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LED lighting badly suppresses human melatonin production at night

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Re: LED lighting badly suppresses human melatonin production at night

#41

Post by Syonyk »

xoa wrote: post #25
Syonyk wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Post author) The short answer is that I'm quite familiar with those, but I felt the post I'd made was getting alarmingly long already, and I did decide to try and reduce some of the "10k word epics" I'm prone to writing. This probably should have been split into multiple posts, but I struggled to find anything I found relevant to cut. And, yes, figuring out the structure of it was a challenge, because I know a lot o…

Thanks for the reply! I don't want to be overly critical and I agree it's important. And yes trying to keep things briefer matters too and is something I often struggle with. I just don't think the tradeoffs were quite right. The alarmism approach has gotten overdone, because in terms of percentages there are lots of things we just live with that are "killing us" by the measures you use there. I deal a fair amount wi…

Again, I appreciate the feedback. It's a post I really struggled with the details of, and I've been putting off actually publishing it in some form or another for months now.

The problem is... yeah. This stuff, as I see it, is very literally killing us. Our modern civilization, in a wide range of shapes and forms, is "human toxic" - and as a random blogger in the backwaters of the internet, I see no harm in calling a spade a spade.

I left computer network security for a while, because it was becoming a mental challenge to argue that "everything is broken." Because, as I see it, everything is broken. And nobody will admit it.

As far as CRI/R9 go... yes, it signifies improvement, but a lot of those also still spit out a lot of blue. You can spew a lot of blue, still have a high CRI, still have a high R9, not dim worth a damn, and still screw with human sleep. It's better than a 5000K "blue screamer," but it's still not good. I have a bunch of bulb reviews queued, and I've yet to find anything decent. I'll probably spend another couple hundred on high end high CRI LEDs, but... meh? Just not too exciting, when you're dropping that much on a bulb that's still likely to overheat and die if you use it in a regular fixture.

Incandescent bulbs are getting harder to find and more expensive, yes. Dimmers are rare. But dimmers are straightforward to install, and incandescents can still be found. If the question is, as I've formed it, "Your lighting vs your life" (and I recognize this is harsh, but it's also the conclusion I've formed from the research involved), then, so be it. If you want to sleep well and have high overnight melatonin levels, you have to do these things, because I've not found (yet) an LED solution I'm willing to use.

The energy savings? Install dimmers. Come on. I write about this in the post. If our LEDs are interfering with sleep, at great cost to our health, then I don't care what their efficiency is! They're toxic after the sun goes down. If you disagree, great. Use LEDs, hopefully they turn out to be fine. But human history is filled with "This is fine, this is the future, this is... wow. How was this ever allowed to be used?" stories, and I'll argue (as I have) that LED lighting is one of those.

Re: LED lighting badly suppresses human melatonin production at night

#42

Post by Syonyk »

api wrote: post #24

One thing I haven’t seen mentioned is all the supplementation with melatonin people are doing. Does ingested melatonin still have the same protective effects?

I've not looked into it that much (yet).

Short answer, from my view, is that if we've screwed up lighting enough that we need supplements, the easier option is to fix lighting.

Re: LED lighting badly suppresses human melatonin production at night

#43

Post by Syonyk »

colordrops wrote: post #36
Syonyk wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It helps, certainly. At least with my experience (post author), it doesn't actually fix the problem. There are a variety of e-ink HDMI displays out there, though. They're simply "very, very expensive."

And what reflected light would you use with your e-ink display?

Lanterns (incandescent kerosene), or incandescent lights.

The Kobo Clara HD is rather easier to read in low light than my aging Kobo Aura. It also has warm glow, but I'm not sure it matters, and the better reflectance on the display is the major win.

Re: LED lighting badly suppresses human melatonin production at night

#44

Post by Syonyk »

coldtea wrote: post #39
Syonyk wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks at the emitted energy from the screen. The ebook emits directly, a foot from your face. The paper book is reflected energy, at a rather higher reflectance and a rather lower energy. It's amazing how dim a light you can read a paper book in vs an e-ink ereader.

Photons are photons, reflected or not. So what prevents the ebook to lower the brightness of backlight to match the energy of the reflected light from a paper book? (For e-ink ebook readers, can't they just be read without backlight, with just reflected light?)

Short answer is "They don't go that dim." I don't know if there's a technical limitation or it's just not done, but the "1%" frontlight (most e-ink displays are frontlights, LCDs are just awful for every aspect of reading) is quite a bit brighter than reflected.

E-ink readers absolutely can be read without backlight, and I've experimented with that vs the frontlight for the past few months. The older ones (my Kobo Aura) require a lot of light to be readable, but are readable without much trouble by kerosene lantern. The newer ones (Kobo Clara HD) are better, and require less light, but all of them require an awful lot more light than a paper book.

Re: LED lighting badly suppresses human melatonin production at night

#45

Post by Syonyk »

khazhoux wrote: post #38
000ooo000 wrote: post #5

Andrew Huberman of Huberman Lab podcast discusses this in the first 4-5 episodes of the podcast. The takeaway is: it's late-night bright light, rather than blue light, that has effects on the circadian rhythm. It's an appeal to authority but I think I'll go with the professor of neurobiology and opthalmology on this one.

