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Apple's Night Shift May Have Zero Effect On Sleep (macworld.com)
eggboard writes: While blue light emitted by monitors and mobile displays has been widely cited as a cause in disrupting people's circadian rhythm, the evidence is thin: a narrow range of blue spectra might not be the problem (it may be a more complicated interaction), brightness may be more important, and Night Shift's (and f.lux's) effects are probably too negligible anyway.
Apple's Night Shift feature lets you adjust the color temperature of your display to the warmer end of the spectrum. Apple notes, "Many studies have shown that exposure to bright blue light in the evening can affect your circadian rhythms and make it harder to fall asleep."
"You're in heap of trouble, boy."
If it helps my sleep, cool. If it doesn't, I still like it.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Been using f.lux for a few years now; it does wonders to reduce my eye strain but I still find myself up in the late hours, regardless.
And I knew it when I first heard about them.
Certainly the issue is more complicated than just blue light, but I've noticed at night it doesn't seem to be as painful to look at in the dark for longer periods (using the same brightness). It may just be a placebo - but I think it at least helps.
My monitor's brightness is set to 35%... and then I further reduce it using "SunsetScreen" to 35% of 35%, along with a color temperature of 2400.
I can easily see how this could be of use to some users. These problems are idiosyncratic, so it varies between individuals. Making a blanket statement that it of no use is basically willful ignorance. It makes a quick headline, and helps no one in the long run.
Why is Snark Required?
Works for me... Zzz...
I've been conducting various sleep experiments while on vacation, and found my natural sleep patters (up at 5:00 AM, nap at 4:30 PM, up again at 7:30 PM, bed at midnight) occurs with or without looking at a screen.
Normally I'm a bit of zombie keeping regular working hours. I haven't felt this well-rested in ages.
I wonder how many sleep conditions are just biphasic sleep asserting itself.
...blue light does disrupt sleep, filtering the light from one source probably won't make enough of a difference. We need to filter blue light from all sources, so unless all your energy-saving lightbulbs filter out blue light too, one screen isn't going to make a whole lotta difference. Try UV blocking safety goggles (the orange type, not the yellow type) and see if that helps.
f.lux helped my sleep immensely.
If it isn't the case then please explain why we have a highly specialized part of the brain consisting of just 10,000 brain cells that react to blue light independently of all other colors and light intensity.
I have horrendous sleep cycle (medicine and all) and using f.lux and high-quality sunglasses that block out pretty much all blue light certainly feels like it calms me down and all that. Biases might be involved, yet the f.lux people are real scientist that studied this so going to keep this up unless there's more than correlation in a few studies.
Just parting the curtains and seeing a blue sky changes something deep down no matter how tired I am.
Contrast ratios are too high when reading in bed. Warmer light is perceived as less bright, reducing apparent contrast.
I am happy they have it now, rather than making white backgrounds gray as an alternate.
I'm pretty sure redshift (which I'm running under PC-BSD) assists in managing my sleep disorder. I have three 24" displays. It's a lot of light. The last time redshift was inadvertently disabled, at some point in my evening work session I looked at the clock and went "holy shit, it's past midnight!" This does not comply with my sleep program.
My disorder is N24. After many years of personal study, I have fairly high confidence that while it is supposed to help, blue light in the morning influences me very little, if at all (I have a professional treatment box). Blue light at bedtime does, however, seem to make things worse.
What did cure my disorder was 0.75 milligrams of sustained-release melatonin roughly six hours before bedtime.
Before I tried SR melatonin, over several years of experimenting with non-SR melatonin I only ever managed to reduce my 25.5 hour circadian day to 24.25 hours. Drifting 15 minutes a day doesn't sound like much, but it's substantially less desirable than the full cure.
Apparently many people don't get groggy after taking melatonin mid-day. It happens to hit me pretty hard.
Recently I read a paper about how melatonin increases circulation to the hands and feet without increasing core metabolism, with the net effect that core body temperature declines (apparently, enhanced vascularization of the nail beds makes them efficient radiators). Since I started wearing warmer clothing after my daily melatonin dose, my early evening grogginess has declined by about 2/3rds. It doesn't hurt either to throw in some "orthostatic challenge". This was how the stuffy research paper described "standing up and walking around".
Given how blue light works, there's not much point shielding yourself from one source if you end up getting exposed to another source. The reading lamp in my bedroom is a yellow bug lamp. Added bonus: it's extremely slow to warm up, so it's a great lamp to turn on for a few seconds in the middle of the night, if my back pain treatment arsenal rolls out of reach under the bed.
I don't know if it's a side effect of doing photography for a while or what, but I absolutely cannot stand a massive color cast across a whole display. Ugh.
