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Sleeping In Rooms With Even a Little Light Can Increase Risk of Depression, Study Finds (iflscience.com)
Japanese researchers have found that even the slightest slither of light when trying to sleep could be linked to a heightened risk of depression, according to a new study published in The American Journal of Epidemiology. IFLScience reports: The reason behind this link is unclear, but the researchers believe it might be to do with the human circadian rhythm, the 24-hour cycle that tells us when to sleep and wake up, among other things, that is "programmed" by environmental factors. In the case of humans and many other creatures, light influences how much of the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin is pumped into our bodies, meaning we feel awake when the Sun rises and get sleepy when the Sun sets. This system works like a charm when there's only sunlight, moonlight, and a campfire to think about. However, the modern world is beaming with almost constant exposure to artificial light. Light at night (LAN) in a bedroom -- even a flash of a digital clock or streetlight creeping in from a crack in the curtains -- could screw with our natural sleep/wake cycle. The team behind the recent study assessed the sleep of almost 900 elderly people with no signs of depression. They found that people who slept in a room with 5 lux of light or more at night showed a "significantly higher depression risk" than those who slept in a completely dark room. For perspective, a household room with its lights on is around 80 lux and 10 lux is a single candle from 0.3 meters (1 foot) away.
For comparison in the other direction.
If she is in bed and I leave the downstairs stairwell light on, on the other side of the house, she will get up and turn it off.
;)
When I am downstairs in my office, I come up everything is dark. I have a routine, of feeling the walls and getting to bed like a blind individual. Not that my bad eyes are very good anymore.
Me, If I go to bed early, I turn her bedside lamp on and drop off to sleep.
Just my 2 cents
When I travel on an airliner I make sure I bring an eyeshade which blocks ALL light from my eyes when the eyeshade is in use.
I recommend using an eyeshade to anyone who needs to sleep despite ambient light.
It works !
I keep my room pitch black after having years of problems with sleep. Absolutely no electronics in the room helps as well; no tv, no cell, no charging watch, no digital clock. Only thing I have plugged in is a lamp.
I hate fat people.
can't take pics black hotel rooms and have to play with doors / windows to get some light but not full blast
When sleeping in a room with light pollution, I must cover my eyes (dark silk velvet works best) AND my forehead. Several friends polled do not notice any light leaking through their forehead. Do I have a hole in my head? Opinions regarding this phenomenon welcome. -arwen
Listen you guys, I'm telling you this because I love you all:
If you have a computer or router or modem in your bedroom, cover the LEDs. It makes a huge difference. Get it nice and dark in there and you'll get the best sleep of your life. Turn the computer off, and if you've got one of those goofy gaming mice where the LED lights don't turn off when the computer goes down, cover it with a dark cloth.
Also, get yourself the dimmest possible night light and put it in your bathroom (and in the hallway to the bathroom if necessary). When you get up to whiz, don't turn on the bright bathroom light. You want to stay as close to sleeping as you can without peeing in your pajamas.
Those circadian rhythms don't play. If you mess with them, you will start to feel like shit. If you become in harmony with the cycles of light and dark, you will find happiness, or at least you'll feel good.
Seriously. I'm not fucking around. I even want the haters and losers to take this advice. Cultivate your sleep. Sleep is your friend.
You are welcome on my lawn.
risk of depression vs risk of eaten by a grue
That's why I always pack black electrical tape on any trip. Those especially annoying little LEDs get a little bit, and it's easy to clean up afterwards. Same with new computers - they get a heavy dose of electical tape where the LEDs can't be disabled - for some reason, raw power of case LEDs seems to be major priority in case design.
Ryan Fenton
Once DST is banished, all those people who can't figure out how to adjust their clocks twice per annum will probably kill themselves on the summer solstice because the sun is streaming in at 4:00 a.m.
I installed blackout roller shades in my bedroom. Took apart the smoke detector and put tape on the LED inside it.
In the summer, light still comes trough the edges of the blackout roller shades so I have been thinking about a solution to avoid that, perhaps a some sort of rail they run in to get the last part.
In the summer it doesn't get dark until 22:00 and gets light again at 05:00. And then there's the street lights out side.
I don't understand how people can sleep in those bedrooms with large windows without curtains at least not in summer time.
L'Idiot
Okay. Let's have the pedantic reason why they aren't the same. You know you want to.
Prison: for storage of felony-convicted incarcerations, usually at least 1+ years
- states and the feds have prisons
Jail: for = 1 year low-risk felony sentences, misdemeanor-convicted incarcerations, and innocent people awaiting (sometimes multiple *years*) for due process in court.
- cities and counties have jails
Ask any former inmate which they were in--it's about like asking whether someone is from New Zealand or Australia.
Okay, I'll bite. Google "us jail vs prison". One of the first hits comes up with:
[Emphasis mine] The original point was likely that local law enforcement, especially in the more remote locales, are often more brutal (and other consequences of being strapped for cash) than enforcement in federal facilities.
For me, I moved all networking equipment out of my bedroom into a dedicated wiring closet. This reduced noise and eliminated light entirely. My desktop however is still in the bedroom. Others are suggestions electrical tape. That shit is nasty to peel off later. Also, it isn't the best at blocking light. I work in photography a lot, and we use gaffe tape on set. This stuff is more expensive but well worth the price to block out light. It is a rough matte texture rather than glossy. It doesn't stretch at all like electrical tape. It is earlier to tear strips off. And the adhesive is much easier to pull off objects, with the advantage of not leaving any sticky residue. This stuff is often times nicknamed "Photographer Tape" because of all of these properties. I had to use this to block out the power LED on my computer case, which for whatever reason is still fully illuminated even when the computer is in sleep mode. (no, this isn't a wiring issue with the pins in the wrong mobo header, this is a pre-built HP workstation with proprietary header)
Shawshank Redemption == prison
El Camino Christmas == jail
Serenity now, insanity later.
