retimer - Light therapy glasses for better sleep. How to use retimer and do retimer glasses work?
retimer Light Therapy Glasses
retimer light therapy glasses claim to help you feel more energised, productive, improve your mood, eliminate jet lag and even help with weight loss.
All of this sounds perhaps too good to be true. Do retimer glasses really work? Is retimer a real product? And if so, how do we use retimer light therapy glasses to get better sleep and improve our health?
In today’s 1:1 longevity technology interview, we are going to answer all of these common questions about the retimer light therapy product by interviewing the original inventor of this technology Professor Leon Lack.
What is Light Therapy?
Light therapy glasses for sleep
It is important to start with a brief introduction to the term ‘light therapy’. This is not the first time we have discussed light therapy on A Longer Life.
We have previously collaborated with our partners at Kineon to introduce you to the concept of photobiomodulation, which is the more scientific form of the term light therapy. This refers to the exceptionally well documented (decades of research) effects that certain wavelengths of light can have on biological systems.
The retimer light therapy glasses operate on the same principle, but with a very different approach. Whereas red light therapy can be used to stimulate cartilage growth, boost joint recovery (and many other benefits), the retimer glasses use blue green light therapy transmitted through your eyes.
By emitting blue green light into your eyes, as our interview expert will explain, these glasses send signals to your hypothalamus (specifically the suprachiasmatic nucleus). The hypothalamus governs your sleep wake cycle, known as your circadian rhythm and it does so by observing the amount and timing of light in your environment.
This means that light therapy can be used to send specific signals about when it is time to be awake with certain wavelengths of blue green light being received by your eyes.
Another way to think about this is through the need to block blue light in the evening. If your eyes are sensing blue light, your pineal gland won’t produce melatonin, it needs darkness (an absence of blue light) to do this.
As it turns out there is quite a bit of scientific evidence that this type of light therapy is effective for correcting a wide variety of health conditions that arise from a dysfunctional circadian rhythms. Improvements to mood, reductions in anxiety, potentially even weight loss (through improved metabolic function overnight), mental focus and energy have all been demonstrated in research studies, many of which have used the retimer device directly.
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re-timer light therapy glasses:
marketing claims from their website (August 2024):
“retimer is ‘the most preferred light therapy wearable’, ‘a portable and ergonomic wearable to help align your circadian rhythm’, that is ‘research-backed’ and features an ‘optimal delivery angle’ for the blue green light. ”
At A Longer Life, we act on your behalf to put the marketing claims of companies like retimer to the test. We always start by searching for companies who share our values and have a science backed product, whose research we can review.
This then positions us to ask the tough questions of their Founders and/or lead scientists to help you to separate marketing hype from real results. If they make the cut, they become A Longer Life partner.
Today, we are interviewing Professor Leon Lack, one of the inventors of the retimer wearable device and a scientific advisor to the retimer company.
Profesor Lack has worked at the School of Psychology at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australian since 1971. There, he has been teaching and conducting research in the areas of sleep, circadian rhythms, bright light therapy and insomnia for the past 50 years (now that’s an expert!).
He has received many large research grants, published over 200 refereed articles, books, and book chapters, and presented over 250 conference papers on all matters sleep related, and today, he answers our questions about the retimer light therapy glasses.
Is retimer a real product? Do retimer glasses work? We are about to find out.
re-timer. The best light therapy glasses for sleep?
Click on the ‘+’ symbol below to see each question and answer.
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Hello everyone, it's Nick from A Longer Life. Welcome to today's technology interview where we are diving into a very cool product called retimer, which helps us to regulate our circadian rhythm.
Today I'm joined by Professor Leon Lack, who's actually originally from the US, just like me, and where he went to Stanford before coming all the way to Australia to settle in Adelaide.
He has been here since 1971 working most recently at the Flinders University in the School of Psychology. He conducts research in the areas of sleep, circadian rhythm, bright light therapy, and insomnia.
He knows a lot about sleep and he is a co-inventor of a portable light therapy device called the retimer and we're here to learn about that.
The first question we are going to ask is - what is light therapy?
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Light therapy probably means different things to different people.
We're not talking about influencing the skin and getting the tan, getting outside and getting some more vitamin D.
We are talking about light that penetrates into the eye with normal vision and has an effect in the eyes.
The effect we're talking about is really a well-known biological mechanism that sends light information to the hypothalamus, an area just behind the bridge of the nose, maybe three or four centimeters back in the centre of the brain.
It receives information about light, whether or not light is present and how intense it is and what its wavelengths are and that controls the body clock.
We know that light stimulation at different times in the day will have effects on resetting the body clock.
