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Can Blocking Blue Light Help Bipolar Disorder As Well as Sleep Issues? (sciencealert.com)
A new experiment suggests sleeping with amber-tinted glasses can reduce the manic symptoms of bipolar disorder within three days. Slashdot reader schwit1 quotes a report from Science Alert:
The benefits of amber-tinted glasses are that they block blue light -- a major component of sunlight and the light beamed at us from our computer and phone screens. In the mornings, it's this blue light that helps reset our body clock each day. But a growing body of evidence is linking too much blue-light exposure in the evenings to problems including insomnia, obesity, depression, and other mental illnesses.
I wonder how many Slashdot readers are already trying to improve their sleep patterns by avoiding exposure to blue light?
I wonder how many Slashdot readers are already trying to improve their sleep patterns by avoiding exposure to blue light?
at worst i'll read on my ipad or phone with the black screen on and have no problems going o sleep
Seriously? Don't know about you but when I sleep my eyes are shut.
If you're going to set the record straight, shouldn't it be that the lack of histamine is responsible for drowsiness? Antihistamines typically make you drowsy.
Really do I need a red LED on my TV even when it is off?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Many cities that have already installed LED street lights are getting complaints and are removing them. Kind of funny that LED bulbs which are supposed to save money and waste have had the opposite effect. Early adoption of new technology always has issues, there is no reason these problems can't be fixed in street lights as well as any other application involving an engineered light source.
The Blue LED a relatively new invention got really popular especially a decade ago. Having Blue LED Alarm Clocks, Blue LED indicators on electronics (as Green LED and Red LED are so old fashioned)
I had a Blue LED Alarm clock... And I really hated it. It did effect my sleep, because if in the middle of the night I wake up there is a blue glow that tricked me into thinking it was day time. I had sense went back to the boring Red LED clock where I can see the time, without feeling like I am glaring into the Sun at the middle of the night.
I am not sure about bipolar, but sleep issues with Blue LED do mess with me.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I'm a little dubious, on general principles. Plus my optometrist just suggested this new "blue-blocker" option for my glasses, it stops blue-laser light dead, a very impressive demonstration, but it paradoxically doesn't remove any blue from what you're looking at. Must be a very fine-tuned filter that just blocks one wavelength of blue. He talked on and on about the effects of blue light on sleep. Quite a hard-sell. And they want $140 for that option. Sounds like blue snake-oil to me.
OB xkcd, and OB PhD Comics.
Not long ago, we were all being told that illumination that mimics natural sunlight cures Seasonal Affective Disorder. Now we're being told it causes insomnia and bipolar disorder. If you look at the original article, the effect is tiny at best.
I'm guessing most of the Slashdot crowd already knows about f.lux, which I use on my PC's to (attempt to) reduce nighttime exposure to blue light. I don't know how well it does or doesn't work for me, but it helps just as a reminder to unplug an hour or two before my intended bedtime, if possible.
Practicing good sleep hygiene has tangibly improved my sleep and well-being over the past several years, though I noticed results within a week, once I learned and adopted good practices from my sleep doctor. Keeping the right ambient temperature (a surprisingly low 65-70 degrees for me), avoiding light exposure (completely blocked bedroom windows, taped over LED lights, removing all light sources but two red night-lights), getting a truly comfortable mattress, avoiding late meals/snacks/fluid intake, and (more challenging for couples) sleeping alone make the biggest differences for me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
And how are we supposed to know those tests work if you use blind people?
Think, people, think!
Most antihistamines contain dimenhydrinate the same stuff that's used in gravol(anti-nausea meds) which is why it makes you drowsy. So for people who have problems sleeping, most doctors will tell you to take 1/4 to 1/2 up to a full gravol or generic 30 minutes before you go to bed. When that doesn't work, they'll usually move onto something like zolpidem/ambien or a barbiturate with an included hypnotic.
For me, I've been on and off again with stuff like that for ~3 years but it's due to pain issues. Since the pain becomes bad enough that I can't get to sleep, and I'd rather not go to a higher dosage or another narcotic since it would directly impact my day-to-day life. I'd rather be working then on disability, but even that is becoming harder.
Om, nomnomnom...
Starting by reducing minimum brightness on our phones? Even at the minimum brightness setting, my phone still hurts my eyes at night. And it's getting worse at every phone generation. I now have to use a "blue light filter" to dim the brightness by 80-95% more. Oh, and a red-colored one. I don't know whether blue light is worse or not, but I am sure that red is better for night vision, and I like to be able to see my surroundings at night. Maybe manufacturers do this to show more accurate colors at a lower brightness setting; but I honestly don't really care about color fidelity in these cases. If that's the case, how about making some color correction profiles that are function of brightness? And lastly, I sometimes adjust brightness manually on my desktop monitor, but it's quite a pain to fiddle with the hardware buttons. Is is just for my old and cheap monitor, or has no manufacturer yet figured out how to put a light sensor/software brightness control in these $180+ monitors?
