What They Didn’t Tell You: From Core to Floor

Sun Up Phone Down Hormone Health Starts with Light

• Millie Schweky

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In this follow-up to their hormone-nutrition series, Dr. Millie Schweky (pelvic-floor PT) and Dr. Yardena Bauer (endocrine dietitian, PhD) unpack how light exposure, circadian rhythm, and nightly screen habits can make or break hormone balance, energy, and fertility.

What You’ll Learn

  • Morning sunlight in 10 minutes: how red-light wavelengths boost serotonin, convert to melatonin at night, and support stable dopamine and mood.
  • Afternoon “second light hit” to cue the brain that evening is coming, key for easier wind-down and deeper sleep.
  • Why sunglasses at sunrise can act as an accidental hormone disruptor (hint: skip shades for the first 10 minutes outside).
  • Cortisol flip-flop: the classic pattern of low AM / high PM cortisol and how it drives fatigue, anxiety, and sugar cravings.
  • How poor, fragmented, or siren-interrupted sleep raises insulin resistance and ramps up carb cravings.
  • Blue-light blockers, phone curfews, and bedtime routines: practical ways to reclaim restorative sleep without giving up technology entirely.
  • A quick primer on red-light therapy and grounding, plus Millie’s personal experiment watching the sunrise at the beach.

Links:

Connect with Yardena: @Yardena Instagram
Follow Millie:  @milliedpt
Join the Core to Floor community:  https://millie-schweky.mykajabi.com/intimacy

[Dr. Millie Schweky]: [00:00:00] Hey sis, and welcome back to the What they didn't tell You from Court of Floor. I'm your girl, Dr. Milli, your favorite pelvic floor physical therapist, and I'm here with Dr. Dana Bauer, a PhD and highly qualified dietician with an impressive academic background and expertise in the fields of psychology, physiology, dietetics, nutrition, neuroscience, and endocrinology. Her is on hormone nutrition, including PCOS, fertility and endometriosis.

[Dr. Millie Schweky]: All. Dana, welcome back to the show. Today we're gonna talk about sunlight, sleep and circadian health. The first question someone has is about getting morning sunlight. That you're seeing a lot of media about getting sunlight in the morning.

[Dr. Millie Schweky]: Can you talk about that?

[Dr. Yardena Bauer]:: Uh, morning sunlight. Love it. Okay. And it's real. And it's true. Okay, so, and it works. Morning sun is, um, so what's on the sun? We're getting red light. Um, it is a natural source of red light. We want it, we wanna get about, uh, 10 minutes in the morning. You want it on your skin to get the vitamin [00:01:00] D with no sunscreen.

[Dr. Yardena Bauer]:: You can go put on the sunblock afterwards, but first 10 minutes in the morning getting sunscreen. Getting the sun into your skin. Then we also want the sun to go into our eyes. So what happens is the, the sun ray go into our eyes through the retina and it is the sun ray is con, makes serotonin in our, in our brains that is gonna keep us happy.

[Dr. Yardena Bauer]:: Happy. Yay, we happy. So we all wanna be happy. And then that serotonin gets, goes in the pathways, becomes two things. One, it becomes dopamine. Dopamines gonna keep us motivated, so we're gonna wanna actually achieve and get things done. And then also the, the sun rays become melatonin at night. Hmm. Uh, let serotonin go, keeps going through the day, and then during the night it becomes melatonin and helps us fall asleep.

[Dr. Yardena Bauer]:: So we become one with the sun. We become one with the sun. I love that. I

[Dr. Millie Schweky]: just

[Dr. Yardena Bauer]:: made that

[Dr. Millie Schweky]: up. Have you heard that

[Dr. Yardena Bauer]:: before? It's beautiful. You own it.

[Dr. Millie Schweky]: I love it. Ooh, I'm

[Dr. Yardena Bauer]:: calling it up one with the, so we wanna be, um, seeing the sun in the morning, the first. For 10 minutes within the first hour of waking up, we wanna have see the sun.

