I want to tell you about February.
Not last February. A few years ago now. I was in my late 30s, I’d been reading about circadian biology for a few months, and something in the research kept nagging at me and I kept coming back it.
The pattern kept showing up. Tired in the morning, alert in the evening, can’t wind down at night, and can’t get up in the morning. And everywhere it appeared in the literature, it was described not as a personality type but as what happens when the body clock is running out of alignment.
I’d called myself a night owl my whole life. My mother is a night owl, and so are my sister and brothers. I’d assumed it was just who I was — the same way I’d assumed the eczema on my hands was just my skin, and the IBS diagnosis was just my gut, and the afternoon slump was just how I was built. A collection of things I’d accepted and worked around.
I decided to try going outside at sunrise. Just that. It was February, which in Ireland means sunrise around half seven or eight. Late enough to be manageable without setting an alarm for five in the morning. I went outside for about twenty minutes every morning, as close to sunrise as I could manage. I didn’t change anything else.
What happened over the next few months is the reason I do the work I do now.
What changed — and in what order
The first thing I noticed was waking before my alarm.
That had never happened in my adult life. I had always needed an alarm. I had always hit snooze. Two weeks into the February sunrise routine, I woke up naturally about twenty minutes before it went off, feeling — not amazing, but genuinely okay. Not dragged, not resistant, and quite awake.
At the same time, I started feeling properly sleepy around 9pm. Not the flat, suppressed feeling of someone who’s pushed through exhaustion too long. Actual, natural sleepiness. The second wind - the reliable evening energy I’d built part of my identity around - just wasn’t arriving the way it used to.
I’ll be honest: I found this slightly disorienting. The second wind had been when I felt most like myself. Its absence felt like a loss, even though what I was gaining was clearly better.
Then my eczema cleared.
I’d had it on my hands since my teenage years. I’d tried various things - creams, elimination diets, trying to identify triggers. Nothing had shifted it significantly or for long. About three weeks into the sunrise routine, I looked at my hands one morning and the skin was just... clear. I hadn’t changed my diet. I hadn’t added a supplement. The only thing I’d changed was going outside at sunrise.
I stood in the kitchen staring at my hands for a long moment.
Then the gut things started to change. I’m mentioning this because it matters, even though it’s not the kind of detail that usually appears in nutrition content. I’d been constipated most of my life: chronically, low-grade, something I’d long since accepted as just part of how I functioned. Part of the IBS picture. Within about six weeks, my digestion had regulated itself almost completely. I started needing to go to the toilet right around sunrise, every morning, reliably. Which, as I later learned, is exactly what a well-functioning circadian digestive rhythm looks like. The gut has its own clock. Mine had just never been getting the signal it needed.
The energy changes came more gradually. The 4pm dip got less severe, then less frequent, then one day I was sitting at my desk in the middle of the afternoon, fully focused, and realised I hadn’t felt the usual drag. And then a few months in, I had a specific moment I still think about.
I was sitting somewhere, I can’t remember where, and something made me think about yawning. And I realised I couldn’t remember the last time I’d yawned during the day.
That’s a quiet thing to notice. Nobody else would have seen it. But it felt like proof; like my body had reorganised itself in a way that was real and measurable and had nothing to do with willpower.
What was actually going on
Your body has a master clock. It’s a tiny structure in the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, and its job is to coordinate the timing of almost everything: hormone release, digestion, immune activity, when you feel alert, when you feel sleepy.
The master clock runs on light. Specifically, the quality of light that exists outdoors in the morning. When that light hits your retina, it tells the clock: it’s morning, start the day’s biological programme.
One of the first things that programme does is trigger the cortisol awakening response. Cortisol, usually framed as the stress hormone, but also a vital alertness and energy hormone, spikes sharply in the first 30–45 minutes after waking. That spike is supposed to feel like waking up. After it, cortisol is supposed to gradually decline through the day, reaching a low by evening so that melatonin can rise and sleep can happen.
