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15 Jun 2024

How daylight affects your physical health

Natural light is a wonderful thing – it’s all around us and, in the right doses, is excellent for our physical health. Unfortunately, a lot of us Kiwis don’t get enough natural light during the day when we need it most. Whether it’s because we are at work and aren’t leaving our desks enough or our homes weren’t built to have enough natural daylighting, this can be a real hinderance to our health. 

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This post will explore just how bad a lack of sunlight can be for our physical health, as well as look at some options that are available for skylights NZ wide, and how Solatube skylights can really make a difference to your home. 

Light and sleep

Sunlight has a huge impact on our sleep patterns. As much as some of us would like to think that we’re ‘night owls’, the fact is that humans are only habitually nocturnal. In fact, we are diurnal – the opposite. The sunlight is our body’s cue to be awake, and when it gets dim at night, our bodies know it’s time to go to sleep. 

During the day, sunlight keeps our energy levels up and makes our cells active, ensuring the cells in our bodies are consistently working. Come night time, our bodies recognise the difference in light levels, and triggers melatonin – the hormone that makes you sleep – to start being released. 

Imagine being in a brightly lit room without windows and trying to sleep. Similar experiences such as these can be very frustrating due to the lack of light change that guides our sleep cycle. The same happens at home – if you’re shut away from the outdoors without much source of natural light and rely too heavily on artificial lighting, it can be frustrating when it comes time to go to sleep.

Light and wellness

It can be surprising when we first discover just how imperative the sun is to living a healthy lifestyle, especially when so many of us live and spend all our time in places where we are shaded from natural light. Fortunately, there are many ways of getting natural light to flow directly into our homes every day, so we don’t have to spend all day outdoors. Here at Solatube, we help Kiwis get more natural light through high-quality and innovative Solatube skylights.

Installing a Solatube skylight lets natural light into places where we never thought sunlight would be possible, such as internal rooms and dark hallways. It’s the perfect source of natural light as it only lets in the kind of natural light that our bodies need – leaving out UV rays that are hot and damaging. And for a more flexible solution, you can opt to replace traditional, fluorescent lights in the house with Solatube Smart LED Lights to combine the best of daylighting with electric light.
 

If you have a dark home with little opportunity to open it up to light, Solatube skylights can be the perfect alternative and help make you and your family physically healthier. Contact us today to find out how easy it can be to have healthy, natural light in your home.

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