Welcome to The Rise. Your weekly dose of circadian sunshine and decentralised health wisdoms designed to empower you to be healthier, stronger, smarter and truly unstoppable.

In the last 12 months, the 7,000+ people in this tribe have been reading something the other 99% of health newsletters won’t cover — the science your GP hasn’t read. Here’s what’s in this week’s issue and why it matters:

• Your body clock’s early warning for dementia
• Why two-thirds of Alzheimer’s patients are women
• Finland replaced rubber playgrounds with forest soil. Find out what happened to the kids in 28 days
• The word every physician knew in 1930, but we somehow forgot 50 years later
• And more…

Have suggestions or something you’d love to see covered here? Help me better serve this vibrant community of health rebels and send me your feedback here.

Much love and sunshine, ☀️

Sandy xx

Issue #122 • 31 May, 2026

🌅 Rise Report

Your Circadian Rhythm Could Be an Early Warning for Dementia

Quick question: when does your energy naturally peak during the day? Are you full of beans in the morning? Or do you hit your peak mid-afternoon? Turns out, the answer might be a clue for something bigger than you think.

New research published in Neurology found that people with weaker, more fragmented circadian rhythms had nearly 2.5 times the risk of developing dementia. So, what’s this got to do with timing?

Well, people whose daily energy peaked after 2:15pm had a 45% higher dementia risk than those who peaked earlier. Researchers believe a later peak signals a quiet, chronic mismatch between your body clock and the environmental light cues it depends on.

Circadian disruption appears to interfere with the brain’s waste-removal process and the clearance of the sticky proteins linked to Alzheimer’s. We covered this in Issue #99, and yes, it’s all connected, beautiful friends.

The takeaway? Protect your circadian rhythm like the asset it is. Morning light within 30 minutes of waking, consistent sleep and wake times, and keeping your most active hours anchored to earlier in the day aren’t just good habits, they’re insurance for your brain.

Two-Thirds of Alzheimer’s Patients Are Women – Here’s A Clue Why

Did you know that two-thirds of all Alzheimer’s disease patients are women? The medical world has known that number for years, but what they didn’t fully understand is why. This new study offers a clue.

New research from Northwestern University Medicine found that when oestrogen drops after menopause, it doesn’t just affect your bones and mood. It affects the brain’s memory architecture itself. Specifically, the loss of oestrogen, including oestrogen produced inside the brain, not just by the ovaries, causes the support structure around your brain’s memory cells to degrade. Think of it as the mortar between bricks slowly crumbling. Memory and learning depend on that scaffolding being intact.

So if you’re navigating perimenopause or post-menopause and experiencing brain fog or memory blips, this is not just ageing and it’s not just in your head…(well, it technically is, but you know what I mean.) The question worth asking is what am I doing to protect my oestrogen levels, and therefore my brain?

The takeaway? Oestrogen isn’t just a reproductive hormone, it’s a critical brain protector. Strength training, quality sleep, stress management, and minimising endocrine disruptors all support healthy oestrogen levels. Start there. And if you’d like more on this topic, let me know here and I’ll get started.

What Happened When They Replaced the Playground Rubber with Forest Dirt

Here’s a little study to make you smile – or at least, give you permission to get dirty.

Finnish researchers swapped out the synthetic rubber mats and gravel at urban daycare centres and replaced them with actual forest floor, soil, moss, leaf litter, plants. Then they watched what happened to the children.

In just 28 days, kids in the rewilded yards showed increased T-regulatory cells, the immune markers that protect against autoimmune disease and inflammation, along with a dramatic increase in beneficial microbes on their skin and in their gut. Their gut microbiome started resembling that of children who played in a real forest every single day.

Twenty-eight days. That’s all it took, and some dirt, plants and probably the occasional worm or two. Eek!

And if those signs are visible in children after less than a month, it’s not a stretch, it’s biology, to think the same inputs work for adults too. When was the last time you played in dirt? And when did we decide that soil was something to be cleaned off rather than sought out?

