Recommended Reading: Chasing the Sun — cova raine: the joy project

Have you ever wanted concrete evidence on how we humans are impacted by the sun? Here is your definitive book on the subject.

Photo by Patrick Tomasso (via Squarespace) — Photo by **Patrick Tomasso** (via Squarespace)

The ancients were right to put the sun at the centre of their world. Sunlight was essential for the evolution of life on earth, and it continues to influence our health today. But darkness is also important: the natural cycle of night and day that the sun presides over is implicated in everything from our sleep patterns, to our blood pressure, to our life-spans. Denying access to this cycle, as we do when we cosset ourselves indoors and spend out evenings under bright artificial lights, could have far-reaching consequences that we’re only just beginning to grasp.

—Geddes, Chasing the Sun (page 15)

So…this is a mind-bending book for me. Another paradigm shifter, and I’m dying to share it with you. I was touting the studies and facts I learned at our last family gathering, and I’m sure annoyed more than family member, but hey, this sh*t is valuable life learning. As someone who struggles annually with SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) or winter depression, this book completely helped me better understand the existence of SAD and how our modern industrial society has complicated the relationship between humans and our environment. It’s funny how in the last hundred years we have dismissed so many structural functions of these connections, and without understanding or observance to how humans are intrinsically impacted by their environment.

Chronobiology is still a fairly recent developing area of scientific research. Finally, recent decades of research and evidence are pointing to issues that we have ‘intrinsically’ known and experienced, and now understood and supported with hard scientific evidence to support our own physiological intuition. It’s pretty dang cool.

Geddes is a science journalist who specializes in biology, medicine, and technology. She explains how the sun cycle impacts us on a cellular level, and how our daily biological processes and functions run with the sun (chronobiology).

Geddes brings up several scientific cases of human and animal disease and dysfunction, all rooted in our relationship with the sun. Geddes elegantly distills her findings, and systematically connects the dots for the reader. Once distilled, it seems almost elementary. Humans, animals, and plants evolved for the duration of our entire existence to live, respond, survive, and thrive by our natural elements-- most notably, sunlight. How couldn’t it deeply impact our behaviours and health?

Geddes provides comprehensive and varied research on sunlight and our affectations with (and without) it. She synthesizes findings from NASA and US Navy studies, international studies from the last one hundred years in disease and chronotherapy, shiftwork and our sleep cycles, non-24-hour-sleep wake disorders, the evolution of circadian rhythms (from cyanobacteria to humans), chronobiology (our DNA-embedded interrelationship with sunlight), chronotypes, and studies from non-digitalized and electrified communities including the Amish(religious group in North America) & Hadza tribe (hunter-gatherers from Tanzania).

She takes part in some of the experimentation herself, and gives meaningful and useful strategies to re-connect with these natural and powerful cycles, in order to reconnect with ourselves and our environment for a healthier and more fulfilling life.

Photo by Tetiana SHYSHKINA (via Squarespace) — Photo by **Tetiana SHYSHKINA** (via Squarespace)

If you’ve ever wanted to better understand the following, Geddes explains these concepts in a fascinating and east-to-understand way:

Circadian clock (how it impacts our physiological health and functions, human, plant, and animal)
Illuminance levels, natural and artificial
Explaining blue light (screens, devices, LEDs-indoor and outdoor) and their physiological impact on our health
Shift work and its cumulative impact
Chronobiology (the study of cyclical changes in our bodies) and its relationship to human health today
Sleep disruptions and dysfunctions
Illnesses that manifest due to imbalanced circadian rhythm; this includes depression, dementia, cancer, type 2 diabetes, coronary artery disease, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s, and obesity, among other autoimmune diseases
What is light therapy?
How to fine-tune your own circadian clock