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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

#201

Post by aj_g »

ricksunny wrote: post #194

I find that nighttime alertness is artificially (and undesirably) propped up by having the sum total of the world's knowledge at my fingertips. The LED brightness exacerbates. I haven't RCT'd tbis, but my best guess is that excessive nighttime alertness is 2/3 due to content availability, 1/3 screen (and perhaps ambient) brightness. I take active steps to have both passively cut off after a certain time.

Great point, I feel often the same. The brain so often goes into a mode of "ah yeah, now is the time to google that one thing I was wondering earlier today", or "I just want to confirm this one small detail about thing X", and then my phone is pointed straight into the eyeballs again.

Re: LED lighting badly suppresses human melatonin production at night

#202

Post by etherael »

sundvor wrote: post #77
ChickenNugger wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you seem super duper into this, you could try what I do on many evenings even just as an experiment. I just strap on a very nice LED headlamp that has a pure red LED that I use for "night mode". That it uses way less power is actually just a side effect of me wanting all the blue lights off at night. I know it's not for everybody, but I find it really relaxing. The trick is to get one that's not a joke lamp fro…

Somewhat likewise I set my Hue lights to red or a dark orange at night; this seems to work well, at least for me.

There's even a home assistant blueprint that is quite nice for matching the external colour temperature for LED lights that support it, it's basically flux for your LED Lights.

https://gist.github.com/HarvsG/cc86381dc99169159d6d4cd870c36...

This plus dimming plus red lights in the bedroom and flux for devices I have found works pretty well.

Re: LED lighting badly suppresses human melatonin production at night

#203

Post by nikvdp »

londons_explore wrote: post #185
koverda wrote: post #107

Regarding the quoted e-book study: > Third, in the present study, the LE-eBook was set to maximum brightness throughout the 4-h reading session, whereas, by comparison, the print-book condition consisted of reflected exposure to very dim light. Yeah, max brightness is probably going to make an impact. I bet if you were in a room with a bright light reading a book, with an equivalent amount of lumens going into your e…

I am disappointed that many phones/tablets don't go very dim. From flagship to cheap, it seems that if you're in a pitch black room and check the time on your phone, the light will illuminate the whole room, even on the dimmest setting. I actually modded my phone by putting a resistor in the LED backlight circuit, which divided the brightness by 1000 - and it was still plenty bright at night (human eyes are logarithm…

iOS actually has a hard to find setting that lets you make the screen super dim. It's been a lifesaver when using my phone in the evening. To enable it go to Settings -> Accessibility -> Zoom and then tap the Zoom toggle switch.

Once that's enabled iOS will now bring up a super secret popup menu whenever you double tap the screen with three fingers. From the little popup menu go to Choose Filter -> Low Light and your screen will go dimmer than is normally possible. With this on and the normal brightness mode set to its lowest setting the screen can get quite dim indeed.

Re: LED lighting badly suppresses human melatonin production at night

#204

Post by nathancahill »

mike_h wrote: post #198
greggsy wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s possible to set a custom filter in iOS, which reduces the brightness even further, but only in one colour, ie red. Better than nothing. The main issue i think is that backlights tend to flicker at low brightness.

There’s a full-color dimming filter in Accessibility -> Zoom -> Zoom Filter -> Low Light. You can assign it to the accessibility shortcut for quick access.

Game changer. Thanks so much for this.

Re: LED lighting badly suppresses human melatonin production at night

#205

Post by dools »

Mistletoe wrote: post #63
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.

I’m surprised to see him championed here. He pops up on my Twitter feed sometimes and as a scientist myself, he comes off as an absolute quack. Dr. Oz for millennials and zoomers that think they can fix everything with the right supplements, red light therapy, and daily affirmations, with very little real evidence behind it. A good summary here- https://www.reddit.com/r/podcasts/comments/rpu1b4/any_opinio...

I don't agree with that assessment at all. I have listened to several hours of his episodes and he discusses supplements, but rarely have I heard him actually recommend any supplement particularly strongly, except maybe Magnesium Threonate if you want to take Magnesium, but that's hardly quack level supplementation.