The decentralised wisdom? You don’t need a forest. A patch of real soil, a barefoot walk on grass, or hands in the garden will all work too. We need to let the kiddies get dirty, frequently and while we’re at it, we need to get friendly with more dirt too.

🤓 Smarty Pants

Heliotherapy

Most people have never heard this word. But a century ago, every serious physician in Europe knew it, and some of the world’s most respected hospitals were literally built around it.

Heliotherapy (from the Greek helios  = sun) is the deliberate, therapeutic use of sunlight to treat disease. Not a vitamin D supplement. Not a sun lamp from Kmart. Actual, prescribed, dosed sunlight, applied to a patient the way a doctor would apply any other treatment, with intention, timing, and clinical oversight.

And the man who put it on the medical map was a Danish physician named Niels Ryberg Finsen.

In the 1890s, Finsen was chronically ill himself. He had Niemann–Pick disease which left him exhausted, anaemic, in pain. He noticed his symptoms improved in direct sunlight so he did what scientists do: he started asking why. He discovered that specific ultraviolet wavelengths could destroy bacteria and heal severe skin infections that no drug of the era could touch. In 1896 he opened the world’s first phototherapy clinic in Copenhagen.

In 1903, Finsen won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work. The Nobel committee called it one of the most important medical breakthroughs of the century.

What followed was extraordinary. Hospitals across Europe and North America were redesigned, specifically, architecturally redesigned, to deliver heliotherapy at scale. Buildings were oriented to face the sun. Wards were built with wide south-facing balconies so patients could be wheeled outside into full sunlight. Flat rooftops became treatment decks. Open-air sanatoria in Switzerland, France, and the UK filled with patients sent there not for rest, but for light. Schools for children with rickets were constructed with maximum sun exposure built into the plans.

In 1928, The Times of London published a 48-page special supplement entirely devoted to heliotherapy. Forty-eight pages. Written by physicians, scientists, and public health officers. Taken seriously at the highest levels of medicine. Here is just a very small snippet.

Then penicillin arrived. Antibiotics were considered faster and easier to administer, and heliotherapy, quietly faded from the curriculum. And this was the beginning of the great shift. From nature as medicine, to the pharmacy as medicine. One was free, available to every human on earth, and had been healing bodies for millennia. The other was a commercial juggernaut built on patents, profits, and power.

And here’s where it led us: what was once deliberately prescribed, sought after, built around, is now widely feared, hidden from, and avoided. We didn’t lose heliotherapy because it stopped working. We lost it because it couldn’t be sold.

But here’s what didn’t fade: the biology. Your skin still converts sunlight into vitamin D, nitric oxide, serotonin, endorphins, and anti-inflammatory compounds. Your immune system still responds to UV exposure exactly the way it did in Finsen’s patients. The sun hasn’t changed and the benefits haven’t changed. We did.

Mainstream narratives shifted and people believed them. Doctors stopped prescribing sunlight, and somewhere along the way, we handed over one of the most powerful healing tools we’ve ever had, for free, every single day, and replaced it with sunscreen and supplements. It’s time to take our power back my friend.

Go outside, and let the light find you and heal you – it’s waiting for you.

P.S. If you’d like help developing a healthy relationship with the sun, and building a gorgeous, healthy tan safely while you’re at it, my Solar Callus Blueprint is waiting for you inside the Circadian Health Vault. ☀️

☀️ Sandy’s Sunshine 

🔢 Number Crunch

30 minutes: that’s how much extra REM sleep humans naturally get in winter compared to summer. So, you’re not being lazy in winter – you’re just listening to your biological rhythms and the sun.

“A hundred struggle and drown in the breakers. One discovers the new world. Rather, ten times, die in the surf, heralding the way to a new world, than stand idly on the shore.” — Florence Nightingale