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Your Computer Or iPad Could Be Disrupting Sleep
Crash McBang sends in a CNN report on electronics and sleeplessness and asks, "So, what do Slashdotters do to get a good night's rest?" "More than ever, consumer electronics — particularly laptops, smartphones, and Apple's new iPad — are shining bright light into our eyes until just moments before we doze off. Now there's growing concern that these glowing gadgets may actually fool our brains into thinking it's daytime. Exposure can disturb sleep patterns and exacerbate insomnia, some sleep researchers said in interviews. ... Unlike paper books or e-book readers like the Amazon Kindle, which does not emit its own light, the iPad's screen shines light directly into the reader's eyes from a relatively close distance. That makes the iPad and laptops more likely to disrupt sleep patterns than, say, a television sitting across the bedroom or a lamp that illuminates a paper book, both of which shoot far less light straight into the eye, researchers said."
"So, what do Slashdotters do to get a good night's rest?"
If you get a girlfriend she will put all those computer things away at night. You also get to have sex and cuddle and spoon her, making it really easy to fall a sleep. It's the easiest and simplest fix.
That's what f.lux is for. It changes the temperature of your screen according to the time (sunrise/sunset). It works under Mac, Linux, Windows ; a real gem.
Of all the bizarre complaints about modern electronics, this is the first one I can definitively understand. Though, how is this any different from the other light sources in reflecting into our eyes at night. I have lights in every room of my house, my TV, and the street lamp outside- so this is nothing new.
My iPhone disrupts my sleep every day. It's my alarm clock.
GENERATION 27: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
I've noticed an improvement in my sleep patterns since I set a curfew for the computers, stopping any use of them two or three hours before bedtime.
before you go to sleep. Not only it saves your bill, but you'll get comfy environment to sleep in. No buzzing of adapters, no sound from IM, no fans, ... only silence to enjoy.
occasionally I let my computer run with shutdown -h +40 and let it play some music like vangelis or enya. computer is in the switch which controls whole multiplug -> comp goes off, everything's going off
And here I was blaming the four pack of Red Bull I just downed.
The article claims that the light intensity is less from the other source. It is about distance and intensity. You usually don't sit 6 inches from your TV or lamp like you might with an iPad. The intensity of light (from a point source) is a function of r^2.
GENERATION 27: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Simple solution: TURN THE DEVICE OFF!
Yeah, I know. It's primitive and crude to be pressing the off button on a device. It's not that hard. Using a power strip to turn off a bunch of "always on" devices (i.e., everything connected to TV) not only makes it easy to turn turn them off but also saves electricity when you're not using them.
I think that this line from the article says it all:
While there has been research to show that light -- even artificial light -- can affect human melatonin production, no research has been done specifically on whether the iPad and laptops disrupt sleep cycles.
Basically, we'll speculate wildly about what might be harming you (threats sell news!) without any actual research. I'm not saying that the claims are improbable, just that it can't be that hard to do some studies on the effects of iPads and other gadgets on sleep. This isn't even a multi-year study, it ought to take a few months (max) to run and probably a few more to work over the data.
Waking up screaming and shitting in my pants every couple of hours.
Have gnu, will travel.
But there is a difference in physical size of the light sources as well, and if you adjust the luminance (cd/m^2, probably fairly independent of the size of the screen, be it a TV or an iPod) of your TV and your laptop to be the same and if you watch both from such a distance that each of them covers the same solid angle, your eyes receive equal irradiation from both of them.
Ezekiel 23:20
Of course my computer disrupts my sleep.
While I'm using it.
when will people get this :
NO ONE CARES WHAT "A RESEARCHER" (or professor, or cleverdick) SAYS
we only care if they have published peer reviewed research that we can read and evaluate for ourselves and then decide if we believe if it is substantively true or not.
Thank you for your attention.
--------------------------------------------- "In the end, we're all just water and old stars."
http://xkcd.com/333/ ftw
The greatest thing about my new "Linux Mint" distribution with "CompizConfig" was the "negative" trick under "Accessibility". It negates all the colour bits in a window or desktop, turning the usual "black ink on white paper" look of most web pages (at least news pages) to white-on-black.
Hitting that button at night makes you go "aaahhh" as your eyes stop aching when you hadn't noticed how strained they were.
