Also, sunscreen has substantial anti-aging benefits of its own so it’s a good idea anyways.
The human body uses the amount of UV light it gets to decide how much of the sex hormones to produce.
I notice substantial positive effects from my habit of getting 20 to 30 minutes of strong sun on my bare arms and legs and eyes every other day. The main positive effect is to make me more optimistic and maybe willing to expend effort and endure suffering in pursuit of my goals. (Naturally I avoid getting more UV than I need to keep my sex-hormone levels high.)
People on this site tend to be too dismissive of seemingly-mild interventions like sunlight. “If the goal is to raise the levels of the sex hormones, why not inject the hormones directly?” they might say. Well, I injected testosterone for a couple of years (decades before I started the habit I just described), and I prefer the effects of the sunlight habit I just described to the effects of injected testosterone. The injected testosterone got me into at least one physical altercation and made me expend much too much time and mental energy in the focused intellectual pursuit I was interested in at the time (programming-language design) and had other negative effects (on general metabolism) that are hard to describe.
Most interventions available to us into the functioning of the central nervous system are too strong in my experience, and injected testosterone’s effect on me was too strong. I have a simple model of the brain or at least that part of the brain that controls physiology and mood as consisting of dozens of interlocking feedback loops, and things like injected testosterone alter the equilibrium of too many of the loops too strongly.
Maybe a person wearing sunscreen or high-SPF clothing that covers their arms and legs can get enough UV light to keep sex-hormone levels high through the eyes (as long as they’re not wearing sunglasses) but if so, it would require spending at least 2 or 3 times more time in the sun, which makes it less convenient to maintain a habit of UV exposure to keep sex hormones high.
Since the comment I am replying to is being upvoted, I will put a little more effort into explaining. “Getting 20 to 30 minutes of strong sun on my bare arms and legs and eyes every other day” is from neuroscientist Andrew Huberman. This effect of UVB light on the sex hormones seems to have been recently discovered; more information here.
That’s an interesting paper! Although it seems a bit confounded—“Because eyes of mice and of human volunteers were not covered, we cannot exclude the possibility that solar/UV radiation to the eye affected the observed sexual behavior.” Which would be interesting if true, suggesting that just being outside and getting UV light in the eyes would be the thing to do. I guess you note this at the end of your first comment.
What do you think about the potential skin aging effects of UV vs the potential health benefits?
The human body uses the amount of UV light it gets to decide how much of the sex hormones to produce.
I notice substantial positive effects from my habit of getting 20 to 30 minutes of strong sun on my bare arms and legs and eyes every other day. The main positive effect is to make me more optimistic and maybe willing to expend effort and endure suffering in pursuit of my goals. (Naturally I avoid getting more UV than I need to keep my sex-hormone levels high.)
People on this site tend to be too dismissive of seemingly-mild interventions like sunlight. “If the goal is to raise the levels of the sex hormones, why not inject the hormones directly?” they might say. Well, I injected testosterone for a couple of years (decades before I started the habit I just described), and I prefer the effects of the sunlight habit I just described to the effects of injected testosterone. The injected testosterone got me into at least one physical altercation and made me expend much too much time and mental energy in the focused intellectual pursuit I was interested in at the time (programming-language design) and had other negative effects (on general metabolism) that are hard to describe.
Most interventions available to us into the functioning of the central nervous system are too strong in my experience, and injected testosterone’s effect on me was too strong. I have a simple model of the brain or at least that part of the brain that controls physiology and mood as consisting of dozens of interlocking feedback loops, and things like injected testosterone alter the equilibrium of too many of the loops too strongly.
Maybe a person wearing sunscreen or high-SPF clothing that covers their arms and legs can get enough UV light to keep sex-hormone levels high through the eyes (as long as they’re not wearing sunglasses) but if so, it would require spending at least 2 or 3 times more time in the sun, which makes it less convenient to maintain a habit of UV exposure to keep sex hormones high.
Note that this is a reply to myself.
Since the comment I am replying to is being upvoted, I will put a little more effort into explaining. “Getting 20 to 30 minutes of strong sun on my bare arms and legs and eyes every other day” is from neuroscientist Andrew Huberman. This effect of UVB light on the sex hormones seems to have been recently discovered; more information here.
That’s an interesting paper! Although it seems a bit confounded—“Because eyes of mice and of human volunteers were not covered, we cannot exclude the possibility that solar/UV radiation to the eye affected the observed sexual behavior.” Which would be interesting if true, suggesting that just being outside and getting UV light in the eyes would be the thing to do. I guess you note this at the end of your first comment.
What do you think about the potential skin aging effects of UV vs the potential health benefits?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1015958423001392 suggests that bright light might be causing the effect, not UV.