[Dr. Yardena Bauer]:: [00:02:00] Um, it is you, it's not okay to be inside your house and see the sun through. You gotta be out there window. You have to be outside. Go for a walk, take your kid to school. Exactly. Um, no sunglasses. You can't wear contacts or reading glasses, but no, but no sunglasses. You really need the sun going into your eyes.

[Dr. Yardena Bauer]:: Um, obviously don't look at the eye. Uh, look at the sun. I started telling

[Dr. Millie Schweky]: people that sunglasses are hormone disruptor. Oh, clever. They probably are actually. Yeah. But trying to only wear sunglasses in the afternoon. Well, interesting you talk about the afternoon because I mean, I, I know there's different benefits to the afternoon sun.

[Dr. Millie Schweky]: Like I, the sun has different benefits at different times of the day, but I, it's, you can't just, I don't know. It's very hard to never wear sunglasses. So I'm choosing to now wear them in the morning,

[Dr. Yardena Bauer]:: right? So the sun is, the sun is bright, so don't look at the sun 'cause it'll hurt your eyes. Um, and we don't need more pain.

[Dr. Yardena Bauer]:: But I would say in the late afternoon, you wanna go out outside again to get your circadian rhythm, realizing that, oh, this sun is. The sun is now setting it's time to get into, um, sleep [00:03:00] mode. Um, that's not gonna give you the serotonin, it's going to give you the circadian rhythm.

[Dr. Millie Schweky]: Wanna hear a weird story?

[Dr. Millie Schweky]: Oh my gosh. So speak. I sp I spoke to this rabbi, he actually called me and I was telling him, he was asking me questions and I was like, yeah, I'm like, been really tired lately. And he is like, okay, like tell me what time do you wake up every morning? And I was like, I wake up every morning at six 40. He's like, oh, that's the Gama of Shees.

[Dr. Millie Schweky]: So for anyone who doesn't understand, there's like a numerical equation. Long story short, the sun represents 640. Um, love that. And then he told me to get more energy. Something I could do is watch the sunrise and the sun Wow. On the beach if I can. Um, and it'll give me more energy, which scientifically does check out according to the circadian rhythm.

[Dr. Millie Schweky]: 'cause it, it lines you up exactly what you're saying about getting d sunlight at different parts. Of the day. I literally did it once. 'cause I live 15 minutes from the beach, which is pretty close. But like with kids, bedtime, whatever, couldn't do it. So I I was what? I felt more energized. I'm sorry. Amazing.

[Dr. Millie Schweky]: J it once, I don't know if it was placebo. [00:04:00] What? Placebo works. Anyway.

[Dr. Yardena Bauer]:: Well look, you did a clinical trial on yourself. Yeah. But look, on one day. On one day. I do wonder why he said the beach. I wonder if there's something about, oh, he said, because

[Dr. Millie Schweky]: there's four elements there. The wind, the sun, the earth, the water.

[Dr. Millie Schweky]: Yeah.

[Dr. Yardena Bauer]:: Well.

[Dr. Millie Schweky]: I mean, I love for healing.

[Dr. Yardena Bauer]:: Yes. Well, I love grounded theory, the idea of feeling ground. Yeah. And you're grounding. Yeah.

[Dr. Millie Schweky]: And you're grounding. I love that so much there. Um, okay. So getting sunlight in the morning and afternoon, I think, I think that's a key piece that people might be missing about getting it in the afternoon so that you could start winding down and your body understands the nighttime is coming in certain amount of hours and whatnot.

[Dr. Millie Schweky]: Wow. The body is so wise. It is. It is mindblowing how your eyes pick up receptors from the big ball of fire in the sky and then nose that you should be going to sleep in X amount of hours based off of what time it is according to the sun. Like, isn't that nuts? It's brilliant. But then what do we do? We try override

[Dr. Yardena Bauer]:: the signals.

[Dr. Yardena Bauer]:: So because we have

[Dr. Millie Schweky]: bright lights in our house, we're going on our screens. I bought the orange glasses. Oh, the blue blockers? Yeah.

