The pain wasn't there.
I mean—it was. My shoulders still burned. My hips still felt like someone had replaced the joints with beach gravel. But I was standing barefoot on the deck at 11:43 PM in mid-October, and I'd lost track of the number. For forty-seven minutes, I hadn't been running the background process: Is it a 6? Still a 6? Creeping toward 7?
My nervous system is a smoke detector that screams every time I make toast. Out there, under photons that had traveled for years just to hit my retinas at that exact moment, something clicked off. Not the pain. The monitoring.
Ken had dragged me outside after finding a Japanese study about "night sky exposure" at 2 AM.1 He does this—surfaces research like a retriever with a duck. I usually resist. But the fog had cleared in a way it rarely does on the Oregon coast, and Orion looked close enough to touch the belt buckle.
We stayed out there for an hour. Kona pressed against my legs, warm and steady. Samba watched from the living room window with the expression of someone observing humans doing human things—mildly concerned, mostly unimpressed.
When we came back inside, my pain was a 4.
"When we came back inside, my pain was a 4."
I know how this sounds. I know what you're thinking: She looked at stars and her fibromyalgia improved? Sure, Toni.
I thought the same thing. So Ken went deeper into the research, and I kept going outside, and three months later, we're both staring at a pattern neither of us expected. Star bathing—the intentional practice of immersing yourself in the night sky—might be doing something measurable to the same nervous system that won't stop yelling at me.
Here's what we found.
The Thing Nobody Told Me About Darkness
First, let me address what star bathing is NOT: It's not astronomy. I still can't tell you which constellation is which beyond Orion and the Big Dipper. It's not astrology. No Mercury retrograde explanations here. It's not meditation, though it feels meditative.
Star bathing is what happens when you lie down (or stand, or sit in a camping chair with a heating pad, no judgment) and let the night sky be the only thing you're doing.2
No phone. No identifying constellations. No agenda. Just you and several trillion photons that have been traveling since before you were born, finally arriving at your eyeballs on a random weeknight in February.
Same philosophy: shut up and let nature do something weird to your nervous system.
And it turns out darkness itself is part of the medicine.
Here's the thing nobody tells you when you're diagnosed with fibromyalgia: your circadian rhythm is probably scrambled. In healthy people, melatonin—the hormone that regulates sleep, pain perception, and about fifteen other things—peaks at night and drops during the day. In people with fibromyalgia, that rhythm gets flipped. We produce more melatonin during daylight hours and less when we actually need it.3
Translation: My body's 24-hour clock doesn't know what day it is, and this isn't just a sleep problem—it's a pain amplification problem. Disrupted melatonin rhythms correlate with higher pain scores, worse sleep quality, and more tender points.4
True darkness—the kind you can only get outside, away from streetlights and screens—helps reset that rhythm. It tells your brain, "Hey, it's actually nighttime. You can stop being on high alert now."
When Toni first mentioned the pain drop after that October night, I was skeptical. One data point isn't a pattern. But then I found the 2025 study from Japan that measured oxygenated hemoglobin in people's prefrontal cortexes while they looked at images of dark versus bright night skies.1
Dark sky images—the kind you'd see in low light pollution areas—significantly reduced activity in the right prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain associated with stress and overthinking. The brighter the night sky (more light pollution), the less healing effect. And here's the kicker: participants reported significantly higher "healing ratings" for dark skies versus bright ones.
The darkness itself is therapeutic. It's not just about stars—it's about the absence of artificial light recalibrating something fundamental.
Awe Is an Anti-Inflammatory
The second thing star bathing does—and this is where it gets strange—is trigger awe.
Awe is what you feel when your brain encounters something so vast it temporarily shuts down the part of you that's constantly monitoring your pain, your to-do list, and whether you remembered to take your thyroid medication at exactly 7 AM. (Samba's thyroid medication. Mine goes down whenever I remember.)
