Flash Therapy During Sleep May Curb Jet Lag

An hour of flashing light therapy helps reset your biological clock. Stanford psychiatrists report this preliminary yet promising finding after their study of 10 healthy 25 year old volunteers. Each subject took part in two 36 hour sleep lab stays. During one, there was exposure to one hour of repetitive flashing light during the non-REM sleep phase when the brain’s circadian pacemaker in the hypothalamus is most sensitive to light signals without any sleep disturbance. During a second, the control, the subject wore the same flash goggles, but no light therapy was delivered. The result: one hour of flashing light can shift the brain’s biological clock up to 6 hours though there was wide variability with most subjects enjoying a shift of about 68 minutes. This technique could be simplified and commercialized to help you bet jet lag……someday soon.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-41742-w#Sec1

#jetlag #circadianrhythm #flashes #light #stanford