But when you cover your eye, most probably you don't cover the bridge nose arch properly, up and down. This is the same trick people use to "magically" see stuff when having a blindfold, either stage magician, or scammer (which is why when james randy tested those pretend people seeing with blindfold, he made sure to properly cover above the bridge nose arch and below so they could not peak either above or below). In your case the bit of light filtering is enough. But your forehead is utterly opaque, trust me on that one ;).
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
This makes perfect sense. Even if you are in a good mood and suddenly the light goes dim in a silent room you will start grtting dark feelings.
Some years ago I heard that shrinks were playing with the idea that there might be TWO circardian clocks, and that the manic/depressive cycles of bipolar disorder might be the beat between them if one of them didn't sync properly to the day/night cycle, but free-ran. (This could explain things like the wildly different length of different people's cycles and how depression can be alleviated TEMPORARILY {like for a few days} by shifting wakeup time forward a couple hours - though doing it repeatedly doesn't work.)
No idea if anything came of this or if it turned out to be bogus.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The distinction is not pedantic at all.
Jail is where you go when you're arrested. Prison is where you go when you're convicted. One is short term, one is long term.
There is some overlap, with jails holding prisoners with short sentences, but this rule of thumb is a good one.
You are welcome on my lawn.
He's also most likely a Rattus norvegicus, probably a Wistar rat.
the 3908089509845 lux blue led so popular with hardware manufacturers makes people batshit insane.
As a typical /. subscriber I have a particular difficulty in this respect. Because the sun shines out of my arse.
Darkness, darkness, be my pillow. I was a shift worker for years and had to try to sleep during the day. I warned my family I would be in a bad mood and to please forgive me. I put heavy dark curtains and pull down shades on the two windows. That helped but I could hear my sons playing and cars driving by so I wore earplugs. That helped. During the summer the room would get warm and I installed a window air conditioner. More noise. I slept for four hours then woke up. I still wear a sleep mask and sometime use earplugs at night. It;s one-thirty AM now .
> The team behind the recent study assessed the sleep of almost 900 elderly people with no signs of depression
"Programming is life, the rest is mere details"
We have a TV in our bedroom, and I can sleep just fine with it on if my wife is watching, but when it's off, it has a white LED status indicator that is on at the bottom, and that light drives me crazy -- thinking I might have to either remove it or tape it. My alarm clock drives me nuts, too, so I have to turn it away from me, and if my wife tries to read her kindle it often will wake me up even if it's not facing me.
Anyway, I don't think it's all this that makes me depressed, I think it's my job in IT that does that...
The curtains in my bedroom are rubbish AND I have LEDs from a my smartphone and Bluetooth speaker (needed for white noise) bleeding light. I bought a bunch of surprisingly good eye masks from a 100 JPY shop (Seria) which keep out the light until the horribly early time I have to get up for my long daily commute.
You shouldn't take other people's ability to spell for granite.
Someone needs to clue hospitals in on this. I recently spent nine days inpatient because of complications after laparoscopic surgery for cancer. I was supposed to only be in for one night, but due to serious internal bleeding, ended up in for the nine days. This in turn made my normally high blood pressure very low, which caused me to pretty much be bed bound for most of the time. While I was allowed to sit up in a recliner chair, it required a nurse to help me do that. They alarmed both the bed and the chair to keep me from getting up on my own... and preventing me from getting up to shut the door.
The thing that was huge a problem for me was all the light (plus the noise) when the night staff would come in (and turn the lights on so they could see to take vitals and draw blood), and then leave the door open when they left, even though I kept asking for it to be closed. The entire time I was in, I got no more than about four hours sleep every night. I also had one of the floor's WiFi access point directly above my bed, with a bright blue indicator light that was bright enough to read by.
I've seen other hospitals, and they are all like this.
I know for myself I sleep just fine with a little "warm" 4200K light. Light does seem to affect me more in the mornings thou when it comes to waking up. It's really hard to wake up in a pitch black room even with the alarm clock going off. A bit of lighting then seems to help. I'm guessing for me a bit of light isn't a problem.
Just hug your waifu pillow over your face covering your eyes with it
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Spent a large portion of my summer vacation in a cabin in Nova Scotia that had no electricity and no one around for miles. It was the absolute best, most restful sleep that I've ever, ever had. Pitch dark every night.
Now that I think about it again, it's time to look for some good blackout curtains. Any recommendations?
"It's a tarp!" -- Dyslexic Admiral Ackbar
Waking up in a pitch black room can be bad for your health too if your tripping over someone else's crap.
Fortunately my spouse insists on lights being on in the closet and hallway despite me telling her for 10 years it is unhealthy.
Will stop before I start to rant.
Dark clean safe room = better health
Light at night (LAN) in a bedroom
Can we please not randomly replace phrases with TLAs, or at least if we do, can we please not use TLAs that have well-known already used meanings? How would it be if we abbreviated something new to "HIV"?
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Well, there’s depression and there’s depression. To overly simplify, there’s deep sadness and there’s an inability to function well independent of any deep sadness. So what are they talking about in the study? Apparently not explaining, and the study group is limited to older people. So the significance of the finding is kind of mushy.