Apparently you can study 13 people and get it blogged about on the ny times. Talk about ridiculous sample size, 13 person studies can say just about anything if the researcher gets lucky because variance is the biggest factor. Interesting random thought -> the number of PhD's who become professors in some fields is well below the margin of error on a study, it would be interesting to see how many people are getting Professorships from having interesting results that eventually fail to replicate. If this number is overwhelming it could be the PhD system in those fields is almost a lottery where having variance trump data is the most likely way to get a professorship.
While we might be able to draw stronger conclusions from a larger study, the effects on the participants were strong, and the information might benefit the readers directly. So I'd argue it's worthy of inclusion in the wellness blogs area even if it's not really hard science reporting.
If you don't want orange glasses, try f.lux (Windows, Mac) or redshift (Linux).
Either one accomplishes much the same effect by adjusting the (apparent) color temperature of your screen depending on time of day. It distorts colors, if you fancy yourself a photographer, but your eyes will thank you.
They don't. They might reduce eyestrain (I have it installed on all my computers, fwiw), but they aren't effective enough on their own to help with sleep.
In psychology grad school, I learned that a single blue photon hitting the back of the is sufficient to cause a measurable shift in melatonin output. Note: measurable is not the same as deleterious, but flux doesn't even eliminate all the blue light your computer is putting out, let alone the other sources in your house.
The only solution, baring blacking out all your windows, or removing all modern light sources from your house, or replacing them all with red lights, is 0.3-0.5 mg of melatonin a few hours before bed. Note: it's sold in the stores in 5 mg tablets - an order of magnitude too much.
Author of f.lux here: you may want to do some more reading.
Most of the range of "alerting" light for humans is between 11-14 log photons/sec/cm^2, so one photon is sort of an enormously huge understatement.
For sleeping, it is good to be in a dark room, but for winding down, you won't mess yourself up with dim light.
Also, I think it may be poor advice for most people to take melatonin except for "shifting the clock" e.g., jetlag. Seeing extra light in the morning is enough to entrain the clock for most people.
> but for winding down, you won't mess yourself up with dim light.
I have absolutely no scientific evidence in favor of its effect on sleep... but on a whim I picked up a yellow CFL bulb (originally advertised as not attracting bugs to your porch) and it makes a pretty nice lamp for reading in bed. If I go to another room of the house and turn on the light, I'm often surprised by how blue everything seems by comparison.
To add here: One photon is not going to do anything and you can reason that out from 1st principles.
What is the 'noise' of your retina? How often do the nerves attached to your cones (the blue sensitive ones) just fire spontaneously? It's not 0 even when you are asleep. Just from some basic reasoning you can work out there is a noise floor that your body (each likely unique) learns to ignore. From what /u/herf here says, it's a log scale of input (similar to most detector systems).
From UpToDate: " Nocturnal melatonin concentrations can also be affected by drugs that interfere with the transmission of neurotransmitter signals to pineal cells (like propranolol, a beta-blocking agent) or those that inhibit melatonin's metabolism (like 8-methoxypsoralen), and by a few drugs that lack clear links to melatonin's synthesis or metabolism (eg, caffeine, ethanol).
Nocturnal melatonin secretion is also suppressed by a relatively dim 100 to 200 lux when pupils are dilated. The most potent wavelength for suppressing melatonin secretion appears to be 446 to 477 nm, which differs from the peak absorbances of the photopigments for vision.
Prolonged use of portable light-emitting devices (laptops, tablets, smartphones) before bedtime can have a negative impact on melatonin secretion, circadian rhythms, and sleep. One study compared the effects of reading an electronic book illuminated by a light-emitting device (LE-ebook) versus a printed book (by reflected light) for four hours prior to bedtime for five consecutive nights. Subjects in the LE-ebook group had suppressed melatonin concentrations in the early part of the night, a delayed endogenous circadian melatonin phase, felt less sleepy before bed, took longer to fall asleep, and reported feeling sleepier the following morning. These observations suggest that evening use of light-emitting devices may contribute to phase-delays in the circadian clock and difficulty initiating sleep."
