Daylight essential for our sleep, health and mood

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19/09/2026

Daylight essential for our sleep, health and mood

By: Kathryn Ryan
RNZ Nine to Noon: 27/02/2023

Kathryn Ryan: Kathryn grew up in the South Island is now based in Wellington.

She has a BA degree in History and Education, a post-graduate diploma in journalism, and has also completed university study in business and economics.

A journalist for twenty years, Kathryn began in print, and joined RNZ in 1999. She spent six years reporting on Parliament in RNZ's Press Gallery office, the last three as RNZ's political editor. She became host of Nine to Noon in May 2006.

Kathryn has travelled widely throughout New Zealand and visited around 20 countries in Europe, Asia and the Pacific, as well as the United States and Antarctica.

Her interests include reading, movies, good food and wine, the great outdoors, tramping and sea swimming. She was named 2015 International Radio Personality of the Year by the Association of International Broadcasters....

One of the best things we can do for our sleep cycle – and therefore mental health – is head outside for 30 minutes of daily daylight, says world-leading neurobiology researcher Anna Wirz-Justice.

"'Go out for half an hour in the morning no matter what weather," she tells Kathryn Ryan.

Neurobiologist Anna Wirz-Justice is Professor Emerita at the Centre for Chronobiology, Psychiatric Clinic of the University of Basel in Switzerland.Neurobiologist Anna Wirz-Justice is Professor Emerita at the Centre for Chronobiology, Psychiatric Clinic of the University of Basel in Switzerland. Photo: Supplied / The Daylight Award

Wirz-Justice is an expert on circadian rhythms who grew up in New Zealand and now lives in Basel, Switzerland.

Last year she received the Daylight Award for her work on light therapy as a treatment for seasonal affective disorder (SAD)and other sleep-related pyschological disorders.

Back in the 1980s, when Wirz-Justice began researching light therapy as a treatment for SAD, it wasn't taken seriously in psychiatry, she says.

Thanks partly to her research, it has now been established as the "treatment of choice" for SAD, rather than antidepressants.

Wirz-Justice has also discovered light therapy can be beneficial – yet not as beneficial – for people with non-seasonal depression, bipolar disorder, and pregnancy-related depression.

It has also been shown to slow cognitive decline and improve mood and sleep in people with Alzheimer's disease and dementia.

For decades, people saw light therapy as a "really alternative medicine without any scientific justification," Wirz-Justice says.

Although many patients still think "alternative" is the right way to describe the healing power of light – because it's natural and not a drug – Wirz-Justice says that there's now too much scientific evidence for this label to be appropriate.

"We just have to keep working on finding a way that the psychiatric establishment can consider light therapy as part of the therapeutic armamentarium, particularly in depression."

Not only is healthy sleep crucial for recovering from any illness, Wirz-Justice says, a lack of healthy sleep can exacerbate the symptoms of psychiatric illnesses.

With a better understanding of the importance of getting enough daylight and understanding our own circadian rhythms, we can each time our sleep so it's of good quality, Wirz-Justice says.

Increased flexibility of working hours was one upside of the Covid-19 pandemic as it gave people the ability to create a lifestyle better suited to their individual chronotype, she says.

"As a night owl, I do not like getting up to go to [work] every morning at 8 o'clock whereas a [morning lark] would find that absolutely unproblematic."

Anna Wirz-Justice's sleep tips:

  • Aim to be in more light during the day and more darkness at night.
  • Don't go near electronic devices within an hour of bedtime.

"The blueish screens we play and work with in the evenings are going to delay our circadian clock and shift our sleep to later … Particularly kids are inordinately sensitive to these blue wavelengths, even at very low intensity."

  • If your child has a night light make it orange, not blue.
  • And if you're not always blessed with an "eight-hour lot", don't panic.

Five hundred years ago, it was normal for people to have a "first" and a "second" sleep during winter, Wirz-Justice says, and many non-human animals are polyphasic – get their sleep in bursts rather than a long stretch.  

'We have this image that good sleep should be consolidated. I say just don't worry about it. Natural sleep, particularly in winter, is bimodal. It has 'first sleep' then a hole in the middle. Just lie there or go to the fridge… don't worry about it."

...

Anna Wirz-Justice collaborated with fellow Switzerland-based New Zealander Sarah Kenderdine - director of the Lausanne scient and art laboratory EPFL Pavilion - on the current exhibition Lighten Up! On Biology and Time.

<HR>>>>

Anna Wirz-Justice, Laureate of The Daylight Award 2022 for Daylight Research

Anna Wirz-Justice, Neurobiologist and Professor emerita at the Centre for Chronobiology / Psychiatric Clinic of the University of Basel, received The Daylight Award for her research on 16 May 2022, at the award ceremony in Copenhagen, Denmark.

The jury citation:

Anna Wirz-Justice has undertaken pioneering research on how human circadian rhythms and sleep are regulated by light. Defining the key parameters of how light acts as a biological stimulus, including the importance of when we see light, how long we see it, and of what intensity and colour spectrum. 

Working in a psychiatric clinic, Anna appreciated the connections between abnormal light exposure, circadian rhythm disruption, and the impact this has on mental health. She introduced the use of light therapy to Europe and studied its use in Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), non-seasonal depression, Borderline Personality Disorder and dementia. This work allowed Anna, and other groups around the world, to establish both the scientific and therapeutic application of light as a treatment for different areas of mental illness. This holistic approach led Anna and colleagues to write a manual for health care professionals, thereby guiding evidence-based light treatment to improve mood and sleep disorders. 

Anna Wirz-Justice has embedded her science broadly across the public sector. She has, and continues to reach out to numerous other fields in both the natural and humanistic sciences, to convey the importance of the natural day-night cycle on our psyche and physiology, including through architecture and the world of art. She has been the driving force behind multiple public lectures, exhibitions, installations, and architecture projects. 

YouTube: 17/05/2022 05:22

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