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mattbell I posted earlier about my experimentation with blue-blocking glasses to help improve my sleep. I ended up not enjoying the experience of wearing the glasses, but I realized that I could achieve similar results by setting up red and orange colored night lights in my house. This was especially nice to add to my bathroom, as it now allows me to use the bathroom in the middle of the night without forcing myself awake again with bright white lights. You can get these lights for cheap ($5) at Home Depot.
While this took care of the ambient room light, it didn't take care of the bright white of my computer screen. For that I used f.lux, which reduced the blue light coming from the screen. I used f.lux on the strongest setting (Tungsten lighting) and I was surprised by how quickly my brain's white balance adjusted to the new color, especially when the surrounding room lights were red and orange.
This combination of colored room lights and f.lux seemed to work well at helping me get to bed, but not quite as well as wearing the blue-blocking glasses.
However, based on a couple of weeks of data (which admittedly isn't much), the partial blue blocking setup using the colored lights and f.lux starting 2-3 hours before bedtime did not substantially affect my sleep latency -- it averaged 19min instead of 23min. What did change substantially was my bedtime. I found I shifted to going to bed an average of 28 minutes earlier and waking up an average of 5 minutes earlier. The results actually seemed much bigger until I realized I had seasonal fluctuations in bedtime, so I went back and compared only with data from February, which had a similar day length. I'm getting more sleep and feeling more well rested, which is good.
Now I'm going to play with Nocturne, a program that gives me much more full control of screen brightness and appearance than f.lux. Nocturne lets me set my display's entire color space, invert white to black, and do lots of other tricky things. So far the best compromise between minimal blue light and maximum readability I've found is to just use the "monochrome" and "tint colors" settings on Nocturne, with the "white" color set to pure red and "black" set to black. It's not the sort of thing I'd want to use for photo editing, but it works fine for working with text and some web browsing. I'll report back in a couple of weeks on how that goes.
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At some point I'm not sure mow much more sleep self-experimentation is worth it. I do know I still move a lot more than the average sleeper, I'd like to get rid of my remaining mild snoring, and I'd like to improve my recovery time on days when I have to get up extra early, but I don't know how much improvement to my waking life I'll get from further changes. For now I'll keep gathering data, since the cost to do so from a time perspective is very low.
It would be nice to declare some sort of victory at some point, but this is one of those infinite games where improvements may continue but the margins will diminish, and true value lies in correctly answering the question of when it's no longer worth the trouble to try to improve further.
While this took care of the ambient room light, it didn't take care of the bright white of my computer screen. For that I used f.lux, which reduced the blue light coming from the screen. I used f.lux on the strongest setting (Tungsten lighting) and I was surprised by how quickly my brain's white balance adjusted to the new color, especially when the surrounding room lights were red and orange.
This combination of colored room lights and f.lux seemed to work well at helping me get to bed, but not quite as well as wearing the blue-blocking glasses.
However, based on a couple of weeks of data (which admittedly isn't much), the partial blue blocking setup using the colored lights and f.lux starting 2-3 hours before bedtime did not substantially affect my sleep latency -- it averaged 19min instead of 23min. What did change substantially was my bedtime. I found I shifted to going to bed an average of 28 minutes earlier and waking up an average of 5 minutes earlier. The results actually seemed much bigger until I realized I had seasonal fluctuations in bedtime, so I went back and compared only with data from February, which had a similar day length. I'm getting more sleep and feeling more well rested, which is good.
Now I'm going to play with Nocturne, a program that gives me much more full control of screen brightness and appearance than f.lux. Nocturne lets me set my display's entire color space, invert white to black, and do lots of other tricky things. So far the best compromise between minimal blue light and maximum readability I've found is to just use the "monochrome" and "tint colors" settings on Nocturne, with the "white" color set to pure red and "black" set to black. It's not the sort of thing I'd want to use for photo editing, but it works fine for working with text and some web browsing. I'll report back in a couple of weeks on how that goes.
--
At some point I'm not sure mow much more sleep self-experimentation is worth it. I do know I still move a lot more than the average sleeper, I'd like to get rid of my remaining mild snoring, and I'd like to improve my recovery time on days when I have to get up extra early, but I don't know how much improvement to my waking life I'll get from further changes. For now I'll keep gathering data, since the cost to do so from a time perspective is very low.
It would be nice to declare some sort of victory at some point, but this is one of those infinite games where improvements may continue but the margins will diminish, and true value lies in correctly answering the question of when it's no longer worth the trouble to try to improve further.