Prehaps /u/herf could tell us about the study that looked at ebooks and if they used f.lux or not as a control.
UpToDate's cited sources are:
Mayeda A, Mannon S, Hofstetter J, et al. Effects of indirect light and propranolol on melatonin levels in normal human subjects. Psychiatry Res 1998; 81:9.
Garde E, Micic S, Knudsen K, et al. 8-methoxypsoralen increases daytime plasma melatonin levels in humans through inhibition of metabolism. Photochem Photobiol 1994; 60:475.
Wright KP Jr, Badia P, Myers BL, et al. Caffeine and light effects on nighttime melatonin and temperature levels in sleep-deprived humans. Brain Res 1997; 747:78.
Röjdmark S, Wikner J, Adner N, et al. Inhibition of melatonin secretion by ethanol in man. Metabolism 1993; 42:1047.
Ekman AC, Leppäluoto J, Huttunen P, et al. Ethanol inhibits melatonin secretion in healthy volunteers in a dose-dependent randomized double blind cross-over study. J Clin Endocrinol Metab 1993; 77:780.
Brainard GC, Rollag MD, Hanifin JP. Photic regulation of melatonin in humans: ocular and neural signal transduction. J Biol Rhythms 1997; 12:537.
Aoki H, Yamada N, Ozeki Y, et al. Minimum light intensity required to suppress nocturnal melatonin concentration in human saliva. Neurosci Lett 1998; 252:91.
Brainard GC, Hanifin JP, Greeson JM, et al. Action spectrum for melatonin regulation in humans: evidence for a novel circadian photoreceptor. J Neurosci 2001; 21:6405.
Chang AM, Aeschbach D, Duffy JF, Czeisler CA. Evening use of light-emitting eReaders negatively affects sleep, circadian timing, and next-morning alertness. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 2015; 112:1232.
Chang's eBooks study was done in 2010, after f.lux shipped but before we figured out who to talk to about it.
If you want to see fluence-response curves for single-wavelength lights, this is a really neat reference:
http://www.cet.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Gooley-2010-Sc... - this one makes the case for some cone interactions when people are sensitized to darkness.
>Note: measurable is not the same as deleterious, but flux doesn't even eliminate all the blue light your computer is putting out, let alone the other sources in your house.
I think the effect is different for everyone. I personally have extremely vivid (and not necessarily pleasant) dreams when I take a 3mg pill. 1mg or less works great, though.
As with any medication, side effects vary. When I took melatonin, I would very quickly fall asleep but would still wake up extremely tired. I also experienced very severe depression when on melatonin, that started about 2 days after use, and ended about a day after stopping use.
I do know people that have had it work very well for them, however.
I found that the higher doses lead to me falling asleep fine but I tend to wake up in the middle of the night. I assumed the pill was getting my melatonin to high and when it went back to natural levels it triggered my waking up.
I've been using 1mg lately (the lowest I can find) and they work much better. Still help make me drowsy, but without waking up in the middle of the night.
I've found that 0.3 mg will have me waking up very briefly in the night, but that my sleep is still refreshing. I assumed that this might have something to do with the 'dual sleep' that humans are ostensibly supposed to have had, before electricity came along.
I recommend experimenting with amounts (I break my pills up) and finding the amount that works for you.
It seems the only real study/evidence for the dual sleep idea is from one source and a separate study of 8 people. Sleep experts seem to suggest that now is is impractical and unlikely you will be able to adapt, because of how prolific electric light is.
Since it's a non-linear metabolic process, and relies on a specific level of increase over time, when it increases too fast (because you took too much), won't necessarily help you get to sleep. It will also give you a 'sleep hang over' in the morning.
You also have to take it an hour or so >before< bed.
I take 5mg every weeknight as a insomnia treatment. I start getting sleepy about 45-60 minutes after taking it. If I fall asleep then, I'll sleep the entire night.
