice, I’ve worked with patients who come in with persistent lower back pain, hip imbalances, or even neck tension. They’ve often tried everything—physical therapy, chiropractic care, even surgery—but the pain persists. What’s often overlooked in these cases are the hidden drivers: vision, light exposure, and the intricate balance of the nervous system.
🌟 The Role of Light in Health
Let’s start with light. Most of us spend the majority of our day under artificial lighting—bright, cool-toned, and dominated by blue wavelengths. While artificial light has become an unavoidable part of modern life, it creates significant disruptions to our circadian biology and overall health. Why? Because our bodies are designed to thrive in natural light, which contains a balanced spectrum of wavelengths—UV, infrared, and blue light—that regulate processes like hormone production, nervous system balance, and even posture.
💡 Natural Light vs. Artificial Blue Light
When you’re exposed to artificial blue light in isolation—such as from phones, computer screens, LED bulbs, and TVs—it sends a signal to your brain that it’s daytime, even if it’s late at night. This inhibits melatonin production, the hormone that governs sleep and nighttime repair processes, and disrupts your body’s internal clock. Over time, this can lead to poor sleep, chronic stress, and inflammation—key contributors to chronic pain and dysfunction.
On the other hand, natural sunlight, particularly morning UVA and UVB exposure, plays an essential role in regulating your circadian rhythm. When sunlight enters your eyes (without sunglasses or contact lenses that block UV), it stimulates receptors in your retina that signal your brain to start producing serotonin—a hormone critical for mood and alertness. Later in the day, that serotonin converts into melatonin, preparing your body for restful sleep. Without adequate light exposure in the morning, this process is disrupted, leaving you in a sympathetic (“fight-or-flight”) state, which exacerbates stress and pain levels.
☀️ The Importance of Morning UVA and UVB
Morning sunlight is particularly unique because it’s rich in UVA light, which works in tandem with blue light to trigger essential hormonal cascades. Exposure to UVA during sunrise primes your body for optimal melatonin production later in the evening, reinforcing your body’s natural sleep-wake cycle. It also helps regulate cortisol levels, ensuring that your stress hormone peaks at the right time in the morning (to wake you up) and tapers off as the day goes on. Missing this natural light cue not only impacts your sleep but also leaves you in a chronically stressed state, contributing to nervous system dysregulation and chronic pain.
🔗 Why Light Impacts Movement and Pain
Light exposure isn’t just about sleep or mood—it directly impacts your nervous system and posture. When your circadian rhythm is disrupted, it throws your body into a state of imbalance, making it harder for your nervous system to transition into a parasympathetic state (your “rest and digest” mode). This is critical because being stuck in a sympathetic state (your “fight-or-flight” mode) contributes to chronic tension, poor movement patterns, and pain.
Natural light exposure, particularly early in the day, helps to regulate your nervous system, aligning your body with its natural rhythms and reducing stress levels. By getting light into your eyes in the morning and limiting artificial light exposure in the evening, you’re supporting your body’s ability to recover, repair, and move efficiently without unnecessary compensation or strain.
🛠️ Practical Tools for Optimizing Light Exposure
☀️ Morning Sunlight: Spend at least 10–20 minutes outside during sunrise or early morning hours, without sunglasses, to get essential UVA and blue light exposure. This kickstarts your circadian rhythm and sets you up for a balanced day.
🕶️ RA Optics Blue Light Blocking Glasses: In the evening, protect yourself from artificial blue light with high-quality blue light blocking glasses like those from RA Optics. These glasses filter out harmful wavelengths, allowing your body to naturally prepare for sleep by increasing melatonin production. Use code AKANN for a discount!
💡 SPERTI Vitamin D Lamp: On days when getting outside isn’t possible, the SPERTI lamp is an incredible tool to mimic UV light exposure, helping your body synthesize vitamin D and maintain its natural rhythms. Use code KANNER10 for a discount.
🌍 The Bigger Picture: Pain and the Nervous System
People often have a hard time connecting the dots between light biology, posture, and pain, but it just makes sense. Chronic pain doesn’t exist in isolation—it fires up the nervous system into a fight-or-flight state, creating tension and compensation patterns throughout the body.
The way I work is all about getting people back to the basics: reconnecting with nature, restoring efficient breathing, and enabling movement that flows side-to-side through a proper gait pattern. These are the keys to getting out of pain and staying out of pain.
But here’s the thing—pain can feel overwhelming, and making big lifestyle changes can seem daunting. That’s why the easiest, most passive way to influence all of this is by changing your light environment. It’s so simple yet profoundly effective. By exposing yourself to natural light at the right times of day and reducing artificial blue light at night, you can regulate your nervous system, support better breathing, and even reset your movement patterns—all without doing anything extra.
Let me know what resonates with you! Are you curious about your light exposure, vision, or posture? Reply or comment—I’d love to hear your thoughts and help you take the first step toward relief.
Keep Learning,
❤️Aleena
Great post! Sometimes we forget light or the wrong light can be a stressor.
I used to live in a convent where wearing sunglasses was not allowed, even when we were doing farmwork up under the bright mountain sun. When the policy eased up a bit and I was able to wear sunglasses, I noticed I was much less exhausted and could last hours longer at the manual labor happily.
We also had florescent lights in our kitchen and while the windows were not terribly abundant, several of us preferred to leave the lights off while we worked because it just did not exhaust us as much.
I want to try the blue screen glasses. How do you tell which ones are quality--effective?