Andrew Huberman's Light Lore

scientizing Early Rising

If you’ve been on any social media platform or even just talked to a man who goes to the gym in the last three years, you’ve heard of Andrew Huberman. His podcast’s “science-based tools for everyday life” are so popular with a particular kind of high-achieving biohacker that TikTok has taken to calling them “Huberman Husbands.”

Fans are putting red light bulbs in their lamps because Huberman said in an episode once that they’re good for sleep — citing a preliminary study seeking to improve the performance of shift workers that is still ongoing. “Beautiful,” he says of studies he likes, but they’re often new, feature small sample sizes, and haven’t yet been repeated.

He often appeals to quantity, talking about the “many studies” or the “decades of research” backing up his points, but neglects to mention that quantity of study does not necessarily mean quality of evidence, and that neuroscience as we know it is only a few decades old, anyway. Science moves slow, and the things we think we know today, we might laugh about in fifty years.

Huberman dresses up his health advice with brain words and neurotransmitters, but it really boils down to basic tenets we’ve been told for a very long time already. Get good sleep, exercise, eat a balanced diet, hydrate. He gives specific, quantified protocols for following these tenets, though, which I think appeals to people who prefer to find their truth in data and their priests in scientists.

His claim to fame is perhaps his advice about morning sunlight, something he is uniquely qualified to speak on, as his neuroscience lab at Stanford specializes in ophthalmology. Everyone needs to get several minutes of early morning sun in their eyeballs immediately upon waking, he says, for brain chemical reasons.

In Huberman’s lore, human beings are just machines controlled by their chemicals, and if we learn how to tweak those chemicals through specific rituals, we can control our own bodies.

But does this practice really benefit everyone like Huberman claims? And does he even owe his own productivity to the light lore he professes to the rest of us, or does he perhaps have some special conditions that make high-achieving more possible for him?

Because I’m currently operating on the hunch that Gilded Age health crazes are coming back in vogue under the banner of neuroscience, it only took a little bit of research paper surfing before I found some literature about a subset of post-Industrial Revolution health reform movements that promoted what they called “Early Rising” as a moral practice.

Sleep patterns were different before the Industrial Revolution, with many people sleeping in two shifts separated by a period of wakefulness in the night — referred to as first sleep and second sleep. Historian Roger Ekrich writes that in the 1800’s, “propelled by uncertainties over the dramatic pace of economic and social change,” health reformers started to really push self-improvement among the middle class.

source: Discover Magazine

This included telling people that second sleep was bad for them because it could cause headaches, constipation, and even lead to young men losing their “vital force” to sexy dreams (of course this is also connected to No Fap!) so the right thing to do was just to get out of bed instead.

Ekrich writes:

As early as 1674, the author of The Art of Thriving: or, the Way to Get and Keep Money had urged this course in order to avoid the twin perils of lethargy and lust. ‘What a shame it is to spend half one's lifetime in dreams and sleeps; leave your bed thereof when first sleep hath left you, lest custom render your body sluggish, or (which is worse), your mind a cage of unclean thoughts’¹

An 1855 booklet on Early Rising (which appears to have been misattributed to Benjamin Franklin, who died in 1790) talks about the health benefits of early morning sun like this:

According to Huberman, they were right about the “chemical rays” — he says that light photons tickle the melanopsin ganglion cells in your eyeballs and tell your circadian clock that it’s daytime, triggering cortisol to “promote wakefulness and the ability to focus throughout the day.”

“Ideally, you do it every day, because it’s like setting a clock or a watch properly,” Huberman tells entrepreneur and lifestyle guru Tim Ferriss.

Properly — this word is doing a lot of work, and it’s not unlike this 1954 propaganda film on good habits for young people that begins with a girl named Barbara hitting snooze on her alarm. “You’re a creature of habit, Barbara, we all are,” the narrator says. “Unfortunately, not all your habits are good ones. This is how your day started. It started wrong.”

Huberman’s work is scientizing this old moral advice about health, and he sounds a bit obsessed with his own supposedly “proper” light-viewing habits. In addition to running outside immediately upon waking for his daily sun-gazing, he has said that he keeps a high-lux light pad turned on at his desk all day so he can get a steady stream of those good, good light photons. He also claims (citing a mouse study) that viewing bright light at night can suppress dopamine, trigger depression, and dysregulate blood sugar.

The red lights come on at night in Huberman’s house, because bright light inhibits melatonin, “the chemical of darkness” that tells your body it’s time to sleep. This has led to some interesting restrictive light practices for Huberman, who believes that if he views the sunset that means he’s allowed to watch a little Netflix later, as a treat:

“Viewing light circa sunset adjusts the sensitivity of the cells in the eye such that it buffers you against some of the negative effects of light late at night. So, I call it sort of my Netflix vaccination — I can watch some late-night movie or TV or be on my screen a little bit later provided I got some sunlight right around sunset.”

