The Morning Light Habit Sleep Experts Swear By

You’ve probably heard that getting some morning light can help you feel more awake during the day and sleep better at night—from your doctor, your sleep app, and roughly 900 podcasts. But you might not realize just how much it matters. “Morning light is arguably more important than your coffee,” says Mariana Figueiro, director of the Light and Health Research Center at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. What you may not have heard is exactly how to get it: where to position yourself, how early in the morning to start basking, and how long to take in the rays. Without that knowledge, the advice to “get more morning light” is surprisingly hard to put into practice. Here’s what researchers say about how to get the right dose of morning light. How morning light helps you wake up—and sleep at nightThe amount of light reaching your eyes is measured in lux, and by that measure, most morning routines happen in near-darkness. A dimly lit bedroom might clock in at 30 to 40 lux. A brightly lit kitchen might reach 500. Step outside on an overcast morning, and you're standing in 5,000 to 10,000. "You're looking at orders of magnitude more light when you're outside," says Jamie Zeitzer...