Circadian Rhythm Lighting

What Is Circadian Rhythm Lighting and Lighting Controls?

The circadian rhythm is your body’s internal clock. It quietly ticks away, guiding your sleep-wake cycle every day. This rhythm, lasting about 24 hours, is deeply connected to the natural light-dark cycle. Yet, many of us overlook how much this clock affects our overall well-being.

As the sun rises, its soft, warm light tells your body to wake up. By midday, the sun’s bright blue light keeps you alert, suppressing melatonin, the hormone that makes you sleepy. As evening falls, this light fades, allowing melatonin to rise, signalling it’s time to rest.

When this rhythm is disrupted—whether from late-night screen time or erratic sleep—it impacts more than just your rest. You might notice mood swings, low energy, or even health issues.

But understanding this natural clock can be life-changing. By listening to your body’s rhythm, you can improve your sleep, boost your mood, and feel more energised. This simple yet powerful rhythm can help you live better, healthier, and more in tune with yourself.

This means that the use of artificial (electric) lights can interfere with our sleep pattern.

You may have seen when purchasing white light bulbs, that you have the option of cool white vs warm white. Cool white bulbs emit a high amount of blue light. Because blue light is the dominant type of light during the day, if you use cool white bulbs in the evening, it can confuse your brain into thinking it’s ‘day time’.

Warm white bulbs emit less blue light than cool white and if you spend your whole day under warm white lights, you may find that your energy is low and your mood, attention and productivity suffer.

Therefore, to try and replicate the natural sunrise to sunset cycle indoors, we should use warm white light (low amount of blue light) during the morning and evening and cool white light (high amount of blue light) during the day.

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What Circadian Rhythm Lighting Options Are Available?

Smart Lighting With A Hub

Until recently, unless you wanted to manually change your lightbulbs throughout the day to replicate the natural light cycle, you’d need a smart home system to control your lighting.

A smart home set up requires a smart speaker with a smart assistant, like Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant and some smart light bulbs. Smart lighting can then be preset to change the type of light that your smart bulbs emit throughout the day.

Some points to consider if you already have a smart home system, or are planning to invest in one include:

Compatibility – Are the smart bulbs compatible with your smart home system/smart home hub?
Connectivity – Most smart home automation systems require either Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Z-Wave or ZigBee to operate. Make sure you invest in a system that will have a good connection throughout your home so that it operates properly. You’ll also need to take into consideration whether you want to be able control your smart home appliances when you’re away from home (i.e. Bluetooth has a maximum range of 100m so you won’t be able to control Bluetooth devices from too far away)
Does the bulb do what you want it to? Not all smart white light bulbs have ‘circadian rhythm lighting’ functionality – some bulbs will only emit one type of white light but are dimmable, others are full colour change rainbow bulbs

Circadian Rhythm Lighting Smart Bulbs – Hub Controlled

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Smart Lighting Without A Smart Assistant

More recently, smart home appliances have been designed that aren’t dependent on a smart home assistant/hub system. These are ideal for if you want to introduce smart lighting into your home without needing to invest in a full smart home setup.

However, it’s worth bearing in mind that if you do want to develop the smart features in your home without a smart home hub system, you might end up with a lot of different systems that need managing individually.

Generally, smart lighting systems that don’t require a smart home assistant/hub are app controlled. Other options are the switch controlled bulbs which cycle through different types of light using a normal light switch and the smart kit from IKEA which uses a remote control.