[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

[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!