Most mornings, I hit snooze on my alarm as the sun peeks tentatively through the opaque curtains covering the edges of our heavy-duty blackout shade. A few minutes later, I take my phone out of the nightstand drawer and check my notifications, then start reading the news or whichever newsletter catches my eye. Soon I’ll have to get in the shower so that I can be ready when my daughter wakes up, filling the house with childlike chatter set to the soundtrack of her favorite kids’ songs.
I love our time together in the mornings, just the two of us after my husband leaves for work (he started a new job last month, thankfully). But it can also be challenging, and these brief moments lying in bed with my phone make me feel connected, however fleetingly, to the world of ideas, of culture, of complex thought—and to parts of myself that feel both important and neglected.
When the alarm goes off again, I try to grab one last piece of information as I get out of bed, like a swimmer taking a final sip of air before diving underwater. Then I throw open the curtains, lift the shade, and take in the day.
And lately, throughout this routine, a small voice has been humming in the back of my mind like an incantation: sunlight before screen light. Sunlight before screen light.
This slogan has an intuitive appeal to me, as someone concerned with digital well-being. But it’s also become popular in wellness culture, which always makes me skeptical—and I encountered variations on the phrase several times while researching the dubious evidence behind Andrew Huberman’s “protocols,” which made me even more suspicious. Plus, I had the vague sense that “sunlight before screen light” was somehow tangled up with diet-culture ideas, like the belief that getting light exposure at the “right” times could lead to weight loss or prevent weight gain.
After weeks of having my morning routine disrupted by a guilt-inducing inner monologue, I decided it was time to investigate the claims. What I found set my mind at ease. There isn’t actually any good science to support the “sunlight before screen light” slogan—or the notion that morning sunlight will somehow shrink your body.