It was all keewwwwl for them to make the Mac be the first computer to have word processing and so forth look like black ink on paper when every computer monitor before them had been white text on dark. But direct light into your face is NOT reflections from paper and it was always a stupid idea for legibility and ergonomics both.
I'm not sure about the sleep thing (I don't recall any trouble before I got the "negative" function a few months ago) but trust me, get that capability if you use either a CRT or LCD with modern apps and web pages in a dim room. Your optic nerves will practically sob with relief.
I love how this article singles out the iPad for no valid reason whatsoever, just to whore up attention since the iPad is the latest hot topic. Should have thrown in some 9/11 or Obama references for added traffic. Maybe mention Haiti or Thailand a bit. Sleep patterns blah blah IPAD blah devices IPAD blah blah IPAD blah light intensity blah IPAD blah
I'm in the process of measuring exactly this effect.
Noontime clear-sky sun measures 9500, blue light through office window with indirect daylight is 250, a desk lamp measures 45, and an LCD TV up close measures 7 uW/cm^2 in the frequency range of the retinal ganglia (480 nm) which is thought to be the part of the eye that senses daily cycles. (Mammalian Eye on Wikipedia.)
So far as I can tell laptops and related devices don't generate an appreciable amount of energy in this range, it's more the artificial indoor lighting.
As an experiment, I've started wearing red-tinted wrap-around sun glasses 2 hours before bedtime. I can still work, read, watch TV and all that, but the glasses mask off the blue frequencies, telling the brain that the sun has gone down.
It had an almost immediate effect. I'm a long-time sufferer of insomnia who has tried everything, but wearing the glasses fixed the problem in the first week.
I'm also a lot more "peppy" during the day, and I wonder if long term exposure to late-night artificial lighting (and low level during the day) is a cause of depression. Depression meds take about 6 weeks to have an effect, so I'm guessing that it would take about 6 weeks for the glasses to have an anti-depressive effect as well. I'm on week 3 with the glasses.
You can get good wrap-around red tinted glasses at a motorcycle shop for $12. WalMart sells an "old grandpa" set for $25 which will go over your existing glasses.
It has to be wrap around so that no light gets in over the edges. You don't want polarized lenses because they will interfere with LCD viewing. You want red tinted and "blue blocker". Oh, and make sure they're comfortable.
If you have to take them off for any reason (such as scratching your nose), you have to remember to close your eyes. It takes a couple of hours of dark before the pineal starts producing melatonin, and I strongly suspect that a short burst of light will reset that internal timer.
If you try this and it has any effect, positive or negative, I'd like to hear about it. Contact me through my homepage (above), I'll collect and post all the anecdotal stories so we can see if there really is an effect. Negative data is important, so if you try it and find no effect, I'd like to hear that as well.
Although urban lighting has always been with us, we have not (yet?) recognised it as a disruptive influence.
You city slickers can shut off your lights, but what should us country hicks do about moonlight? Only sleep one week per month?
Also you city slickers can have "silent" rooms but us country hicks whom have gone camping, hear a rock concert of bugs, birds, and nocturnal critters. Seriously loud at times!
Everything urban is not necessarily bad strictly because its urban, and "natural" is not inherently good, despite enviro-loon propaganda.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
True dat.
Before I got married I did most of my sleeping on a cot in the computer room and I can honestly say that, in regards to sleep, the hum of servers is as good as rain on a tin roof.
Also the clicking of hard drives let me know if somebody was accessing my FTP site. My ftpd didn't allow for ratios so I went through the logs by hand to make sure people uploaded first.
RelicNet FTW!
I can't jerk off to internet porn in the living room! People are out there!
I started using it a week or so ago, and have noticed a striking difference. I'd all but forgotten what it felt like to actually want to go to sleep because I spent so much time at night in front of a big LCD monitor. When I started using f.lux, I started actually feeling tired at night, and found myself going to bed earlier and earlier. It would usually take me a week or more to adjust to sleeping 3 hours earlier than I'm used to, and it would never stick. When I started using f.lux, I was going to bed hours earlier after a few days. Now it takes getting extremely absorbed in a conversation or work to keep me up late, and it's nice being able to wake up before the crack of noon without feeling like a bomb went off in my head. Even if it's the placebo effect, though, it's worth it to be able to turn on my monitor in the middle of the night without being blinded by it.
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