When researchers at UC Berkeley measured inflammation markers in people's saliva after they reported feeling various positive emotions, awe was the only emotion that consistently predicted lower levels of interleukin-6 (IL-6)—a cytokine that drives chronic inflammation.5
Let me translate that: The emotion you feel when you stare at the Milky Way and think, "Oh. I am so small. My problems are so small. The universe is absurdly, incomprehensibly large, and somehow I get to be here witnessing it"—that emotion reduces the same inflammatory markers that make fibromyalgia worse.
"Awe was the only emotion that consistently predicted lower levels of inflammatory cytokines."
Awe lowers cortisol. It increases vagal tone (the activity of the vagus nerve, which calms your fight-or-flight response). It reduces sympathetic nervous system activation, which in fibromyalgia is chronically hyperactive.6 It even boosts oxytocin, the hormone that makes you feel connected to other humans instead of wanting to bite them when they ask how you're feeling.6
In one 22-day study during the COVID-19 pandemic, people who reported more daily experiences of awe had lower stress levels, fewer physical pain symptoms, and better overall well-being.7 The effect held even when researchers controlled for other positive emotions. Awe was doing something specific.
Here's the part that makes my coder brain light up: The mechanism isn't just psychological. It's neurophysiological. Awe changes your body at the cellular level.
What It Looks Like to Actually Do This
I'm not going to tell you to buy a telescope. I don't have one. I'm going to tell you what I actually do, which is walk outside in my slippers and a blanket that smells like Kona because she's been sleeping on it.
First, I let my eyes adjust. This takes about twenty minutes. Modern life has made us impatient about darkness. We want to see everything immediately, fully lit, high contrast. But your retinas need time to switch from cone cells (daytime, color vision) to rod cells (nighttime, motion and dim light). If you go outside and immediately decide "there's nothing to see," you left before your eyes even started working.
Your eyes can't see anything yet. That's normal.
Ken brings a red flashlight if we need light. Red wavelengths don't mess with your night vision the way white or blue light does. Also, it makes him look like he's on a submarine mission, which I find unreasonably charming.
Then we just lie there. Some nights on the deck. Some nights on the grass near the bay when it's not too wet. Kona usually comes with us now. She doesn't care about stars, but she cares that we're outside, and she's very invested in making sure we're okay. Samba supervises from a window. Occasionally she'll come out for a patrol, then return inside to her more dignified evening routine.
I don't try to identify constellations. I don't try to meditate. I just look up and let my brain do whatever it wants with the information "sky, vast, full of ancient light." Most nights, after ten or fifteen minutes, something in my chest unclenches. The pain doesn't disappear, but the attention I'm paying to it shifts. It's like my nervous system realizes it has something better to monitor than my joints.
Some nights nothing happens. I lie there, my hips hurt, I come back inside, and the experiment feels pointless. But even on those nights, my sleep is better. And the next morning, I wake up at a 5 instead of a 7.
As CEO of Sweetieport Bay, I must report that the humans have developed a new behavior: lying motionless outside for extended periods while staring upward.
Initial assessment: concerning.
I have conducted several supervisory patrols to ensure they have not malfunctioned. They appear alert. They are not hunting. They are not eating. They are simply… existing. The one called Toni claims to feel "better" afterward. The one called Ken has attempted to explain this using words like "autonomic regulation" and "vagal tone." I remain unconvinced.
However, I have noted that on nights they perform this ritual, Toni's pain vocalizations decrease by approximately 40%. Her movement patterns the following morning are 23% more fluid. These are acceptable outcomes.
The canine employee participates by lying near them with unnecessary concern. I supervise from my climate-controlled observation post. We have reached an understanding about division of labor.
Recommendation: Permit the humans to continue their strange sky-staring protocol. Monitor for sustained improvements. Increase fish portions accordingly.
The Light Pollution Problem
Here's where living on the Oregon coast becomes an unfair advantage: Alsea Bay is dark. Not perfectly dark—we're not in the middle of the Sahara—but dark enough that I can see the Milky Way most clear nights.
