Name: Bill Maher & Andrew Huberman: The Light Is Making You Sick
Uploaded: 2026-03-30T21:37:44.000Z
Duration: 9 min 22 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I think the two thing I mean, there are many things that are making Americans and others sick, including lack of physical exercise and so on.

Adverbs of degree

But I think two, at least two of the important ones that aren't discussed enough are being divorced from our natural circadian schedule.

We've talked about this before, but I'll just briefly reiterate.

Bright days, meaning sunlight in the morning, bright days as best you can, getting sunlight through a window.

There's a recent study showing that if you work near a window, it actually can help with blood glucose management and dark nights.

And, you know, for some people, going to bed late and waking up later is best for them.

For other people, waking up early and going to bed earlier is best for them.

People have to figure out what's ideal for them.

Because there are some hardcore people who insist that the healing only happens between 10:00 PM and 2:00 AM.

There are Because I, you know, 2:00 PM, 2:00 AM is when I'm just getting to sleep.

and some people do best on a late-to-bed, late waking-up schedule,

and nonetheless getting bright light, ideally from sunlight in your eyes in the first hour after waking.

and the first thing I do is go over to the window,

and it's always like, "Oh, I feel like a vampire," you know, because it but I force myself to, you know, open my eyes to that.

also I'm very, very aware that light in the eye at night, you know, it's the worst thing for you.

Yeah, so your pineal gland makes melatonin, which makes you sleepy and makes you fall asleep.

I should point out that it's clear that some people can tolerate screen light and fall asleep with no problem.

But the bright what bright light does in the morning is it increases cortisol, which we know is a stress hormone.

But in the morning, you want your cortisol high.

This is the foundation of health: to have your morning cortisol high, yes, high,

and then to have it taper off into the afternoon and evening.

This is true for men, for women, perimenopausal, menopausal, pregnant women, kids, everybody.

This has been it's called the healthy cortisol curve.

And if that curve flattens, meaning if it's not a big enough peak in your morning, whatever time that happens to be, and

if you have too much cortisol in the evening, you're going to have problems with sleep.

You're also going to have problems with blood sugar regulation because cortisol has been labeled a stress hormone,

but we need to think about cortisol as a glucose, as an energy mobilizing hormone.

So it turns out that even if you can sleep just fine after being around a bunch of bright lights at night, it will elevate your morning blood glucose.

Now, is that going to make you prediabetic or diabetic?

But kids nowadays, they've done a beautiful experiment where they had kids sleep in a room with 100 lux—that's very dim—100 lux light overhead, eyes closed,

and they saw significantly elevated morning blood glucose levels.

So dimming the lights at night is important.

Now, there's a lot that's been said about blue light,

and for some people, wearing blue blockers can be helpful, etc., but just dimming the lights.

This environment that we're in here is actually quite dim.

It's bright enough for us to see each other,

but this environment is not nearly bright enough for the morning, what we need in the morning to spike cortisol, which is what we want,

but it's plenty bright to spark cortisol, I'd say, an hour before sleep.

So just in the first hour, make the first hour of your day as bright as possible, ideally from sunlight.

Make the last hour of your day as dim or as dark as safely you can.

Right, I do start to lower the lights, but, you know, there's only so much you can do.

But when I go to bed, I cover up all these little things.

Everything in fucking America now has to have a little fucking stupid light that you don't need.

I'll put things all over the—I bring duct tape and I'll cover it a little bit.

Or get a great soft eye mask is one of the best investments.

I don't like that because I feel it and it's onerous, but I have blackout curtains.

No, when I go to sleep at night, it is so it is as black as Stephen Miller's heart.

When I open my eyes or close them, I see the same thing.

And I don't mean to knock this product, I'm wearing it right now, these rings that I'm sure you're very into.

I wear a Whoop band, or I measure my sleep with an Eight Sleep, the cooling mattress.

Okay, well, this is the same idea, and I'm look, I've just started it up.

And by the way, I was no— That's why I don't wear one of those.

I figured it out, and I'm going to give you here's a life hack, you life fucking hackers.

and it does the one thing you're not supposed to do, which is have light on when you're sleeping.

Okay, so what I did was I took a black surgical glove, you know, like thin rubber gloves.

We gave out a zillion of them during COVID,

and now they're polluting the entire country and world, so great on that one.

and I put it on as a fucking Oura Ring cozy at night, and then it blocks it off.

So there's your life hack for all the people who wrote in like I did and said, "This is so silly.

We're trying to do our health here." I know.

So I think the emergent theme in our conversation already today is technologies that we use to improve convenience or improve our health inevitably have some sort of side effects that we run up against.

So the long wavelength light, red light, infrared light, etc., that's the heat from the sun that you feel.

That long wavelength light is not the light that burns your skin.

And it was present in incandescent bulbs.

So incandescents are, you know, even if you see a white incandescent bulb, it's got short wavelengths, so it's got blue, it's got green, it's got yellows, all the way out to red,

That infrared and red, we'll just call it long wavelengths.