How do I get more daylight in winter?

Indoor lighting is far dimmer than people assume — often a fiftieth of a cloudy day outdoors. That gap is why winter days spent inside leave the body clock without the signal it needs.

Safety

Step by step

1. Get outside in the morning.Within an hour or two of waking, for ten minutes if that is all there is. Morning light is what anchors the body clock, and it matters more than the total across the day.
2. Go out even when it is grey.An overcast winter day is still many times brighter than a well-lit room. The instinct that it is not worth it on a dull day is wrong by an order of magnitude.
3. Move things outdoors where you can.A phone call while walking, coffee outside, part of a lunch break. Small relocations accumulate.
4. Sit near a window when indoors.Light falls off sharply with distance. A desk beside a window gets substantially more than one two metres away.
5. Take the lunch break outside.In midwinter this may be the only genuine daylight available on a working day. It is worth defending.
6. Consider a light box if mornings are dark.A 10,000 lux light used for 20-30 minutes in the morning is a well-established approach for winter low mood. Follow the instructions on distance and timing.
7. Try a sunrise alarm clock.It brightens gradually before the alarm. Genuinely easier to wake to in winter, and it helps when sunrise is after your alarm.
8. Keep the evenings dim.The other half. Bright light late pushes the body clock later and undoes the morning's benefit. Lamps rather than overhead lights after dark.

Tips

• Clean the windows in autumn. Dirty glass reduces the light meaningfully, and it is a ten-minute job with a visible effect.
• Cut back anything blocking a window. A shrub outside can halve the light in a room.
• Walking with someone else makes a winter morning walk far more likely to happen than resolving to go alone.

Questions people ask