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Good sleep When our biological clock is properly aligned with time we are fit during the day, our mood is upbeat and rest well during sleep. The biological clock is a mechanism in our brain that, among other things, regulates our sleep-wake cycle, our most well-known bodily rhythm. It makes us feel tired at the moment we need to sleep and feel rested and energised when we wake up. This clock is synchronised by the patterns of light and darkness that our daylight detector receives. To keep our biological clock in tune with the 24-hour day, we need daylight or electric light that mimics daylight. Bright light during the day and dim light in the evening and night. If you want to bring good light in your life, watch also the other steps to a healthier and happier life here: Try | Home | Good Light Group | Foundation Light supports us in everything we do. Good light means the right light at the right time. It has a great positive impact on our experience of energy, sleep, happiness and health.

An update to our infographic has been released with the three steps to good light for a healthier and happier life. It also explains the steps for a healthy lifestyle, with the important 20-20-2 rule. The infographic also shows how exposure to natural light or light that mimics natural light can improve our mood, sleep and energy. Download the infographic here. If you want to TRY good light, look at the suggestions on our website here.

We have summarized our accomplishments in 2022 and outlined our plans for 2023 and beyond. We still want to grow a lot especially in the marketing/communications area. With many projects realised we still see many opportunities to inform more people about the benefits of good light and how they can live healthier and happier. Please contact us if you have suggestions or want to cooperate. Read more about our review of 2022 or our operational plan for 2023.

Adjusting the biological clock The daylight detector uses light to adjust our biological clock with the time of day. In the morning the intense daylight activates us. In the evening, when the sun goes down it prepares our body for a good night’s sleep. The daylight detector are cells in the retina of our eyes. These cells detect the intensity, colour and duration of light and send signals to our brain that adjust our biological clock according to the time of day. The clock adjusts our body rhythms, including metabolism, energy, sleep and mood. So if you cannot sleep, it could be due to a disrupted biological clock. If you want to bring good light in your life, watch also the other steps to a healthier and happier life here: Try | Home | Good Light Group | Foundation Light supports us in everything we do. Good light means the right light at the right time. It has a great positive impact on our experience of energy, sleep, happiness and health.

Brighten your day and download our new flyer. Discover the three steps to good light. Increase your exposure to daylight and make sure that you are in good light indoors throughout the day. This will improve your overall health and well-being. If you know Good Light Group, you know that we are passionate about helping and informing people to live more in light that helps synchronizing our biological clock. That is why we’ve put together this easy-to-use flyer to help you live in good light, even when you’re indoors. The flyer contains some practical information about the Good Light Group and, if you want to improve your mood, sleep, health and energy levels, three easy to follow steps to good light. Download the flyer here and enjoy the many benefits of good light.

A blog written by Marina Giménez (University of Groningen) Research has consistently shown that exposure to natural sunlight is crucial for human health and well-being. Sunlight contains both visible and non-visible light; one component of non-visible light is near-infrared (NIR). Therapeutic exposure to doses of NIR light, known as photobiomodulation (PBM), has been shown to be effective for a wide range of conditions. Chrono@Work has conducted a scientific research project for Seaborough. The study was set up to assess the effects of PBM on health and well-being, in a double-blind randomised, placebo-controlled manner. A total of 56 participants with ages ranging from 25 to 64 years with mild sleep complaints participated in the study. Three doses of PBM were tested against no PBM. The study found positive effects on well-being and health, notably improvement in mood, reduction in drowsiness, reduction in some aspects of inflammation, and reduction in resting heart rate for the highest PBM dose tested. These benefits were significant in winter, when it is more difficult to get sufficient sunlight in the Netherlands. The study found no significant effects on sleep or circadian rhythms (the paper can be found here). A follow-up study is currently being prepared to better understand the mechanisms of the systemic positive effects. The study was conducted in people's homes or workplaces, as available technology makes it possible to construct PBM devices that can be easily integrated into people's daily lives. With more people spending their time indoors, this technology facilitates a new way to help improve overall health and well-being with light. The results of this study may open up new ways to create optimal environments for a healthier society by preventing certain negative effects caused by lack of sunlight exposure. If you are looking for a way to improve your well-being and health, consider incorporating photobiomodulation (PBM) into your daily routine, especially on those dark winter days. While, the present effective PBM dose could be achieved after about 12 minutes of sunlight in a summer day, this would only be achieved after 7 hours on a cloudy winter day. Considering that in winter people wear protective clothes with very little skin exposed to sunlight, and that sunny winter days are exceptional occasions in Northern Europe, our PBM dose would rarely ever be reached in the winter months. Remember that it is important to use a PBM setup that provides you with the right dose of NIR light. Although there are no products with Seaborough's technology on the market yet, feel free to contact Dr Anne Berends for more information on technology details or partnerships. We are currently running a follow up study and we are looking for participants. If you would like to receive more information please send us an email to: lichtstudie@chronoatwork.com or visit our website: www.chronoatwork.com

