Your Sleep is Broken and Your Body Hurts 🥲

Let's talk about what's really happening when you can't fall asleep at night.

Your brain is supposed to produce melatonin when it gets dark. That's the signal that tells your body "hey, time to shut down for the night." But between your phone screen, your laptop, your TV, and every LED light in your house, your brain is getting mixed messages. Blue light from screens crushes melatonin production, and your circadian rhythm has no idea what time it is anymore.

Research comparing red and blue light exposure found something fascinating: after two hours, blue light kept melatonin suppressed at roughly 70% below normal levels. Red light? People's melatonin bounced back to nearly normal. Their brains could actually recover while the lights were still on.

The same red light wavelengths that help reset your sleep also happen to reduce inflammation and manage pain. The recovery center's red light therapy bed isn't just multitasking—it's solving two of the most common problems people deal with but rarely connect.

When Your Internal Clock Needs a Hard Reset

We're losing daylight fast—sun's not up until after 7am now, and it's setting before 7pm. Your circadian rhythm, which evolved over millions of years to sync with actual daylight, is now trying to function in an environment where "daylight" means fluorescent office lighting and "evening" means four hours of screen time before bed.

Studies show that red light therapy can reset disrupted circadian rhythms and improve sleep initiation for people with insomnia. Not by knocking you out with chemicals, but by giving your brain the signal it's been missing: light that doesn't suppress melatonin production.

Your body recognizes red light as the kind that exists at sunset—the natural cue that it's time to start winding down. Which is exactly what you need when you've spent the last three hours watching Survivor and Great British Baking Show or scrolling TikTok—screens that have been screaming "STAY AWAKE" directly into your eyeballs.

If your sleep schedule is wrecked from shift work, travel, or just existing in the modern world, red light therapy can help reprogram your internal clock. No grogginess, no next-day fog, just a circadian rhythm that actually functions.

How to Actually Reset Your Sleep Schedule

The timing matters here if you're trying to fix your circadian rhythm. But if you just want pain relief or inflammation reduction? Use the bed whenever—red light won't mess with your sleep the way your phone does. Studies actually found that red light increases daytime alertness without disrupting nighttime sleep.

For those specifically working on sleep issues:

If you're struggling to fall asleep: Use the red light therapy bed in the evening (6-9pm). This mimics sunset and signals your brain that it's time to wind down without suppressing melatonin like your phone does.

If you can't wake up in the morning: Hit the bed first thing in the morning (within an hour of waking). Combined with bright light exposure during the day, this helps anchor your circadian rhythm to an earlier schedule.

For shift workers or jet lag: Use it at the time you want your body to think it's evening. If you need to sleep at 2pm because you work nights, a session around noon can help signal the transition.

Just here for pain relief? Anytime works. Mid-day sessions can actually help with that post-lunch energy crash.

Consistency beats intensity. 15 minutes a few times a week works better than one random session when you remember the recovery center exists.

Why Your Pain Sticks Around

Here's what makes red light therapy different from every other pain management option: it actually addresses inflammation at the cellular level instead of just masking symptoms.

Research from MD Anderson Cancer Center shows red light therapy works by stimulating your cells' mitochondria—the actual energy factories that keep everything running. Better mitochondrial function means reduced inflammation and increased blood flow to damaged tissue. They're using it for cancer treatment pain. That should tell you something about effectiveness.

Our red light therapy bed uses two different wavelength ranges:

• Red light: Tackles surface-level inflammation—sore muscles, joint pain, anything that hurts close to the skin

• Near-infrared: Penetrates deeper for chronic pain, tendon issues, and the kind of injuries that don't heal as fast as they used to

You're getting both at the same time. No choosing between surface relief and deep tissue healing.

What This Means If You're Tired and Sore

Whether you're dealing with:

• Sleep that's getting worse as the days get shorter

• Chronic pain from old injuries that never quite went away

• Post-workout inflammation that's taking longer to calm down than it should

• A circadian rhythm destroyed by night shifts or too much international travel

• General inflammation from training too hard or being over 30

Red light therapy addresses all of it through the same mechanism: better cellular function, reduced inflammation, and a circadian system that remembers how to work.

No pills. No side effects. Just 15 minutes of lying down while specific wavelengths of light do what your body would do naturally if we still lived in an environment with actual sunrise and sunset instead of Instagram at midnight.

The Recovery Center Makes Sense Now

The hydromassage bed feels great. The compression boots are phenomenal for circulation. The PEMF mat does things to your recovery that border on unfair.

But the red light therapy bed is the only piece of equipment that can simultaneously fix your sleep, reduce your pain, and reset a circadian rhythm that's been broken since smartphones became mandatory.

If you're currently spending money on sleep aids, pain relievers, or mama's little secret from the dispensary, you might want to do the math on 15 minutes of actual cellular repair versus another bottle of something that may or may not work.

Your body wants to heal itself and sleep properly. It just needs the right signals. Red light therapy provides those signals without the prescription or the hangover.

Give us a holler at the front desk, you'll be glad you did. 

You deserve to feel good,

Your West Coast Fitness Family