[Dr. Yardena Bauer]:: Oh, [00:05:00] you're so cool. I mean, don't wear them out, but I mean, no, I wear them at night when I'm on my screen. Yes. Brilliant, brilliant. So, because what? Why? Because you wanna block out the blue light.

[Dr. Yardena Bauer]:: So every light has different wavelengths and we need to be getting the right light at the right time. But we go say, oh, I'm so tired now. Okay, let's turn on the lights and turn on Netflix, and I'm not tired anymore.

[Dr. Millie Schweky]: So from what time should we be using those glasses? Should we start from sunset or is Yeah.

[Dr. Millie Schweky]: Yeah. Sunset's, right? Mm-hmm. Sounds right. Well, because if, if the sun is setting, then, so in the winter you're like putting them on at 4:00 PM and in the summer you're putting 'em them on around 8:00 PM Yep. Kind of thing. Cool. Okay. Hopefully I'm doing it right. I'll, I'll put a link to some blue light glasses in the showroom to get them on Amazon.

[Dr. Yardena Bauer]:: What also has become, you know, a very, um, not what very trendy, but with good research behind is the red light.

[Dr. Millie Schweky]: Mm-hmm. We're gonna get to red light. Okay. We're gonna get to red light. Um, how does poor or irregular sleep affect hormone balance cravings, fertility. [00:06:00] Okay,

[Dr. Yardena Bauer]:: so if you are not getting good sleep, your hormones do not have time to reset and they will all be out of sync.

[Dr. Yardena Bauer]:: So if you, for, uh, just an example, if you don't get good, um, sleep, your cortisone, your cortisol will be high in the morning. Too high. No, lemme start over. Okay. Start over. Um. If you're not getting good sleep, your hormones cannot reset. So for an example, uh, we want cortisol to be high in the morning and low at night.

[Dr. Yardena Bauer]:: It is probably the first hormone that goes out of sync. And I see this a lot in women, is that they have low cortisol in the morning and high at night, high in the late afternoon around four. How do we see this? Because obviously we're not, you know, taking the blood tests 10 times a day Exactly is, um, hard to get out of bed.

[Dr. Yardena Bauer]:: Um, I'm just so tired, like I need more sleep. Mm-hmm. I like not being able to face the day. That means cortisol is, is very low in the morning. You need cortisols need cor that corti stress in the morning to get you outta bed, get you [00:07:00] motivated. Exactly. Cortisol. We want cortisol. It's got, it's got a lot of bad rep for good reasons, but we want cortisol to get us going and we, our cortisol then is high.

[Dr. Yardena Bauer]:: Later on in the day, what are we, we tired but wired? Mm-hmm. So we so tired. We craving sleep, but like we are stressed and we've got so much to do and we anxious and then we can't unwind and then it's difficult to fall asleep and then we get into a very, very bad cycle. Next thing that I see a lot of is with, um, not good sleep and remembering that there is a sleep architecture.

[Dr. Yardena Bauer]:: So we have five stages of sleep and we need all five. Even light sleep's very important. Um. But we need all stages of sleep. And what is important is that when we, if we don't get sleep, we're gonna be more insulin resistant. And that means our body, you crave sugar, we, because you're tired and sugar's gonna wake you up.

[Dr. Yardena Bauer]:: And then, but because we, so we crave sugar, but the sugar's not gonna go into the cell. Mm-hmm. Because it needs to get into the cell, into the mitochondria to make the energy. Wow. But because we're not sleeping, we are more insulin resistant, so it's not working. So we need. More carbs. We need more [00:08:00] sugar and we crave it.

[Dr. Yardena Bauer]:: And it's, it's out of our control that it's not about more self-control. If your, if your hormones are telling you to eat, you can't control that. You will need to eat. So we need to actually say, force ourselves to actually go to sleep and get good sleep. And how could this regular sleep affect affect fertility?

[Dr. Yardena Bauer]:: So, especially, especially with, um, PCOS or, um, if there's unexplained infertility, what I like to start with is just the sleep cycle, getting that in order because, um, because of insulin resistance. So if we're not getting good sleep, um, our insulin is, we're going, our insulin isn't working properly and the receptors aren't responding to properly.