Our participant ILDC (intelligent lighting design & consultation) is launching a crowdfunding Indiegogo campaign for their new product. They have developed a lamp (simply circadian) that changes with the right intensity and light colour according to the 24-hour cycle, they closely replicated the spectral content of daylight through the day, and after sunset the lamp provides a light spectrum optimised for evening and preparing for sleep. Watch their explaining video: They developed the simply circadian lamp because, like air, food and water, the quality of the light we live in is a key determinant of our holistic well-being, productivity, and user experience. Studies show that Human behavioural, biological, psychological, and visual systems are all turned to the 24-hour cycle. Also known as the circadian rhythm; and a balanced circadian rhythm is essential for a balanced life. Most people spend more than 90% of their lives indoors, shielded from daylight and those important benefits. Still most electric light does not meet the intrinsic needs of the people who use it and causes adverse effects with repetitive and/or prolonged exposure. But many people can’t go outside for a few hours every day because they have office jobs, work nightshifts or… you name it. So, lucky for them, these daylight mimicking lamps are on the rise.

A blog by Bruno Smets. Lack of sleep has a substantial impact on people’s health and well-being, as well as on their cognitive performance and work-place productivity. Based on a preliminary literature review, we conclude that the improvement of workplace productivity by exposure to good light might amount up to 410 billion $ per year for five major OECD countries. No reliable data are yet available to estimate the long-term economic impact of good light on health and well-being. DC Studios on Freepik We as the Good Light Group advocate the beneficial effect of the right light at the right time for people’s health and well-being. In this blog a first attempt to quantify the socio-economic impact of good light is made. In 2016 the RAND institute published an extensive study on the impact of sleep deprivation on the economy. This study is seen as a key reference in most sleep publications. For adult people insufficient sleep duration impairs health and well-being, resulting in an increased mortality risk. People sleeping less than six hours a night have a 13% higher mortality risk than people sleeping seven to nine hours, as recommended by the health authorities. People sleeping between six and seven hours still have a 7% higher mortality risk than the reference group. The authors however were not able to translate this substantial health effect into economic data. Lack of sleep also decreases the cognitive performance and work place productivity of adults. For five major OECD countries, i.e.: the US, Canada, the UK, Germany and Japan the RAND team managed to quantify the effect of a lack of sleep on workplace productivity, caused by absenteeism as well as presenteeism. The direct economic cost has been estimated to amount to 680 billion dollars per year. Half of this cost has been attributed to people sleeping less than six hours a night, the other half to people sleeping between six and seven hours a night. Sleeping less than six hours decreases productivity by 2.4 %, while sleeping between six to seven hours still has a negative impact on the work place productivity, amounting to 1.4%. Sleep deprivation will largely vary from one country to another, but is substantial in all cases. In the RAND recommendations to change this for the better, light has nowhere been mentioned. Nevertheless, at that moment in time some smaller studies already indicated that light has a substantial positive impact on sleep duration. Boubekri et al. in 2014 showed that people working in windowless offices on average sleep around one hour less per night than people working in an office with daylight exposure. Combining these results with the ones in the RAND report, would indicate that the economic impact of sleep deprivation on work place productivity might be more than halved, by exposing employees to sufficient light during daytime. The cohort sleeping normally between six and seven hours would get the recommended amount of sleep, i.e.: between seven and nine hours, bringing their productivity to the level of the reference group and almost completely eliminating the economic loss related to it. A substantial improvement of the work place productivity might be anticipated for the cohort sleeping normally less than six hours, because most of them will sleep longer as well. Based on the available data it is however not feasible to quantify this improvement exactly. In the following table it is assumed that half of the cohort sleeping less than six hours will get 6 to 7 hours of sleep after exposure to Good Light and its productivity consequently will improve. The other half on the contrary would not show sufficient improvement in sleep duration to affect their productivity. Based on the improvement of productivity shown, exposing people to the right light at the right time, might save society up to 410 billion $ in direct costs per annum for the five OECD countries studied. Over the last years our insights in the role of light on health and well-being has drastically increased, culminating in the recommendations for the exposure to light during daytime, in the evening and at night by a group of specialists in the field. On the basis of these recent insights, academia must be able to design more extensive studies, enabling us to quantify the effect of good light on workplace productivity more accurately. The socio-economic impact of good light is not solely confined to the direct cost of work place productivity, but also includes its long-term effect on health and well-being. Till now, no reliable data could be surfaced to quantify the additional benefits of good light on long-term health and well-being.