I have to say I really like how you can elect to manually turn it on for a day to try and it will turn itself off forever after... so glad they didn't turn it on by default.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Is if you have a dark, quiet environment to sleep during the daytime
and you stay on night shift, none of this rotating shifts crap
I gotta get ready for work
So does that mean that Red Shift is going away?
I used to be unable to fall asleep within an hour of going to bed until I started using redshift. Now I can use my computer immediately before going to bed and fall asleep within 15 minutes.
I live in Seattle, and they recently replaced all the streetlights with 5000K LEDs. If I am exposed to those lights within a few hours of going to bed I am unable to fall asleep until 5-6AM. (I always go to bed at 11PM).
Unfortunately, it seems many businesses are replacing their lighting with daylight temprature lights. It's not bad during the day, but at night it's cold, harsh, overly-bright and dystopian.
Car headlights are getting unbearable.
I've come across a lot of studies regarding blue light and it's effects. It seems like it's best to avoid all blue light ~3 before going to bed. In the morning you definatly want to be exposed to blue light, though.
So many other sources of blue light, it won't help unless you're a teenager with your nose glued to the damn thing.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
While blue light emitted by monitors and mobile displays has been widely cited as a cause in disrupting people's circadian rhythm, the evidence is thin
and
Many studies have shown that exposure to bright blue light in the evening can affect your circadian rhythms and make it harder to fall asleep
I know the two quotes come from different people (the submitter and "Apple", respectively), but putting them both in the summary without further comment seems odd. Which one is true, then?
As an owner of an iPad Air and iPhone 6, the Night Shift feature of iOS 9.3 has one advantage for me: because I have to wake up when it's still dark outside (I start work at 0630 hours in the morning), turning on my iPad or iPhone on the night stand next to my bed when I wake up no longer gives me eyestrain (and sometimes a headache) with that blast of bluish-white light.
I appreciate what they are going for, but the brightness is still too high for me to use at night. On Android I could get an app to lower the brightness of the whole system, but all I see for iOS are dimmer browser apps of dubious origin.
... and stop blaming your phone for your insomnia.
There is plenty of evidence out there on the physics and biology behind why blue light wakens us up. It is literally proven biology.
There is a reason our vision has a peak in both yellow and skyblues.
We have non-vision cells specifically aimed at long-term blue-light exposure. (which is supposed to wake us up at sunrises)
We also have a threshold for bright yellows since that would mean the geometry around us, when sleeping, has massively changed.
The latter part isn't as useful in humans, but it was useful in our ancestors. Tiny mammals that lived in burrows and holes in the ground. Sudden exposure to bright sunlight would mean the ground is likely being dug up by a predator.
It is the reason we also naturally move away from bright yellows when napping during the day, or if sudden and bright, wake up completely. (usually with a rush of adrenaline as well)
Brightness definitely does affect it, the reason being is that the bright screen emits a significant amount of blue light whether there are blues visibly on screen or not.
The screen itself is not a perfect absorber of white light, it still emits A small amount of blue light. Even in OLEDs with their superior blacks.
Low brightness + red-shifting is what you need to do.
That is the reason things such as F.Lux has a brightness hotkey as well.
I used to go to bed when my eyes felt like they were burning out of their sockets. After installing f.lux, it was much easier to use the computer into the deep hours of the night that I ended up going to sleep much later.
Best thing I've found is 70% amber tinted glasses for looking at any screen (nearsighted anyways). I put them on when I'm looking at a screen, then switch to normal glasses around the house (with low lighting through the house).
Anyways, melatonin is inhibited by blue light and melatonin is not nearly as correlated with sleep as the histamine system (mainly h3 receptors). Blue light inhibiting melatonin probably reduces the oxidative handling system more than it does effect sleep, as melatonin is a very strong antioxidant.
Isn't it easier to just turn off your phone when you go to bed?
Doesn't it also depend on the refresh rate/frequency of the display? I recall back in the early days of tube monitors, where the flicker rate was found to stimulate the brain. I have no idea if this translates to mobile displays, but I would think it would along with light and color.
Even with f.lux and in "night view mode", monitors are unbearably bright to night-adjusted vision.
I discovered PangoBright when I woke up and couldn't get back to sleep one night.
It works great, and now I always work at 30% brightness at night.
Just use Magnavision tinted glasses for computer use:
http://www.amazon.com/Magnivis...
-- I fear explanations explanatory of things explained.
Indirectly I think there is evidence that the absence of higher frequency light lowers the suppression of melatonin. All the Season Affective Disorder lights I am familiar with have chosen a particular set of blue spectra are used to stimulate neural centres via the eyes to suppress melatonin in northern latitudes and act as a way of setting the biological clock in places and season when the sun is low on the horizon and the days are 8 hours or shorter. They most definitely do work and so from that I extrapolate that removing those blue shorter frequencies might prevent suppression of melatonin at night reading sessions. Worth a try..tis a freebie.