After your brain and your heart (and your ovaries if you’re a woman), your eyes contain the highest concentration of mitochondria in your body. This makes your eyes extremely sensitive to anything that might mess with your mitochondrial energy production. And some light frequencies do exactly that.
Now you might be thinking, Why would my eyes need so many mitochondria? They’re so small! The answer is simple: it’s about energy supply and demand. Your visual systems require up to 15 percent of your total energy budget.1 Your body spends a huge amount of energy on visual processing. When you have an unstable energy supply to the mitochondria in your eyes, or just poor mitochondrial performance in general, you can suffer from brain fog and headaches and even lose your ability to perceive subtle shades of gray. In fact, changes to your perception of shades of gray (it turns out there are more than fifty of them) can be used to diagnose whether or not you have been exposed to mitochondrial toxins.
At any given moment, your eyes take in volumes of information about the world around you, and your brain requires a lot of energy to process and make sense of it all. When your eyes have to function in unnatural spectrums of light, it stresses your mitochondria, slows down your energy production, increases free radical production, and can damage mitochondria. As a result, your brain has more difficulty processing the light information your eyes take in. This can really hurt your mental performance. Mitochondria also communicate with each other,2 so any stress to your eye mitochondria can adversely affect the mitochondria in your brain, your heart, and everywhere else.
In the last thirty years, we started to completely avoid ultraviolet A (UVA) and ultraviolet B (UVB) light for the first time in history. Both of these frequencies come from the sun and have biological impacts. We now block these frequencies from our eyes through ever-present UV-filtering windows, windshields, and sunglasses, and we filter them from our skin when we use sunscreen. And that affects your whole body, because your eyes aren’t the only organs that take in light. Your largest organ—your skin—also absorbs light into its cells and mitochondria. Your grandparents didn’t have UV-filtering glass, didn’t wear sunglasses much as kids, and didn’t wear sunscreen, and they had less skin cancer and better mitochondria than we do now.
when UVB light hits your skin, it converts vitamin D into its activated, sulfated form. Thus it’s not enough to just pop a vitamin D3 supplement. You have to activate the vitamin, and that requires exposure to real sunlight (or a high-quality UVB lamp).
Your mitochondria have to produce a lot of extra energy to process the blue light in LEDs, which burns oxygen and creates free radicals in the cells of your eyes. And when the mitochondria in your eyes are stressed, the rest of your mitochondria can get stressed, too, including the ones in your brain.
it turned out that adding some orange, rose, and gray colors from the visual light spectrum made my brain work better. After I started wearing my own custom pair of cool orange glasses, it felt like my brain turned back on for the first time in years. I was immediately more focused and able to perform better than I ever imagined I could—even in the most distracting environments.
Many people think they’re getting enough sleep because they go to bed at eleven and wake up at seven. That’s eight hours, right? So why aren’t you full of energy? Because it’s the quality of your sleep that really matters, more than the quantity. Exposure to artificial light after dark slows your melatonin production even more, which prevents you from getting quality sleep and causes you to gain weight.10 Lack of sleep and weight gain both contribute to mitochondrial inefficiency. And without sufficient energy, your brain suffers. To put it simply, junk light equals junk sleep.
• Certain foods, products in our environment, types of light, and even forms of exercise can weaken your brain.
• All useless stimuli—potential threats, ringing phones, flashing lights, and so on—use energy in your brain.
• Forgetfulness, cravings, low energy, moodiness, and inability to focus are all symptoms of low brain energy.
• Stop blaming yourself for running out of willpower—it’s not a moral failing!
• Reduce the amount of stimuli in your environment when you want to focus—turn off the phone, limit alerts from your computer, cover the windows.
• Make the most important decisions first every day, before you can experience decision fatigue.
Autophagy happens in response to mild stress from exercise or calorie restriction. Cellular stress also activates mitochondrial biogenesis, the creation of new mitochondria. That’s right—you are not forever stuck with your old, lame, dysfunctional mitochondria. By strategically and temporarily stressing your body, you can boost its natural detoxification systems and stimulate the creation of new mitochondria to maximize your energy. Even better, there is a hack for calorie restriction so that you can reap the benefits without ever feeling hungry.
Thanks to the brain’s ability to grow and change, little by little my brain filled in those gaps and the potholes were smoothed out. Now I don’t get abnormally tired in noisy environments because my brain isn’t struggling to process certain frequencies and sucking up energy that I’d rather use to do something meaningful. This is not really a mitochondrial hack—it’s just a way of using less energy than you normally would so you can use that extra energy to kick more ass. But it deserves your attention if you care about your brain function as much as I do, and you’ll grow neurons faster during the training if you use the other techniques in this book.
At your audiologist’s office, AIT will cost you about $500, but there are cheaper versions that you can try at home. The Tomatis Method uses specifically designed sound tracks that are like weight lifting for your ears—and your brain. They go very quickly from high to low frequencies, forcing your ears to listen and your brain to work hard to process a great deal of information efficiently. There are also apps you can download that use a similar method of training.