Brush your teeth in the dark to help sleep, says Oxford University neuroscientist

Bright bathroom lights can stimulate the body and prevent sleep, claims Russell Foster, professor of circadian neuroscience at Oxford University

The secret of a good night’s sleep could be as simple as brushing your teeth in the dark, an Oxford Neuroscientist has claimed.

Russell Foster, professor of circadian neuroscience, claims that the bright fluorescent light of bathrooms wakes the body up just when it should be switching off.

He believes that simply brushing teeth in the a dark room could allow sleep to take hold more quickly.

"We live in these dimly-lit caves, both at home and in our offices, which are far less bright than natural light, even on a cloudy day"

Prof Russell Forster, Oxford University

“Sleep is the single most important behaviour that we do. Across our lifespans 36 per cent of our life will be spent sleeping," he said following a lecture on sleep at The Royal Society in London.

“Often people will turn their lights down at night which helps to get the body ready for sleep, but then they will go and brush their teeth and turn their bathroom light on.

“That is very disrupting. I often think someone should invent a bathroom mirror light which has a different setting for night-time.”

Sleep is vitally important for clearing toxins, repairing tissues and replacing energy and restoring metabolic pathways. Lack of sleep is known to reduce cognition and creativity as well as suppressing the immune system and raising the risk of obesity, diabetes, cancer and mental illness.

But Prof Foster said that people often struggle to regulate natural sleep patterns in the winter because they spend so much time in ‘dimly-lit caves’ which confuse the body about the time of day.

Humans, like all other animals, have evolved over millions of years to respond to light levels with genes switching on and off depending on the time of day.

But the invention of the lightbulb has meant that bright light is available 24 hours a day which can confuse the body’s natural rhythm and cause genes to switch at the wrong time.

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