🤔🤔🤔 Researchers from the University of Colorado, Boulder monitored the sleep patterns of people living their regular lives at home, and those who spent a weekend camping without artificial light, and not only saw that they went to bed earlier, but follow up results also showed that their melatonin expression had shifted. Melatonin is the hormone that's released in response to darkness at night to make us feel sleepy, but the problem is that many of us are staring at our screens for longer than ever before, which means melatonin is getting released later than it should be, and our body clocks are getting out of whack. But the team showed that camping away from artificial light, even just for a weekend, could help fix the problem. The study compared nine people who went camping during the Northern Hemisphere summer with five people who stayed at home, and showed that the campers fell asleep up to 1.8 hours earlier than those who stayed home, and woke up earlier too. An even bigger difference was seen when the researchers sent five people camping for a week during the winter solstice - the extra time in the outdoors resulted in melatonin being released in their bodies 2.6 hours earlier than before the experiment. It shows similar results to the study the team conducted on eight adults back in 2013, which showed that a week of camping without electricity during the summer months could shift people's body clocks back around 2 hours, so people were naturally falling asleep around 10pm and waking up at 6am. Credit: @project.knowledge #ProjectKnowledge #outdoors #camping #freshair #health #vegan #vacation #new #good