I used flux for a few years and it helps. For me, the glasses were more effective. Maybe because I live with my partner and a light would be flipped on at some point.
I'm not sure if it's in Android 5.1 or just a feature of CyanogenMod (12.1) but there's a feature in there to also change the color at night, and I find it less aggressive than f.lux, which I like.
I've used these tools, they simply don't filter enough blue coming from the display, dispite such tools that try to limit the light genereated, compared to tinted glasses
> It distorts colors, if you fancy yourself a photographer
I was actually bothered by the uneven distortion so I created multiple display profiles with a monitor calibrator at different color temperatures and then wrote a simple tool to load them at the appropriate time: https://github.com/stefantalpalaru/iccloader
Eh, isn't there a huge different between just orange glasses and safety glasses that are designed to block blue frequencies?
I have the Uvex S1933X glasses, and they're amazing. I have pretty cool LED lighting in my apartment and can make my whole living room any color I want at night. If I set in to pure blue and put on the glasses, it's like being in pitch blackness (except a couple of items glow brightly).
It's not like looking at things with an orange tint at all, even though the glasses are obviously orange.
That being said - the benefits I get by using them is amazing. It's weird how much of a difference it can make, I get tired quickly after putting them on in the evening. If I forget to put them on I usually end up staying up too late, getting too little sleep and often ruining the next day. Personally I find it way more effective than flux.
By the way - blue light isn't just a negative thing, but also a huge positive. In the morning I use a Philips goLITE BLU HF3332, and it really improves both my energy and mood quickly after just a few minutes of usage.
Those two simple items, a blue light and a pair of blue-blocking glasses, have improved my life significantly. Try it out (especially the glasses, it's just $9).
This is mostly useless antidotal evidence, however:
I started wearing orange tinted glasses about a week or two ago, and I have noticed that they help me feel more tired when I'm trying to fall asleep. However it could just be a placebo. The downside is that I can't do any design work while wearing them, and programming is more difficult because code coloring is really off in Sublime. If I continue to wear them, I'll probably have to change my Sublime theme to something that's easier to distinguish.
I've been using yellow tinted Gunnar glasses for about 5 years (wearing them now as I'm typing this)- they do help a lot with eye strain reduction.
Prior to wearing Gunnars, I'd often have headaches by 4 pm and my eyes felt dry and quite tired. I was sceptical in the beginning, but these things do help.
I use them for the past two years and can confirm I don't have problems looking at monitor for 12h if necessary anymore. I bought the cheapest ones just to test if I see any difference (at that time around $40) and it seems to be having a surprisingly positive effect on me. The only problem is when I am producing visual art - they have to go away when I am adjusting colors or the results are too cold ;-)
In Japan, you can order "PC Lenses" for your glasses at outlets such as Jins. These supposedly filter out that blue light (PC is from Personal Computer: staring at the screen).
If I search in English, most of the search results are spammy companies selling what look like sunglasses for computer use (e.g. google "compuer glasses"). These are obviously tinted. But these Jins "PC Megane" do not look tinted, or only faintly so. Jins will put these lenses in any frame.
I wanted these the last time, but for my astigmatism it would have required a 1 week order, and I was flying out of Japan sooner than that.
I don't know about sleep, but I used to love my orange-ish Oakleys for bike riding in spring/winter/fall in Oregon when the sky is often overcast and dreary. They make things look a bit brighter and cheerier.
Interestingly enough, f.lux[1] has been around for a while (a cool app that adjusts the colour temperature of your screen(s) as the day progresses, based on your lat & long.
I also noticed a similar functionality in one of the latest CyanogenMod (CM12) - under "Settings -> Display & Light -> LiveDisplay" - you can adjust colour temps too for day and night times. Not sure if it takes lat & long into account.
Anecdote time: My home gym is outside (Bay Area) and I had to stop wearing my blue blocker sunglasses during workouts because I feel significantly weaker when wearing them. I can't say why.