If you live in or near a city, you're probably not seeing stars. You're seeing light pollution, and according to a 2024 study that developed something called the "Night Sky Connectedness Index," that matters for your mental health.8
Researchers surveyed over 400 people and found a direct correlation: the stronger someone's connection to the night sky, the higher their scores on measures of happiness, resilience, and mental well-being. And—here's the part that hurt to read—people living in areas with higher light pollution reported significantly lower night sky connectedness, which meant lower well-being scores.
"We've built a world that makes it almost impossible to see the thing that our ancestors saw every single night for 300,000 years."
And then we wonder why everyone's nervous system is screaming.
If you're in a city, this doesn't mean star bathing is off the table. It means you might need to drive twenty minutes to find darker skies, or make peace with a diluted version of the experience. Even looking at the moon counts. Even seeing three stars instead of three thousand seems to do something, according to the research on awe and inflammation.
But if you can, find darkness. Real darkness. The kind where you can't see your hand in front of your face for the first five minutes. That's where the reset happens.
I need to add something about circadian rhythm disruption that most fibromyalgia patients don't know: Blue light from screens (460-495 nm wavelength) is particularly destructive to melatonin production, especially in the three hours before bed.9
When Toni started star bathing, we also started dimming lights earlier and using blue-light filters on screens after 7 PM. I can't separate the variables perfectly—is it the stars or the reduced blue light exposure? Probably both. But the combination of true darkness outside and reduced artificial light inside seems to be helping her body remember what "nighttime" means.
One study on fibromyalgia patients found that morning bright light therapy (which should theoretically help reset circadian rhythms) showed improvement, but so did the control group receiving dim light—as long as sleep timing was stabilized.10 The researchers concluded that light exposure mattered, but consistency mattered more. Toni going outside at roughly the same time most nights might be creating the rhythm her body couldn't find on its own.
What Three Months of This Looks Like
I started tracking this in November. Not rigorously—I'm not running a clinical trial in my backyard—but enough to notice patterns.
Nights I go outside for at least 20 minutes (even if it's cloudy, even if I can only see two stars): I sleep better. My morning pain baseline drops by 1-2 points. I don't wake up feeling like my body spent the night fighting a war.
Nights I skip it because I'm tired or it's raining or I just can't: The pain creeps back up. Not immediately, but I can see the trend over three or four days. My sleep gets thinner. I wake up at 3 AM with my brain doing that thing where it reviews every conversation I've had in the past six years.
The effect is cumulative. One night of star bathing helps a little. A week of it helps noticeably. Three months in, my average pain baseline has dropped from a 7 to a 5.5. That's massive. That's the difference between "I can't think about anything but pain" and "I can write code for two hours before I need to stop."
Not a cure. A pattern. Downward, with bad nights folded in.
I'm not saying this cured my fibromyalgia. I'm saying it gave me back part of my life.
The Part Where I Tell You to Just Try It
You don't need special equipment. You don't need to live on the Oregon coast (though I recommend it for unrelated reasons involving tide pools and absurdly good coffee). You don't need to know anything about astronomy.
You need:
- Twenty minutes
- A place where you can see sky (darker is better, but even a somewhat dark place counts)
- Warm clothes if it's cold (fibromyalgia + cold = bad plan)
- A willingness to feel slightly ridiculous the first time
Lie down if you can. Sit if lying down hurts too much. Let your eyes adjust for at least ten minutes before deciding there's "nothing to see." Look up. Let your brain be small and the universe be large.
If it works, you'll know. Not because the pain disappears, but because something in your nervous system exhales.
If it doesn't work, you spent twenty minutes outside under the sky. Worst case scenario: you saw some stars and came back inside. No harm done.
I think it works because my body remembers something older than fibromyalgia, older than cities and electric lights and the idea that we should be able to see everything all the time. I think it remembers when darkness meant rest, and stars meant we weren't alone in the incomprehensible bigness of existence.
Either way, I'm going outside tonight.
Kona will come with me. Samba will supervise from the window. Ken will bring the red flashlight and accidentally drop it in the grass, and I'll feel the pain in my hands and shoulders and hips settle into something quieter, something tolerable, something I can live with.
That's what star bathing is.