The impression that I get is that he discusses supplements because the audience wants to know about supplements, and because he experiments with them himself, but I've gotten several excellent and useful pieces of information about diet and sleep regulation and they all involved zero supplements.

Comparing him to Dr Oz is wildly inaccurate, even based on the top comment on the Reddit link you posted (which I still think is inaccurate).

Re: LED lighting badly suppresses human melatonin production at night

#206

Post by oblio »

derda wrote: post #177
rwnspace wrote: post #172

The council replaced the warm halogen bulb streetlights in our area with extremely bright LEDs that have no shielding towards houses. I slept in a ground floor bedroom with a bay window directly beneath such a light for a year. Despite installing blackout blinds as best I could, the ambient light in my room was about the same level as mid-dawn the entire time. My mental health suffered intensely almost to the point o…

It sometimes helps to call the council about this. Many streetlamps have the option for shading in certain directions to prevent your problem, but the guys installing it might not set it correctly. My parents had the exact problem. Called up the city and actually a few days later a cherry picker appeared and there was no more light glaring into their windows.

> cherry picker appeared

Oh, so that's what those things are called :-))

Re: LED lighting badly suppresses human melatonin production at night

#207

Post by ricksunny »

otikik wrote: post #191
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…

How is your breathing while sleeping? If you have sleep apnea you could have subconsciously associated sleeping with axfixiation. This is the particular problem I have. A CPAP machine remedied the breathing, but it was very uncomfortable to wear, waking me up. Now I use nose strips (Breathe right) and a slightly inclined bed. I still snore but it seems to have improved my breathing. Next on the list: losing weight.

I'm interested in exploring a completely different type of bed design that would allow apnea sufferers to sleep securely with their head face down. Not just a mattress with a head cavity in it, but a design that would be both comfortable yet passively discourage subconsciously turning over in the middle of the night.

Re: LED lighting badly suppresses human melatonin production at night

#208

Post by spirit557 »

nikvdp wrote: post #203
londons_explore wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am disappointed that many phones/tablets don't go very dim. From flagship to cheap, it seems that if you're in a pitch black room and check the time on your phone, the light will illuminate the whole room, even on the dimmest setting. I actually modded my phone by putting a resistor in the LED backlight circuit, which divided the brightness by 1000 - and it was still plenty bright at night (human eyes are logarithm…

iOS actually has a hard to find setting that lets you make the screen super dim. It's been a lifesaver when using my phone in the evening. To enable it go to Settings -> Accessibility -> Zoom and then tap the Zoom toggle switch. Once that's enabled iOS will now bring up a super secret popup menu whenever you double tap the screen with three fingers. From the little popup menu go to Choose Filter -> Low Light and your…

Do you know does this actually lower the backlight or is it changing gamma or something like that. I'll try it anyways thanks

Re: LED lighting badly suppresses human melatonin production at night

#209

Post by dools »

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.

Yeah those were good episodes, the key takeaway for me was early morning and late everning light, low angle in the sky, the "netflix innoculation".

BTW you're allowed to appeal to authority. The problem is "Appeal to false authority" which means listening to a UFC commentator about vaccination.

Denialists use the term "appeal to authority" when they want to stop you from citing any source, no matter how relevant, to refute their baseless opinions. It's obvious that we must appeal to authority sometimes, because otherwise specialisation couldn't exist and we'd all be back to sewing our own trousers.

Re: LED lighting badly suppresses human melatonin production at night

#210

Post by Broken_Hippo »

etrautmann wrote: post #58
MavisBacon wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can relate deeply to this. Spent the last 2 years trying to get treatment for what turned out to be a neurological sleep movement disorder with an insomnia component. Basically I have sometimes ~150 involuntary limb movements/hr during sleep, they sometimes wake me up but even if they don't I wake up exhausted. Things are getting better with medication finally, but yeah I've learned not to bring my sleep issues up…

This sounds naive perhaps but would velcro straps or other gentle arm restraints prevent movement and allow you to sleep better?

These don't actually prevent moving. Restraints simply mean the movement won't be large. Great solution to prevent damage if you hit things in your sleep or, say, you have had a stroke and can't control one arm. It just doesn't actually prevent the movement or the signals that make them (muscles will still get the signal to move).
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