I don't sleep with them, I just don't keep anything that emits blue light in the room I sleep in. But if I need to be sure of getting a good night's sleep I'll put a pair of amber safety glasses on a few hours before I want to go to bed. It makes a noticeable difference. Google S1933X for cheap, optically OK amber tinted safety glasses which are dramatically opaque to far blue spectrum light. As a bonus when you put them on all those annoying super-bright blue LEDs simply disappear. You have to take the glasses off to see whether a blue LED is lit.
And if you feel like a dork wearing safety glasses around the house, just remind yourself this is brain hacking. I've contemplated trying EEG hedsets and TMS all that kind of stuff, but never have taken the plunge; but for $12 and being willing to look an ass you can actually alter the function of your brain to be more to your liking, which is kind of cool. Now I can unwind at the end of the day by watching Netflix -- after awhile your brain adjusts to the altered color temperature and in most cases you don't miss the bright blue. Instead of binge watching into the wee hours you'll get sleepy and go to bed at a reasonable time.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Hypomania is kind-of-sort-of awesome. Not really, but it feels that way, like cocaine or a small dose of meth might.
Full mania involves a facial rictus like the Joker, being unable to stop grinning, giggling at everything. You drive fast, you make bad decisions, you don't care. Everything is awesome, all things are awesome. The inside of your skull burns, and it's awesome; you can feel your neurons screaming, and you want to shoot yourself in the head with a shotgun to make it stop, because it's so awesome, too much awesome, it burns so much and it's awesome like a vicious nuclear fire inside your skull.
Even a hypomanic episode can completely cancel any urge to sleep. You wake up the next day still feeling awesome, but also tired; your eyes burn, your head hurts, your body creaks and cracks around you, and you drag yourself, nauseated and battered by sleep deprivation, out of bed because you just can't stay still. It's bad but it's cool because you feel kind of great and kind of shitty at the same time. You might spend days or even several months without more than a few hours sleep each night; you start feeling high all the time, like you're smoking opium constantly, but the sedation is just extreme sleep deprivation. You can't think straight and can't get anything done, and you feel useless, but also pretty awesome, actually.
Unless you're stable against suicide, mania is a good time to kill yourself, since it's both terrible and uninhibited: it's a shitty way to go through life, and you feel a lot more confident about going on and offing yourself. Most bipolar suicides occur during a manic episode.
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You just got out-pedanted!
Not to get pedantic, but rose-colored glasses let a lot of blue light in too. Not pure-red.
Apologies if what follows comes across as a rant. Thus is an extremely sore topic for me.
As someone with bipolar diagnosis (and an autistic spectrum disorder diagnised over a decade after the bipolar diagnosis), I can say from my experience that two different people with the same diagnostic label can have markedly different problems. What works is heavily dependent on what exactly is happing in the patient's life and mind, and upon what intellectual, social, family and other resources they have at their disposal.
The idea that you can treat all instances of a bipolar patient as sufficiently similar that a clinical trial of a treatment will yield useful, meaningful and reliable information as to what will help an arbitrary new patient with the same diagnosis is something for which I have yet to come across empirical support for (consider how different software can cause the same hardware to behave markedly differently, the futility of trying to fix serious software errors with simple hardware patches, and the foolishness of taking 1000 windows PCs which regularly blue screen, and conducting a double blind randomised controlled trial on treatments for PCs with 'compulsive blue screen disorder'). I am sorry to say, that to me psychiatric research is thus brain damaged in its basic methodologies.
The idea that chemical imbalances are a cause rather than a symptom is something yet to be justified, as is the idea that bipolar disorders can be understood at a biochemical level and remedied with chemicals with any degree of reliability. Then things like whether the person has a (possibly undiagnosed) autistic spectrum disorder or not are ignored (I have recently received an ASC diagnosis), and if not ignored, old trials are not revisited in the event that new diagnostic information has come to light regarding participants of old trials which would have affectee the trial and possibly the outcome. By comparison, if a physicist discovers a component in his exoerimental apparatus has a bias, he or she will not ignore the matter if it could significantly affect the conclusions of the experiment. The psychpharmalogical juggernaut just rolls on, turning mental health into a game of drug sales, cattle management, and explaining away all alternatives: behaviour reminiscent of hard sell marketing, not proper scientific inquiry.
As for blue light, at times when extremely sensitive, blue light can, due to extreme sensitivity, be confused with daylight, with consequences for how your brain tries to sync to daylight. In times of extreme sensitivity (which can be diagnosed as manic episodes, as can episodes of manic behaviour driven differently), it is like the gain on yout brain inputs is turned up too high, is saturated, distorting, and your brain then attempts to make sense of the distorted sensory input on the implicit assumption that it is free of distortion. That, at least, has been my experience in the past (once in hospital they used bright blue-tinted flashlights to see if we were in bed, for example, resulting in my being awoken so strongly when about to go to sleep that there was no possibility of sleep for a number of hours, and jobbing nursing staff often want their jobs to be as easy for themselves as possible, and care little if that has negative ramifications for the patients).
