LED lighting badly suppresses human melatonin production at night

I hope so - I've had chronic insomnia my whole life (and a fair mix of night terrors and sleep walking when younger). Without melatonin supplements I would not have any kind of regular sleep schedule at all. Although on the bright side, screens don't make it any worse.

I strongly advise against buying and using lanterns, they release a lot of toxic soot. Probably negating any health benefits you get from normalizing your melatonin levels by a large amount. Technology Connnections of YouTube made a series of in depth videos about lanterns, how they work, how they can spill and set you and your home ablaze and just how much soot they produce. Don't use them, unless you're outside camping. It's an inconspicuously dangerous technology that has more risks and downsides which will surprise you in very unhappy ways when it's used in inproper ways. Like using it for reading inside your home so you get tired more easily thus more careless in handling them. The use case for these is VERY narrow and you need to know what you are doing.

As much as I enjoyed the blog post, the tiny bit with the lanterns was stupid. I wish they had dug into the downsides of those with the same interest and rigor as they demystified white LEDs. That was such an oversight. Lanterns are more risky than white LEDs that leak blue light.

Yes, there are "clean burning" lanterns, but the innocent casual reader might just not buy the best type but some cheapo fuming, leaking one from Amazon. I think mentioning them is irresponsible especially after they've established themselves as someone who's an expert in blue light emitting LEDs (argument from false authority). But even with those clean burning lanterns I don't buy into how clean they are. There is no sootless lantern.

I’m really turned off by how there’s zero critical consideration of their quoted research. They’re just hammering you over the head with quantity.

Sleep is like diet where there’s virtually no scientific consensus on even the most basic things. Plenty of studies which conclude “more research is needed”, though. That leaves people free to cherry pick and go deep into the weeds with crazy the-world-is-falling theories.

Yellow light may be worse than blue: https://time.com/5752454/blue-light-sleep/

Phone before bed can be good for you: https://newatlas.com/health-wellbeing/screen-time-media-use-...

Night Shift has no effect on sleep: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S23527...

There are a number of factors involved in LED lighting quality, and annoyingly not all are tested for in reviews or shown on specs.

Think of an LED as a capacitor designed to leak electricity that emits light whenever it leaks in one particular direction. It's a bit handwavy but it works here. Depending on the design it might require more or less charge or voltage before the electrons jump over the diode (the light-emitting leaking step), and those characteristics affect how it behaves under different inputs.

One really common thing that affects the quality is the AC/DC conversion is handled. LEDs are DC. A common cheap solution is to use a half-wave rectifier, meaning half of the time the LED is "off". Technically it's more like "half of the time there is no charge build-up so the electrons won't always jump over the LED and the amount of on/off time varies based on specifics" (again, being a bit hand-wavy).

The result is mostly the same: with a HWR the LED isn't always emitting light. Normally these flicker too fast to directly see the flickering itself when looking at the lamp, due to afterimages (the frequency depends on the frequency of the AC input, so typically 50-60 Hz). But you can see it when looking at anything illuminated by the lighting and it drives me absolutely bonkers because it increases my eye-strain.

Example: with solutions that don't throw away half of the AC input waving your hands will result in smooth "motion blur", and with a HWR you'll see a stroboscopic effect. Another common example is cheap Christmas lights: if you move your eyes quickly they'll look like dashed lines, not smooth ones.

Now I hope that no dimmable LEDs use HWRs, because dimming will amplify the relative time the light is off. That will make the flickering worse. But we can't tell ahead of time because reviewers don't test for it! In fact, since there are no specs we can't even tell if any brand changes things between production batches. So I honestly can't say if this applies to Philips or Zigbee.

I think there are multiple practical ways to mitigate this issue. Blue light filtering adhesive tape could be a viable solution in some cases. You can buy those UV filtering adhesive sheets for your window for protecting your precious light sensitive knick-knacks, but I don't know if they filter the spectrum between 450 and 480 nm though.

In other cases another helpful tool would be a portable light sprectrum analyser, with which you can simply weed out the bad lights before you buy them, or return them immediately after buying in case you can't test them before hand.

Then the blue light filtering function in devices is probably the most accessible self-defense mechanism for the average consumer in most cases.

Or just go to bed when the sun goes down or change your job/shift. Behavioral adjustments, they cost nothing except some brain energy.

As a last resort melatonin supplements come to mind. In combination with Vitamin D supplements for the winter time, they don't seem that bad. Even though I've heard that you will have trouble falling asleep if you stop taking melatonin.

Or perhaps... use incandescent lights! They still produce less CO2 than lanterns and they don't stink. Also they are almost as convenient as LEDs. And you can still get them from some sources.

The solution I would prefer is for manufacturers to just build safer products and speaking from experience government regulation is the only sure way to get the manufacturers to actually commit to it. Marketing wank doesn't work because people can't test it and there's too many factors that play into sleep quality and (decades later) cancer, so the manufacturers cannot be held responsible for the effect. They can only be held responsible if their products fail measurable tests, like how much blue light they actually emit.