How Can Your Smart Home’s Circadian Lighting Improve Your Sleep?

Getting a good night’s sleep can sometimes feel like a huge struggle. Work-related stress, physical illness, and using screens before bed affect sleep quality.

Between 50 and 70 million Americans suffer from sleep-related problems. But the smart home offers a solution in the form of circadian lighting.

Wondering how circadian lighting could improve your sleep? Read on to learn more.

What Is Circadian Lighting?

Smart light bulbs offer the opportunity to control your lighting from your smartphone. But they also give you the chance to change the color of your lighting.

That’s not just switching from green to red at Halloween. It means changing the color temperature.

Ordinary white lighting can take on a blue cast to simulate daylight. Or it can mimic the golden glow of candlelight.

This circadian lighting provides the right color light at the right time of day.

Why Is This Important?

Your circadian rhythm is a natural daily cycle that takes around 24 hours. It involves functions like brain activity, body temperature, and hormone production.

It also involves the hormones in your sleep cycle. Your body notices the drop in light levels outside. In response, you produce more melatonin, the sleep hormone, to make you tired.

When this reaches the right level, you fall asleep. Melatonin production continues during the night. It stops just before you wake up.

Daylight suppresses your melatonin production. That’s why you feel more tired during the winter, when it gets dark earlier.

But with electric lighting, we don’t notice when it gets dark outside. So we find it harder to fall asleep because we’ve got less melatonin in our system.

Sleep deprivation can ultimately cause diabetes, strokes, and heart disease. They’re all preventable.

How Does Circadian Lighting Work?

Blue-toned electric light mimics the daylight that suppresses melatonin production. That makes it harder to fall asleep, and much more difficult to get a good night’s sleep.

But you still need this blue light to help you wake up in the morning. The body’s ‘wake up’ hormone, cortisol, responds to this cool-toned light.

Warm-toned electric light doesn’t have the same effect on melatonin. It lets you produce the hormone so you’ll fall asleep. You can follow a more natural circadian rhythm.

Circadian lighting alters its color temperature and intensity to suit the time of day. You get all the benefits of artificial lighting but without the impact on your sleep cycle.

That means you’ll still get tired when you need to. Which leads to deeper, more natural sleep. But you’ll also wake up when you need to, more alert thanks to the boost in cortisol.

This is the same sort of technology behind sunrise alarm clocks.

Rise and Shine with Circadian Lighting

Now you know why circadian lighting can help improve your sleep. It mimics the natural cycles of daylight and darkness that govern our body clocks.

Enjoy longer concentration, a better mood, and deeper sleep.

Do you want to improve your sleep with your smart home technology? Contact us to find out how we can help.