In addition, check out 'Deprived of our Humanity' by Lars Martensson (what he writes accords much with my experience), madinamerica, Joanna Moncrieff's books (myth of chemical cure, straight talking intro), Richard Bentall's books, Lucy Johnstone's books (straight talking intro), details of successful outcomes (beyond what is achieved with typical pharmacologically centred approaches) using alternative approaches (see e.g. Daniel Mackler's open dialog documentary, on youtube now).
Feynman had a wonderful couple of quotes in his Cargo Cult Science talk:
"But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselvesâ"of having utter scientific integrityâ"is, Iâ(TM)m sorry to say, something that we
John_Chalisque
Use Fexofenadine then. Talk to your doctor BEFORE using Fexofenadine. Don't take Loratadine ever again. Tell your doctor Loratadine does that, and tell him it needs to be written into your medical history.
Loratadine works way better than Fexofenadine, and is counter-indicated only when a patient has a Loratadine sensitivity. Drug sensitivity is dangerous as hell; look up Monty Oum to see how that can work out. I historically have *no* drug sensitivities, and any sensitivities that the doctors discover will likely kill me or simply go away after a short period (I have extreme drug resistance, although there are people with stronger tolerances; in my case, my renal system appears to be fantastic, so much so that I have trouble getting drunk because my kidneys have learned to remove ethanol before my liver can process it--and renal elimination is *damn* fast. This is why time-release drugs are now popular, such as every modern ADHD treatment and many 10mg Loratadine pills).
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I've only ever had problems sleeping when I don't exercise, I work hard so I'm usually ready to sleep even after not exercising for up to a year. Best quality sleep I've found is when I have that sore feeling after a workout, I love that feeling and sleep is deep.
I've got a recipe for sleep hygiene as well, it's pretty simple.
I don't know if there is any significant impact when the above is considered, however I avoid blue light. I usually on the computer up until 5 minutes before I sleep. By which stage there is very little that will keep me awake. When I train my wife tells me I am usually asleep within 30 seconds of putting my head on the pillow.
I will relate one other experience though. I've found that knots in your back may not be painful to the point that you are aware of them however they will keep you awake by simply making you uncomfortable. I posted here months ago about the extreme physiotherapy I have put myself through and part of resolving the scar tissue from sports injury meant I went through a period of several months where the knots in my back were so painful that they would wake me up at night and I could not sleep again. Fortunately those knots were also destroyed and it no longer affects me.
Just because you don't have current injuries doesn't mean the former ones, stress and emotional issues aren't affecting you in unexpected ways by manifesting physical issues (especially knots in the back). Losing sleep effects a degenerative feedback loop which can be broken by resolving the scar tissue from the injuries and the knotted muscles from stress and emotional issues. The physiotherapy may be confronting, however it's preferable to the frustration of nights without sleep and feeling like a zombie the next day.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I have found, over the years, that learning various disciplines is invaluable.
I have studied Tai Chi to the point that, to physics students, I often explain how it is just about seeking extreme mechanical efficiency (and then applying that in a martial arts context), and is basically physics in disguise: the major difference in how it is thought of and explained, traditionally, is due to two things, one of which is the cumulative effect of 'Chinese Whispers', and the other is that you do not have time to get a pen and paper out and solve a system of differential equations in order to deal with a fist flying at your face. Thus it must be understood in a way which permits you to react in real time, but in a way which is as mechanically efficient as possible.
Similarly, meditation (Buddhist and Christian) has been massively helpful, as has a grounded spiritual faith. I know Christianity often gets a bad name on forums such as these, and often deservedly so due to the mess that many (esp. fundamentalist and overly conservative) traditions have made of it, but when it comes to stability against suicide, it is certainly my experience that a solid spiritual faith is one of the best tools around.
More generally, if you train your awareness, and your discipline to react in smooth, calm ways to whatever is thrown at you (as Tai Chi aims to do), and you try to infuse this approach into as much of your life as you can, this greatly aids your ability to steer your mind when things are drifting towards mania. Then you need to find a way to strongly dominate your thinking, get yourself tired, and then get your brain to switch off at night long enough for the tiredness to get you to sleep, and with your mind calm enough that it doesn't start up again before you're asleep. Then you can at least get enough rest to stave off the worst, and buy yourself another day to improve your situation.
Music, and music production is again invaluable. Learning how delay and feedback works in DSP has been a massive mind opener, as is how feedback and resonance work, and more importantly, how they sound and feel: for me much of what is going on in mania and psychosis is a kind of ringing feedback in the brain, akin to what happens on an old school analogue synth if you turn the resonance too high, albeit with the complexity increase resulting from moving from a simple one-dimensional electrical signal to the madhouse of mayhem that is a human brain.
(I often like to say that, if you wanted to make the Inside Out movie more realistic, a good way would be to replace the simple embodiments of emotions with massive hordes of Minions, and mania is what happens when said Minions go on a massive 'banana' rush!)
John_Chalisque
A projector can work great in a bedroom. Point it upward and project on the ceiling and you can watch while lying down. Or use a white wall or even vinyl rollup curtains (though the last shares the movie with the neighbors, so it needs to be family friendly).