That’s the healthy cortisol curve. Peak in the morning, gradual decline, low by evening.
When the master clock isn’t receiving strong morning light signals — because you’re staying inside, looking at your phone the moment you wake up, never going outside before noon — the cortisol awakening response misfires. It’s flat in the morning when it should be high. That’s why the alarm feels offensive. That’s the reluctant, thick, dragged feeling that no amount of coffee quite fixes.
And here’s the crucial part. The cortisol that didn’t arrive in the morning doesn’t disappear. The body still produces it, just at the wrong time. In the afternoon and evening, when it should be declining, cortisol stays elevated or rises. That’s the second wind. The feeling of energy and alertness at 9pm is cortisol arriving six to eight hours late.
And because cortisol suppresses melatonin, you can’t sleep at a reasonable hour. Your body is still in a physiological morning. So you stay up until 1am, sleep through the alarm, and start the whole cycle again.
This is called an inverted or delayed cortisol curve. And it creates exactly the pattern that millions of people have attributed to being a night owl.
It also affects the gut, because digestion is a circadian process: the gut clock runs largely on the same light signals as the master clock. And it affects skin, because skin cell repair happens overnight in a circadian pattern, and inflammatory conditions like eczema are often worsened when those repair windows are compromised.
I didn’t know any of that when I started going out at sunrise. What happened told me more than I’d bargained for.
Why this tends to get worse in perimenopause
If you’re in your 40s and recognising this pattern, there’s a specific reason it might feel more pronounced now than it did ten years ago.
Oestrogen directly stabilises the master clock. When oestrogen levels are adequate and stable, the circadian system gets better support. When oestrogen starts to fluctuate and decline in perimenopause, the body clock becomes less robust.
The inverted cortisol curve that was manageable in your 30s — the second wind still useful, the mornings still survivable — can become significantly more pronounced as the hormonal buffer reduces. The same pattern, amplified. Which is why the morning exhaustion that was always there gets harder. Why the second wind starts to feel more frantic than productive. Why sleep gets worse in ways that go beyond hot flushes.
The women in their 40s who have been calling themselves night owls for twenty years often see the biggest shifts when they address the circadian layer, because they’re finally correcting something that’s been running out of alignment for a long time, in a system that now has less tolerance for misalignment.
It’s not too late. If anything, it’s exactly the right time.
What I haven’t told you
Everything I’ve described — the morning light correcting the cortisol curve, the gut clock responding, the skin repair window restoring — happened because multiple biological systems started receiving the same aligned signal at the same time.
But morning light is one pillar. On its own, it moves things significantly, as my February experiment showed. What it doesn’t do is address what’s happening with nutrition and meal timing, or the nervous system state that determines how well your body can actually use all of this, or the specific ways that perimenopause changes what the system needs.
This is where women get stuck — implementing one thing, feeling better, plateauing, not understanding why. It’s usually because the other pillars are still misaligned, pulling against the progress being made with the one.
If you want to see how all four pillars work together, the free masterclass at francesnorgate.com/masterclass is the place to start. It’s about an hour, it’s free, and it brings everything together in one place. The Quantum Nourishment Blueprint (coming soon) is where to go when you’re ready for the full sequenced protocol. Waitlist at francesnorgate.com/waitlist.
Where to start
Outside. Within an hour of waking. Twenty minutes minimum. Every day.
Not through a window, because glass filters the specific wavelengths the master clock needs. Actual outdoors. Even on a grey February morning in northern climates. Especially then.
And in the evening: dim the lights after 8pm. Your cortisol curve needs the morning signal to start right, and it needs the evening darkness to complete the cycle. If you’re getting morning light but bathing yourself in bright screens until midnight, you’re working against yourself.
If you’ve been a self-described night owl your whole life, I want to offer you a different possibility. You might not be a night owl. You might have an inverted cortisol curve. One of those can be fixed. The other cannot.
Frances
