[sleep] My informal experience with blue-blocking glasses

[mattbell]

After hearing about blue-blocking glasses at the Life Extension Conference, I decided to give them a try.  The basic principle behind them is that your body keys its circadian rhythm off of the presence of sunlight, specifically light in the blue wavelengths.  A lot of insomnia (the hypothesis goes) is caused by exposure to blue light well after sunset via our artificial lights and computer screens.  This light apparently confuses our circadian rhythms and causes a suppression of melatonin production, which can lead to insomnia.  There have been some studies (both in mice and in human shift-workers) coming out linking a lack of melatonin to a variety of cancers. 

I've found melatonin to be useful as a sleep aid, but the idea of using blue-blocking glasses to naturally increase melatonin production earlier in the night seems even more appealing as it's less of a brute force method. 

Here's my experience after trying it for a few nights:

First, the world is ugly while wearing the glasses.  Each type of light is a different sickly shade of orange or yellow, and when they're both lighting an object, the combination of colors in the light and shadow areas is unpleasant and irritable.  It's like some bad '70s nightmare.

The color gamuts of the camera and computer monitor are insufficient to capture the rancid sickliness of these colors, no matter how much I try to manipulate the white balance or use Lightroom's advanced color management. 

 
 

Especially on the first day, this miscolored world made me irritable.  It's become less annoying with further uses though.  One frustration that doesn't go away is that the glasses make you blind to a lot of information on the computer.  Graphs will have lines missing, blue buttons will be invisible, unvisited and visited web links will be the same color.  It gives me more appreciation for what red-green colorblind people have to deal with. 

However, on the plus side, they do appear to work.  While I haven't noticed much decrease in the time it takes me to get to bed, I have noticed that it makes me get up earlier and with less grogginess.  That alone makes them worth using on certain days.  Scientifically this makes sense, as suppressing blue light in the evening causes the brain circuits responsible for controlling circadian rhythms to start (and thus end) the night phase earlier. 

While wearing the glasses can be a pain, there are some easier things that you can do to help your body have a more natural rhythm:
- Buy red LED night lights.  Turning on bright bathroom lights in the middle of the night totally messes up your melatonin production.
- Get red compact fluorescent lamps for your bathroom, bedroom, and living room, and use them exclusively during the last hour or two that you're awake. 
- Turn your monitors' brightness as far down as possible during the last couple of hours of the day.

I'll be doing more quantitative research on the glasses over the next month or two.

If you want to buy the glasses, you can buy them from lowbluelights.com for $70 or from Amazon for $10.  your choice.  :-) 

For $10, they're worth a try. 

Comments

Awesome

[zhmort.livejournal.com]

Hi, Matt.

I really appreciate your open documentation of all this health experimentation. It's relevant and useful information to me.

Sleep is my nemesis. I figured out quite a while back that if I could just get myself to sleep earlier, it would change everything. In particular, many of my extra (unneeded) calories are consumed after midnight, and then of course that makes sleep even less likely, in a vicious cycle. At one point I decided the only diet I needed is the "Go To Sleep" diet.

...but getting myself to go to bed is the hard part. I don't have trouble falling asleep when in bed. I have trouble getting up out of my desk chair, leaving the computer, and going to the bedroom. So any simple way to increase my sleepiness and desire to go to bed would be a great help.

I'm going to give the $10 glasses a try.

Derek

[valdelane.livejournal.com]

Fascinating! I, also, appreciate that you're documenting and sharing your experiments.

So non-blue

[brad-templeton.livejournal.com]

Surely you don't have to block *all* the blue do you? You might experiment with slightly less orange glasses which let a little bit of blue through, enough to see colours, but block most of it. Particularly on the computer but the truth is that staring at the computer late into the night, which I do a lot, is supposed to be a bad thing for this.

I should at least change my desktop background from the default KDE blue.

Presumably yellow night lights would suffice, they don't have to be red. Red is used by astronomers as it does not interfere with night vision as much.

Re: So non-blue

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

I don't know. There have been some investigations into what specific wavelengths suppress melatonin production, and it was found that blue has a much stronger suppression effect than green. However, I don't know of anyone who has played with brightness to see how much different amounts of blue light exposure affects melatonin levels. This study could be done fairly cheaply (<$1000) by purchasing a few melatonin saliva tests and varying illumination conditions.

Yellow night lights would suffice. I just like how red looks better.

-----

Also, you probably know this already, but the expensive blue LED arrays they use for helping people wake up are no more effective than regular white light. This seems intuitively obvious, but it's nice to see it confirmed by a study. http://www.sunnexbiotech.com/blue%20vs%20green%20light.html

[zellandyne.livejournal.com]

Nifty. I'm tempted to try them. My melatonin production, last time I had it tested, was way off. I ultimately found that I had to take 10mg of melatonin around 6 pm to kickstart my system enough that I could get start getting sleepy by 10. And then I found out the melatonin I was using had gluten in it. Haven't replaced it yet. At the moment, I use ambien. Which is less than ideal.

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

Wow... 10mg is a lot of melatonin.

Yeah, the glasses are worth trying, though if you're taking Ambien every night, I'm guessing the withdraw symptoms from Ambien would be stronger than the effect of the glasses. So it's probably worth adding the glasses first as opposed to trying to replace the Ambien with them.

[zellandyne.livejournal.com]

I know it :/ On the melatonin and the ambien. I've been trying to wean down off the ambien. Part of the problem is that my CPAP pressure is set too high, and the discomfort from that keeps waking me when I don't use Ambien. I'm currently engaged in a tug of war with my doc about changing the pressure. *shrug* If they don't give in after the next thing we try (turbinate reduction) I'm hacking the machine myself.

[arethiel.livejournal.com]

Here's something I've found quite interesting.