[Dr. Yardena Bauer]:: I was gonna talk about estrogen and insulin resistance. It's too

[Dr. Millie Schweky]: much. Okay. Um, I just wanted to share, um. When I started working with Yardena, she had me put my phone in another room and it was really difficult for me. So what I actually did is I downloaded an app called Opal that you could set the parameters of the app.

[Dr. Millie Schweky]: It's only available on iPhone currently. [00:09:00] And, um, you tell them what apps you would like to block and at what times. So by 9:00 PM I cannot check my email. I cannot go on social media. Any apps that keep me scrolling, I cannot access, I, I personally set it to 9:00 PM You do you if you decide to download this app.

[Dr. Millie Schweky]: But it helped me tremendously. I also can't go on in the morning. Um, I can only go on during working hours and it's, it only lets me go on for like 15 minutes at a time. In general, you know, we are so addicted to our phones. Mm-hmm. You know, I'm, and it's really affecting our health.

[Dr. Yardena Bauer]:: It's, it's, and our

[Dr. Millie Schweky]: sleep.

[Dr. Yardena Bauer]:: So I used to be, when I was young, I used to read. Now I just wanna scroll and so I've made myself a strict regimen. So what I've done is I've become very strict with myself to put my phone away. Don't go into bed with your phone because as soon as your bed comes with you, you just wanna see the end of the home improvement.

[Dr. Yardena Bauer]:: You just wanna see her workout. We just wanna see whatever else is going on. It's rubbish. We don't, we don't really [00:10:00] care. It doesn't impact our lives at all. But that's how it, that is how it is programmed to keep us wanting more and more. Um, I mean, I think a minute video now is even too long. We just wanna like skip to the end.

[Dr. Yardena Bauer]:: So we doom scroll. I have to charge, charge my phone in the kitchen and then I take my book because I'm like, oh, what else am I gonna do when I get into bed? I'm so used to doom scrolling

[Dr. Millie Schweky]: goals. I think the number one way to get to bed earlier. Just leave your phone downstairs. And you know what? I was doing it for a long time until the Houthis came along.

[Dr. Millie Schweky]: Ah, it's the H'S fault. Yeah. I just, you know what? We need to have one phone in the room. I'm gonna leave it to my husband. Let him be the one to get the alerts, you know, because now, now there's that warning five minutes before, but if you asleep, you don't need the warning,

[Dr. Yardena Bauer]:: you'll hear the siren.

[Dr. Millie Schweky]: I know. But the five minute warning before,

[Dr. Yardena Bauer]:: right.

[Dr. Yardena Bauer]:: But you'll hear the siren and then you'll go.

[Dr. Millie Schweky]: Yeah, that's fine. That's true. That's true. That's true.

[Dr. Yardena Bauer]:: Isn't this a wild conversation we are having about the sirens and like, and, and the disruptive sleep? I mean, how difficult is it to carry on eating

[Dr. Millie Schweky]: whenever there's a siren in the middle of the night and the next day I'm like, oh my God, the whole [00:11:00] country is gonna be dysregulated today.

[Dr. Millie Schweky]: The whole crunchy is gonna be craving carbs. That I, that's actually what my brain does. Yes. Oh my God. That's hysterical. What the whole country is gonna be like. Whoever had the siren in their area is gonna be tired today. Grumpy today. Anxious today. Today. Like, not that I'm, you know, bringing that into the universe, but I am thinking scientifically, uh.

[Dr. Millie Schweky]: That is what we are all prone to when there is a siren disrupting our sleep. I mean, that's hysterical and it's so true and that's

[Dr. Yardena Bauer]:: probably why everyone here is in a bad mood.

[Dr. Millie Schweky]: So I think the, one of the steps towards world peace is getting to sleep, bring, bring it to the un. Yeah. All right guys. Thank you so much for tuning in.

[Dr. Millie Schweky]: Stay tuned for next time.