What health advice did you follow for years before realizing it was working against your biology? Drop it below 👇🏻 Someone here needs to hear they’re not crazy.

I wanted to clarify something about red light, in regards to what I learned recently from Dr Jack Kruse. So I wanted to write this up to share but also some new perspectives. Is Red Light Therapy Safe to Use? Here's What Actually Matters This is one of the most common questions in our community. People see a red light panel and immediately wonder if it's doing something harmful. Is it disrupting hormones. Is it messing with sleep. Is it safe to use every day. Short answer: yes, it's safe. Long answer: the real question isn't "is red light safe," it's "when and why are you using it." Summer Rule: Get Outside First Right now it's summer. The sun is up early, setting late, and full-spectrum sunlight is sitting right outside your door for free. If you have access to real sunlight, that always wins over a panel. Sunlight isn't just red and near-infrared. It carries the full spectrum your mitochondria evolved to use, along with UV that drives vitamin D production, nitric oxide release, and skin health in ways no panel replicates. Red light panels exist to fill the gap when the sun isn't available. In winter, at high latitudes, or if you're stuck inside all day, that's when a panel earns its keep. In summer, your first move should be outside, barefoot if you can, skin exposed, before you reach for a device. Why Red Light at Night Doesn't Blunt Melatonin Here's the part that confuses most people. They think any bright light at night is a melatonin killer. That's true for white light, blue light, and most LED lighting. It is not true for red light. Melatonin suppression isn't about how bright a light is. It's about wavelength. Your eyes have a specific receptor, melanopsin, sitting in the retinal ganglion cells. Melanopsin is tuned almost exclusively to blue-green wavelengths, in the 460 to 490 nanometer range. That's the signal your brain reads as "it's daytime, hold off on melatonin." Red and near-infrared light sit way outside that range, typically 630 to 850 nanometers. Melanopsin barely responds to it. So even if a red light panel is pumping out a high lux reading, one of those old-school light meters, your brain's melatonin machinery doesn't register it as daytime. You can use red light in the evening, even at what looks like high intensity, and your circadian signaling stays intact.

Here is the reason your progesterone is low and it has absolutely nothing to do with progesterone. It starts with leptin. And most practitioners aren't talking about this. When you never see the morning sun, or you're eating late at night, get too much blue light, workout too late, your brain stops receiving leptin's signal. And when leptin goes quiet, your hypothalamus interprets that as famine. But before it even gets to your sex hormones your mitochondria shift. They exit hormone production mode and activate what's called the Cell Danger Response. Steroid hormone synthesis — cortisol, progesterone, estrogen gets quietly deprioritized. Then your adrenals compensate. Cortisol spikes to stabilize blood sugar. And cortisol doesn't just compete with progesterone, it actively blocks progesterone receptors. Here's where it gets interesting. Leptin is what drives TRH, which drives TSH, which drives your thyroid output. It's what maintains the pulsatility of GnRH = the signal that tells your brain to produce LH and FSH. Without adequate leptin signaling, that entire axis starts to flatten. So by the time we're talking about low progesterone, we are already eight steps downstream of the actual problem. Every system is responding accurately to one broken upstream signal. Any questions, share below.