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retimer jet lag calculations. How to use retimer for jet lag
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I (Nick) just did a four week trip to the United States. I go back each year in the Australian winter which is the US summer. I take my 10 year old son with me and we love doing a bit of biohacking on our circadian rhythms.
We will always wake up around 3:30am or 4am in the morning. We have gone and sat in front of the high beams on my car to get the light in our eyes. I call some people in the US to get that energetic vibe of them being awake and alert, we go for a walk, move our bodies, shift our meal schedule forward and get it so that we can fall asleep on the plane as close to nighttime in LA as we can, flying from Sydney or from Brisbane.
Of course, when we get there in the morning and have to wake up at 7 or 8am in the morning, it's the middle of the night for our body clock. It's really, really hard to wake up. One of the most impactful ways to use the retimer device is actually for adjusting our circadian rhythm in response to jet lag.
Here’s our question: how we could best use a retimer device to do what I just described. We are planning international travel. We need to wake up, but it's the middle of the night, but the sun's coming up in the place to where we're traveling.
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Although that sounds pretty vicious as a therapy. I would recommend, and you would probably get more compliance from people if you did it a little bit more gently for a few days before your trip.
I would suggest waking up half an hour earlier each morning and getting these close to light using the retimers so that you shift your body clock back maybe two or three hours earlier before you leave.
But doing it in a way that's a little bit more gentle and that you can still get enough sleep every night so that your bedtime gets a little bit earlier as well on a regular basis.
So shifting everything earlier by maybe half an hour and getting that light exposure as soon as you wake up in the morning.
If you shift it too quickly, there is the danger that if you only give yourself say an hour of light therapy too early, it can be in the wrong sort of location and have the effect of delaying your body clock and working against what you want to accomplish.
I would do it a little bit more gently on systematic basis of shifting earlier by maybe no more than an hour each morning, but half an hour would be a little bit easier and more tolerable to people, I think.
How to use retimer light therapy glasses for better sleep
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It's bedtime, I'm not tired. What are the very specific actions our readers might take with the retimer light therapy device to improve their sleep schedule?
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As soon as they wake up on weekday mornings, they can stick these glasses on as soon as they wake up and start getting exposed to the light that we know will have an effect to shift their body clock earlier in time.
If they use this on a regular basis and also on the weekends, in the mornings as soon as possible after waking up, it will shift their body clock earlier and we have good research that shows that that indeed is what happens by using light therapy in the morning.
Now normally sunshine has that same effect but in our lives these days particularly during the winter time you don't have much opportunity to get exposed to sunlight at the right time of the day.
If you see these types of people outdoors too, What do they have on? They have on these sorts of dark glasses to shed/shield the light away from them.
That’s precisely what they shouldn't be doing. They should be getting exposed to as much light as possible, but they don't.
Using these light therapy glasses in the morning for at least a half an hour or more on the weekends if they have time available, can shift the body clock earlier and this shifts the sleep zone earlier, it shifts that alert zone which occurs from about 6pm to 9pm in most people, but occurs in these people from maybe 9pm to midnight.
It shifts that alert zone earlier, gets it out of the way of the time that they actually want to be able to go to bed and fall asleep easily.
How to use retimer glasses?
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How many days of therapy would we need to see through that strategy in order to shift or re-time the circadian rhythm?
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Probably about a week at least. It really depends on how conscientious people are about wearing them and how long they can wear them for.
10 minutes is better than nothing, but half an hour is better than 10 minutes. So a little bit more time exposed to bright light at that time in the morning and the intensity is chosen because we know that that's an effective intensity. It doesn't have to be screechingly bright.
( There are two settings for intensity on the device and) a brighter intensity will work a little bit better, it's sort of a plateau effect when you increase intensity up to the level that we have. It levels out a bit after that. So we've chosen an intensity which is not uncomfortable, but will be effective.
Light therapy for seasonal affective disorder or winter depression
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It has been very cloudy here for the past several days. I noticed that when I don't get that morning sunshine, I feel flatter. I feel more like staying inside. I don't feel like exercising as much.
Over the last four or five days when it is been quite rainy and cloud, I've been using the retimer glasses. Of course, I turned it on to the maximum setting, because that's how I like to do things and I've been using it for the full hour in the morning when I would normally get that bright sunlight in my eyes.
I will tell you, I have been really impressed with how it's felt to me like I have a bright sunny day, a level of energy, even without the sun being in the sky.
This has had me thinking about seasonal affective disorder (SAD). We read in your research that there's some mood stabilization mechanisms that are at play here.
I thought you might take the chance to comment on those given what I just shared.