Indeed, even after reading several of the studies cited here and elsewhere, this whole idea of blue light > specialized photoreceptors > melatonin production > sleep (not to mention cancer ) seems like just correlations stacked on top of each other. I understand that some people have problems sleeping, but saying blue wavelengths are a general hazard to sleep (not to mention cancer ) is absurd.

What's your problem with the links in that chain? We know (or, at least, papers argue...) that all of the linkages are true, and I (post author) link some studies that look at the end-to-end results - blue light vs sleep. With what I consider to be fairly straightforward results.

I write having spent the last few months testing exactly this sort of thing in my life. Nights spent with LED lighting, or LED lit screens, I take a long time to fall asleep. Nights spent on incandescent lighting (lanterns or bulbs), I fall asleep quickly. It matches the results of the papers I've linked, and I'm pretty sure "Reading a book on paper by lantern light" vs "reading the same book on Kobo by frontlight" is the same mental activity.

Re: LED lighting badly suppresses human melatonin production at night

#47

Post by ChickenNugger »

jahsome wrote: post #21
karmaMeansCool wrote: post #15

There are also probably very personal and biological variables involved too that the post doesn't mention. I stare into monitors and phones all day long. Every light in the house is full-blown LED. I can't help but fall asleep at 20:00 in an led lit room watching led TVs, while my led phone drops onto the floor after I've fallen asleep. I've been in an extreme LED environment for over a decade and never have problems…

I've battled the opposite in the form of clinical, anxiety-driven insomnia my whole life. I've found it utterly debilitating at times and have quite literally struggled since birth, long before electronics and LEDs were common. I can confidently say you're so right about the number (and type) of variables. Sleep hygiene as we say in the biz is a very complex and personal issue. I've tried everything under the sun fro…

I've had similar problems since I was a little kid.

I do try and combat the blue light problem with nightmode on all my screens, turning off LED light bulbs, and, as weird as it might be, donning my red LED headlamp to get through the evening without much blue light in my life.

>I just appear to be some form of mutant.

This may be literally true for me given that I grew up in ground zero for the DuPont C8 poisoning.

Re: LED lighting badly suppresses human melatonin production at night

#48

Post by luma »

piazz wrote: post #35
jahsome wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've battled the opposite in the form of clinical, anxiety-driven insomnia my whole life. I've found it utterly debilitating at times and have quite literally struggled since birth, long before electronics and LEDs were common. I can confidently say you're so right about the number (and type) of variables. Sleep hygiene as we say in the biz is a very complex and personal issue. I've tried everything under the sun fro…

You sound like me (unfortunately). Did you ever find anything that helped?

Not a solution that works or is available to everyone, but for me, small doses of marijuana taken just before bed has changed my world.

I’m currently traveling and in a state where that isn’t an option and I haven’t had more then 4 hours in each of the past few nights. Will be glad to get some rest tomorrow.

Re: LED lighting badly suppresses human melatonin production at night

#49

Post by Syonyk »

econonut wrote: post #32
Syonyk wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It helps, certainly. At least with my experience (post author), it doesn't actually fix the problem. There are a variety of e-ink HDMI displays out there, though. They're simply "very, very expensive."

On a recent renovation of our home, my wife and I decided to upgrade all of our lighting to LEDs with adjustable color temperatures. In the morning, and during the day, our house is illuminated with 5000k, but in the evening when we're preparing dinner the color temp is lowered down to 3500k and then down further to 2700k after dinner. It's much easier on our eyes and it feels like it's made a difference, but after r…

Check the previous post about my spectrometer.

You're doing the right thing, but I have a bunch of "smart bulb LED" posts coming up, and even the color shifting ones blat out an awful lot of blue compared to an incandescent, and they don't dim worth a damn.

Re: LED lighting badly suppresses human melatonin production at night

#50

Post by Syonyk »

Eisenstein wrote: post #30
Syonyk wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Post author) The short answer is that I'm quite familiar with those, but I felt the post I'd made was getting alarmingly long already, and I did decide to try and reduce some of the "10k word epics" I'm prone to writing. This probably should have been split into multiple posts, but I struggled to find anything I found relevant to cut. And, yes, figuring out the structure of it was a challenge, because I know a lot o…

I'm sorry, I love long-form heavily researched write-ups about topics not usually given attention, but you really did the thing that helping to kill mass adoption of critical thinking: you took a complicated topic and sensationalized it with an attention grabbing 'the sky is falling' headline, while burying the nuance in a essay that maybe 1% of the 'clickers' will read. Stop doing that, please. Add a 'tl;dr' on top…

Eh, goal was more readership than my usual blog posts. Which it has now more than accomplished via HN frontpage.

And it's not like I'm arguing for changes I haven't personally made. My evening lighting, post-sundown, at home, is incandescent. On dimmers. Or lanterns, whichever.

Based on my research, the sky is, indeed, falling. If you're lighting with 5k LEDs at home, you've got a home spectrum opposed to sleep. If you're lighting purely with the 2700K stuff... better, but they're still a problem for a lot of people.

I could certainly have written a technical headline that nobody would read. Though the point about a "TL;DR" at the top is noted and I'll probably consider that for future posts of the long variety.

I hate video. I love text. So I write what I love.

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