Invest in some new curtains for the bedrooms...

I just stumbled on the following theory "making the room very dark at night may help us feel better" after reading a newsletter Alex from rawguru.com sent out.

I looked it up and apparently we make more melatonin when the room is more dark, pitch black is best. We know that good sleep is important for health and this may help with that.

Here is a nice overview of melatonin

Darkness Produces Melatonin

"It's not so much that light is bad for us as that darkness is good for us. Thus, not getting enough darkness can be harmful to our health. That's odd, isn't it? Our ancestors would surely not have understood this paradox, but we are beginning to understand it, thanks to medical research that has shed new, uh, light on the subject of darkness.

..we can, and should, consider darkness to be our friend, physiologically speaking. The reason is that darkness—or, to put it the other way, the absence of light—stimulates the production of a hormone,melatonin, from its immediate precursor, the neurotransmitter serotonin. Like serotonin, melatonin plays important roles in our physical and mental well-being. ...During daylight hours, melatonin production is minimal, and blood levels of this hormone remain low. When night falls, however, and the ambient light level plummets, the absence of light induces biochemical changes that cause melatonin production to increase dramatically, about 2 hours later. That's when we begin to feel sleepy, the signal that it's time to go to bed. Melatonin levels peak during the night and then decline to their previously low levels by morning—time to wake up.

Instead, We Turn on the Lights

In an ideal world, we would go with the flow of nature's circadian rhythms, obeying the melatonin signal by going to bed and getting a good night's sleep (which for most people means 7 to 9 hours, depending on individual needs). Alas, however, our modern world is far from ideal in this regard. When night falls, we turn on the lights, thereby suppressing the melatonin signal and interfering with the circadian rhythms that millions of years of evolution have programmed us for. Instead of getting ready for bed, we keep on working or playing, doing chores, pursuing hobbies, watching TV, etc. For some of us, actually, our day is just beginning, as we prepare to go to our night-shift jobs, where we'll be exposed to bright light all night long.

Our poor biological clocks get thrown out of whack by all this. In a very real sense, we are fooling Mother Nature, and, as everyone knows, that's not nice. It's also unhealthy. The most obvious casualty is adequate and restful sleep. With our busy, fast-paced lifestyles, and with deficient levels of melatonin in our systems during the night, we sleep poorly and not enough. The result is a population that is chronically and dangerously sleep-deprived, with consequent fatigue, irritability, depression, impaired reflexes, and susceptibility to accidents, just to name a few. Night-shift work exacerbates most of these problems and is seen as a serious threat to the workers' health. Poor or inadequate sleep can even lead to premature death.¹*

*For more on melatonin and sleep, see Melatonin Is Good … for … Zzzz (July 2002), Better Sleep May Mean Longer Life (June 2003), Melatonin Can Reset Your Biological Clock (March 2005), and Had Any Good Sleep Lately? (June 2005).