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Seasonal Affective Disorder or winter depression is not uncommon and it's experienced when people go into the winter season and it's thought to be as a result of much less ambient light exposure during the day, particularly and less exposure to sunshine in the morning.
Light therapy in the mornings has been shown to be the most effective and better than, at least as good, not better than drug therapy.
It's a much more natural type of therapy that we normally would be exposed to, but often in our indoor environments and if it's bad weather outside and cold, then often we don't go outside to get that light exposure.
But that's been shown to improve mood and be an effective treatment for seasonal affective disorder. The light in the morning.
retimer improving sleep quantity and sleep schedule and thereby, your health
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We want to address some of the marketing claims made on Re-timer's website.
We have talked about how retimer can help users feel more energized and productive in terms of shifting that productive part of the day to the right part of the day. We also talked about improving mood in a couple different ways. One of them was with seasonal affective disorder.
There are some other claims I found very interesting in terms of lowering health risks that are connected to poor sleep. I imagine that's related to improving sleep, reduce the risk of diseases related to poor sleep. Is that correct or is there a bit more to that?
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I myself wouldn't push that line too strongly. There have been some epidemiological studies that have related a low amount of sleep, less than six hours of sleep on a regular basis, and disrupted sleep, and irregular sleep to health risks.
There's always research that it's difficult to draw causal connections between things. I wouldn't be too frightened by those results.
Nevertheless, people will certainly feel better if they get adequate sleep and they'll be more productive as well. Whether or not you avoid serious health risks by getting somewhat better sleep is still debatable, I think.
I like to reassure the people that have chronic insomnia that I see that they're not necessarily going to die of a heart attack if they're not getting the type of sleep that they would like to get or get Alzheimer's dementia if they're not getting adequate sleep.
This is a bit of a myth that exists in our society right now that's felt very strongly and the media tends to beat up a lot. That connection I wouldn't push to strongly at this point.
But nevertheless, getting more adequate sleep, which is what you do if you're able to place your sleep period in the proper location to get enough sleep, so re-timing the body clock to ensure that you're able to fall asleep when you need to get to sleep and get enough sleep in the end.
Also getting a more regular sleep pattern too. There is some good evidence that irregularity of sleep where you're changing your sleep onset time, your wake up times by two or three hours across the week is associated with more health risks almost than too little sleep. So irregularity of sleep pattern can be addressed by making sure that your body clock is adjusted to a pretty fixed time point.
The retimer light therapy glasses are of course will be useful in ensuring that. If you are conscientious about using the retimer when you wake up in the morning for say half an hour each morning, then your wake up times become more consistent and your body clock then is adjusted to get good sleep quality and quantity.
Sleep better with retimer, lose weight?
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Another related marketing claim - can retimer glasses help our readers lose weight?
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We don't know exactly the mechanism that relates the total sleep time with weight gain and a lot of the sort of health risks which go along with that, diabetes and cardiovascular disease and so forth.
But if retimer glasses can be used to get more total sleep and more regular sleep, then there will be less likelihood that people will put on weight and reduce those health risks.
Again, making sure that people get adequate sleep during the time that they need it when they have an opportunity to sleep.
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That takes us through most of the science questions we had today and as we bring it toward closing, we always like to hear from our guests about their own strategy for living their longest life.
We call this having a longevity strategy, and it might be a new term to you, but I'm sure that there are those 2-3 things you feel really help you stay healthy as you grow older.
Are you willing to share a few of those with our audience today? They don't necessarily have to be about sleep.
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They do involve sleep to some extent, but I think probably, and I think there's good evidence to support this now, keeping physically fit is probably the best longevity insurance that you can take out.
The recent evidence that I've seen is that it's not just maintaining physical activity like doing a daily walk of 20 minutes or something, that's better than nothing for certain but actually pushing yourself a little bit more like getting up your walking speed. If you're a jogger, make sure that your distance that you're jogging doesn't keep getting shorter and shorter and slower and slower but it's to push yourself a little bit and keep that aerobic fitness at a higher level to challenge your body physically.
There's now good evidence that probably is the single most effective longevity insurance that you can get.
And along with that, of course, is a good diet. But, we've had a lot of information about that, you know, keeping your sugar and fat levels, minimizing that, good balance with lots of vegetables in your meal, and not overeating and eating more than you need.
And then keeping your sleep pretty regular, having a regular time of going to bed and waking up, and that's helped, of course, by getting exposed to light in the mornings for the majority of the population who have this tendency for their body clock to slip a little bit later given the opportunity.
Not letting yourself sleep too long on the weekends. If you didn't get enough sleep on the weekend, then have a power nap in the early afternoon to make you feel a little bit more alert for the rest of the day on the weekends.
That’s the end of the interview, unless you want to see the
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