This strikes me as a kind of health anxiety — like diet culture, but for light? I don’t doubt that this advice helps some people, but again, as I say over and over: these ideas individualize social problems and overgeneralize personal solutions. Chronic sleep deprivation is a huge problem for workers, and maybe Huberman’s advice can help some people, but it’s not going to change an economic system that operates on exploiting the energy of human beings past their bodies’ limits.

Maybe I am less taken by the light lore than the Huberman Husbands because it’s the exact opposite of what I need to thrive. I put my desk in the basement because it would be dark and quiet, and I keep it softly glowing in purple light 90% of the time, because working in a cave-like environment actually helps me think.

I’ve always been nocturnal, and struggled so much with mornings that I almost got held back in high school for my constant tardiness. I once had a panic attack in second period because I was exhausted and the fluorescent overhead lights were stabbing me in the face.² I’ve been getting scolded for sleeping late all my life, and tried to work plenty of jobs that forced me to get up early like everyone else, hoping they would fix me by force.

“If you just get in the habit, you’ll get used to it eventually,” everyone said, but everyone was wrong!

health propaganda circa 1922

I didn’t become a morning person, I just became a person who was chronically sleep-deprived and generally depressed, so in my thirties, I quit taking morning jobs and stopped scheduling anything before 11 AM unless absolutely necessary. Leaning into my body’s rhythms actually helps me write more and keeps my mood and energy from dipping too low, but it does directly conflict with society’s schedule.

Huberman’s generalized advice glosses over the diversity of human beings, which vary in chronotype. A 2016 paper on the evolution of sleep explains that human sleeping patterns are not the same across cultures. People like me, whose sleep pattern does not match the culture around them, get told we have delayed sleep phase disorder:

Circadian rhythm disorders are characterized by various types of sleep period mismatch…in which affected individuals tend to go to bed later and sleep later than ideal for optimal function in their environment. [emphasis mine]

But the advice this paper gives for dealing with so-called delayed sleep phase disorder?

Don’t try to change it — just find a lifestyle that matches your “natural circadian proclivities.” And to be fair, Huberman does acknowledge chronotypes briefly in his interview with circadian rhythm expert Dr. Samer Hattar, but Hattar proceeds into a tangent about how a lot of people who think they’re night owls just haven’t ever gotten to properly soak their eyeballs in some bright morning sun, so maybe they should just try it?

As a scientist, Huberman claims objectivity, frequently insisting that he’s not talking about morals, just looking “through the lens of biology.” But his advice is embraced by capitalists and conservatives, who find his biological justification of their moral practices validating. Early rising to view sunlight is a tame example, but Huberman also preaches against alcohol, drugs, and porn,³ subjects that stray much more obviously into moral territory.

It’s funny, because he often mentions that he’s never liked drugs or alcohol. It’s pretty easy to preach against a thing you don’t even like doing and have no life experience with! But what I find really ironic about Huberman’s productivity advice is that it might not even be doing as much of the heavy lifting in his own life as he purports.

While telling former Navy-SEAL-turned-leadership-guru Jocko Willink his life story — that of a Stanford professor whose dad is also a Stanford professor — Huberman mentions that he has an adrenal-related gene mutation which allows him to be highly productive without much sleep:

“I probably have the capacity to make a little bit more adrenaline than most, I can get by on very little sleep, at least for a couple nights…if I need to take a one-hour nap and bounce right back in, I’m good.”

Later in the episode, he admits that he needs a small team to help him with organizing and planning his podcast. “I tend to outsource my forebrain,” he says, as someone who’s made a career telling people how to control their forebrains to succeed in life, and who is probably paying that team with supplement sales generated off the back of such advice.

In a post called The Dominant Discourse on Work is Set By Lucky, Privileged Workaholics, writer Karla Starr points out that productivity prophets often have a lot of help in the form of employees and money, which allows them to outsource much of their tasks with one hand, and tell all of us how to bootstrap our way to success with the other.

In reality, these men are successful not because of their sun-gazing or their ice baths, but because they have a lot of help.

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If you missed it, I wrote more about health-as-religion and the irony of bootstrap gurus neglecting to mention the help they’ve received here:

1. This obviously goes against the Order of the Slug, wherein we believe it is fine to have as many sleeps as you want.

2. Huberman actually recommends turning on all your overhead lights during the day for alertness reasons, which is quite neurotypical of him. We never use the big light, Andy!!!

3. actually he claims that porn damages men’s brains!!!