Blacktree (makers of Quicksilver) also made a program called Nocturne that lets you mess around with the colour display of your monitor. Mine is currently set to monochromatic, inverted colour, tinted red. So, you end up with red text on dark background (usually).

When I'm working in the dark (for whatever reason), I'll often turn it on. It makes images hard to work with, but if you're just coding or putzing about online, it is a lot easier on the eyes. It might also help with this melatonin thing.

http://docs.blacktree.com/nocturne/nocturne

There are a few annoying bugs (specifically the one about multiple monitors), but all in all it works pretty well. I've happily used it during presentations in darkened conference halls.

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

That looks interesting. I'll give it a try. Certainly I can't edit photos late at night with it. :-)

[ferrouswheel.livejournal.com]

There is also a free program called Flux which I use. It automatically knows sunrise and sunset for your location and will fade the colour so you don't notice the transition. I've been using it for the last 6 months and don't notice the slightly orangey-ness anymore.

But yeah, image work probably won't fit with using it ;p

[mudita.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the tip about Flux. I've installed it and am happy so far...

[valdelane.livejournal.com]

Yes, thanks! F.lux seems awesome so far.

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

Link fo the lazy: http://www.stereopsis.com/flux/

Cut the caffeine

[paulmakepeace.livejournal.com]

^^ probably the quickest way of normalizing sleep. I see a lot of people struggling with sleep but consuming a non-zero amount of caffeine. Duh.

Switching to non-blue/fluorescent/low lighting in the evenings has definitely helped me.

BTW, pretty sure we had this conversation including the cancer results from women peeing in the middle of the night from exposure to blue-containing light ;-) Cool to see your experiments in any case!

Re: Cut the caffeine

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

I cut out caffeine long ago. I occasionally ingest a tiny amount when I have a piece of chocolate, but otherwise I don't have any.

[sarcazm.livejournal.com]

question: how long do you have to wear them before you expect to go to bed? also, are you supposed to sleep with them on?

[(Anonymous)]

I haven't seen precise comparisons of # of hours worn before bed and their effects. My advice would be to experiment -- I'm guessing that more hours worn before bed improves performance up to a point, but that's just a guess. There's certainly no point in putting them on before it gets dark outside, unless you're trying to wake up at 3am.

No reason to sleep with them on -- your eyes are closed and it's presumably dark in your bedroom at night.

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

that was me

[sarcazm.livejournal.com]

thanks for letting me know. i get confused taking advice from strangers. especially anonymous. never know if it might be 4chan.

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

They like lolcats and hate Scientology. I'm sure you can trust them. :-)

[sarcazm.livejournal.com]

well, i can't sleep in total darkness. i'm not saying i need a nightlight or anything, but i'm still accustomed to manhattan. total blackness and silence and i do not get along.

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

Sleep with a red light then. :-) You can get red compact fluorescents for $5 at Home Depot.

[savorie.livejournal.com]

I've often wondered how much of my sleep issues have to do with my love of using a computer to tire out my eyes before bed. This would allow me to surf without the blue light. Hmm!

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

One alternative to the glasses would be the program arethiel recommended. Try both!

But yeah, surfing the internet to kill time after waking up in the middle of the night is probably an especially bad idea.

[mudita.livejournal.com]

Check out the program Flux, if you haven't already, for dimming the blue light on your computer at night. Just installed it and am eager to see it in action later tonight. So far it seems user-friendly and when I test the night-time preview, it does seem easier on the eyes for some reason.

[savorie.livejournal.com]

Just downloaded it and it looks great! Can't wait to try it tonight too. Thanks for the recommendation!

[lasofia.livejournal.com]

Came to tell you that I'm enjoying reading about your brain hacks, only to find that I'm chiming in at the end, "me too!"

I often struggle with insomnia, but right now between being deeply sleep deprived because of a fitfully sleeping baby and taking a very sedating dose of progesterone every night, I fall asleep easily most nights.

But for 10, the glasses still might be worth trying to see if they help me wake up more easily.

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

When you get woken up in the night by the baby, do you turn lights on? If so you could use a red flashlight or something like that so that your body doesn't get confused.

Also, good to hear from you. It's been a while!

[lasofia.livejournal.com]

I don't usually turn on any lights. I use ambient light (yellowish street light that barely comes in) or by feel (or, really by sound; Paloma is easy to locate when she is distressed). When I must use a light, I used the incandescent bulbs dimmed almost all the way.

My insomnia has usually been the can't-fall-asleep kind, not the can't-get-back-to-sleep kind.

As for my disappearance, part is Paloma, or rather Paloma on top of everything else, but part I just wrote about in my LJ.

I wish I could see you this year, but Thanksgiving for me will be Phoenix this time!

[apneet jolly (from livejournal.com)]

I've been using the glasses for about a month now, and that + f.lux makes a large difference. It is also useful to be able to do the reverse - if I want to stay up longer, I turn off f.lux, take off the glasses, and I have a specific blue light that I use!

For those of you who wear glasses, this orange glass will work better - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003OBZ64M/ref=oss_product

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

You use the glasses and f.lux? I assume the glasses alone are enough?

Also, what is better about the other glasses?

[apneet jolly (from livejournal.com)]

The glasses alone are enough, but I often don't wear the glasses until later in the evening.

The glasses have the same orange color, but the ones I linked to are designed to be worn over prescription eyeglasses.

LIghts Out

[benjamin rubin (from livejournal.com)]

Matt is definitely on to something here. Electric lights are most certainly screwing with our circadian clock and therefore our whole biology.

If you want to read up on this - these authors take things much further (and likely TOO far):
http://www.amazon.com/Lights-Out-Sleep-Sugar-Survival/dp/0671038680

They recc. 9.5 hours of sleep per night - starting with when the sun sets!