Daylight detector Our body has a daylight detector: Light-sensitive cells in our eyes called spheres. These connect to the part of the brain called the biological clock that regulates our body’s daily rhythms. The discoverers of how the biological clock works were awarded the Nobel Prize. The 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young for their discoveries of the mechanisms that regulate our circadian rhythm. Our circadian rhythm is regulated by our internal biological clock that anticipates day/night cycles of the earth, this optimises our body rhythms and behaviour. That we and other organisms adjust our body rhythms and behaviour according to the time of day has long been known! But that we also have a circadian clock that regulates this internally in our bodies was not discovered until well into the 20th century. If you want to bring good light in your life, watch also the other steps to a healthier and happier life here: Try | Home | Good Light Group | Foundation Light supports us in everything we do. Good light means the right light at the right time. It has a great positive impact on our experience of energy, sleep, happiness and health.

AYO is the world’s first circadian health wearable that focuses on circadian rhythm and combines chronobiology research and light therapy. The National Sleep Foundation (NSF) named AYO, the winner of the 2022 SleepTech Award in the Sleep Health & Wellness category. NSF’s SleepTech Award recognizes the year’s most innovative efforts in advancing sleep technology and is a feature of NSF’s ongoing work to encourage and celebrate efforts by which sleep science and insight are rapidly incorporated into accessible health products and services. “It is truly gratifying to receive the NSF award and the recognition of our efforts in advancing consumer sleep and health technology. Our mission is to bring better sleep and a healthier lifestyle to millions of people around the world. Good Light is an integral part of AYO's solution and is essential if we want to live healthier, happier, and more active lives." said Branislav Nikolic, CEO, and Founder, of Novalogy Inc. company behind AYO. More info

Good light keeps our body in balance. We evolved for tens of thousands of years living outside under the rhythms of the natural light. Our body rhythms, including alertness, mood and sleepiness respond to the day-night rhythm of our planet. This is all regulated by our biological clock. With the help of light our biological clock keeps our body in balance with the time of the day. Our sleep improves, we feel more rested and feel better. Fact Good light keeps our bodies in balance with the times and improves our energy levels. If you want to bring good light in your life, watch also the other steps to a healthier and happier life here: Try | Home | Good Light Group | Foundation Light supports us in everything we do. Good light means the right light at the right time. It has a great positive impact on our experience of energy, sleep, happiness and health.

We would like to congratulate Luxlight on winning such a great award and are very proud that one of our participants with such a good product was one of the fast-growing companies. The FD Gazellen Awards are presented to the fastest-growing companies in the Netherlands. These are companies that showed high sales growth from 2019 to 2021. Which is extra special because these are also the years when companies had to deal with everything around Covid. Luxlight's success lies in large skylights, energy efficiency, lighting control and comfortable living. They aim to provide all homes in the Netherlands and Belgium with more daylight, raise awareness of the importance of daylight and create beautiful living spaces. More about Luxlight and the award they won!