Age of Enlightenment: The Promise of Circadian Lighting | Hacker News Reader

Age of Enlightenment: The Promise of Circadian Lighting

undark.org

65 pointsanarbadalov30 comments

Since these kind of stories are pretty popular on HN I maintain a list at https://github.com/Jimnotgym/Hacking_Depression

Maybe it will help someone.

For anyone who thinks this is medically reckless, please see the earlier discussions where it has already been discussed to death.

I have a bank of blue LEDs that shines on my white ceiling in the living room. I live at a northern latitude so the big interest was in avoiding the blahs in the dead of winter.

I initially had them on for 12 hours a day centred on solar noon. That produced a feeling I associated with spending the day out in the sun which I did not find pleasant. After some messing around I now have them turn on for 12 minutes every 2 hours during the day. The first blue light interval is an exception, it is 24 minutes. Having 12 minutes for "daybreak" just didn't seem to be enough.

The only objective result I can report is that I no longer find myself opening the blinds on the living room window. Before the blue light system I used to open them daily. So ironically I now spend most of my day in semidarkness.

I leave them running in the summer when the problem is an excess of light. It doesn't seem to make a difference and it means that I no longer notice when the bue light is on or off.

Is anyone else unaffected by lighting and screens?

Ive been 'addicted' to the computer/tv since I was 1 years old apparently.

I dont find myself affected by any of these blue or yellow lights. I tried making the change and thought it was easier on my eyes, but I didnt feel different.

From a purely aesthetic point of view, I do like having bulbs that can shift white balance over the course of a day. In the evening particularly, it feels much more "homely" (what the Danes famously partly refer to in their concept of "hygge") to have warmer lighting (4000k-ish). I also like to have something much more like mid-day sun (5500k) during working hours. The latest smart bulbs make it relatively trivial to have your home do this. There is something nice about pure midday colored light when trying to focus for me that I can't really put my finger on.

I'd be lying if I said I had felt this has a measurable effect on my well being, but such things are hard to measure anecdotally. I have personally never liked the software that adjusts computer screen display white balance over the course of a day though.

My hypothesis is that the people who get majorly affected by blue light at night, are that way because they’re not getting a strong-enough pulse of blue light in the morning for their circadian clock to calibrate itself by. It latches onto whatever signal it can find, and thus begins to think that “sunrise” happens at 9AM when you sit down at your blue-light-emitting monitor, rather than at 6AM when blue light starts coming down from the sky.

Or, shorter: maybe it’s because you have large east-facing exposure in your house.

Do you mean West facing? If you had a large East facing exposure then it would give you that pulse of blue light in the morning. I've got a big East facing exposure and don't have any issue with blue light screens. Watch TV every night before bed. No problems.

No, I meant that the GP doesn't have a problem with blue light, because they do get enough light from the sunrise.

That depends on which hemisphere you're in.

Unless you're on another planet, no.

Ancditally, I’ve had insomnia and bkue light at night seemed part of it. I still block nighttime light, but I’ve alao been going to my balcony in the sun for a bit first thing upon waking. I think it has helped.

Same. So much so that I thought the whole thing about blue light thing was BS. BUT it apparently at least rises to the level of being peer-reviewed BS, so I'm keeping an open mind.

And I admit to extreme privilege in this regard. My sleep rhythm has an incredible amount of predictability and I'm usually asleep inside 10 minutes of getting into bed.

I find a light that gradually turns off over 20-30 minutes at bedtime to be nice (though it could just be placebo, for all I know) but seem unaffected by phone-vs-book-vs-kindle lighting types.

> I tried making the change and thought it was easier on my eyes, but I didnt feel different.

Easier on the eyes is still something of a feeling, even if you perhaps don't prize it that much.

My impression is that a) the effects vary from person to person with individual preferences/different lifestyles and environments, and b) they are subtle effects to begin with.

I think it is telling that many of the more prominent examples here are from Seattle, which has several months of weaker access to sunlight (due to overcast/cloudy skies, northern exposure, etc), and we know people there tend to have additional difficulty with things like Seasonal Affected Disorder. So the effects may be more pronounced and obvious in such an environment. As with all such things, your own mileage may vary.

I've been programming my systems and my Hue lights to take this sort of stuff into account, and while I'm not sure I see strong benefits day-to-day, every little bit seems to add up/help. There are certainly days when I come home from the fluorescent light lit multi-screen office I work in and feel subtly more relaxed by the dimmer and redder palette I use in the evenings at home. Maybe some of that is placebo effect, but certainly if it makes me happy, it's a worthwhile tool, even if it is just a placebo effect. Certainly it is subtle enough that I don't think about it most days, individually, but I feel like in the long term it does add up.

It's not about easier on the eyes. It's about producing melatonin in the brain to trigger sleepiness.

Your melatonin (master hormone) and steroid levels are being affected, you are just innured - don't really notice a difference.

Similarly, studies have shown that those who think they've completely adapted to noise at night in high traffic areas, say, are actually being harmed.

Remember, these effects are comparable to jet-lag and spread out over weeks, they aren't simply immediate effects.

I’ve installed this lighting through the ground floor of my house. It’s not continuously variable but has three different white point LED strip lighting systems that are transitioned from one to the other based on the color temperature reading from outside.

Where can I buy such systems?

I built the high level system but out of stock components from the usual suspects. I used off the shelf components though. Standard High CRI LED strips, stock power supplies, 0-10v dimmers, and a Raspberry Pi in charge. Most of the hardware and heat sink from superbrightleds.

LED dimmers introduce another problem in some people, which is the high frequency strobing, which can cause headaches and eyestrain.

A good LED dimmer won’t do this. There’s even a standard now: IEEE 1789. It’s possible, albeit hard, to find IEEE 1789-compliant dimmers.

I was about to back to Halogen Lamp, and I was hoping there are improvement to Halogen Lamp then anything else.

Are there any Consumer LED Products, that offer High CRI 95+, may be with less UV since that should be less indoor, Long Life, Little degradation on CRI and Lighting over time, and more importantly NO / Zero flicking?

I have been asking and thinking, assuming all our electricity is green and cheap, why would I want a LED over Halogen Lamp? All the problem I have, which I absolutely hate and drive me crazy are colour inaccuracy and flickering. Both of which are non existent to Halogen Lamp.

> All the problem I have, which I absolutely hate and drive me crazy are colour inaccuracy and flickering. Both of which are non existent to Halogen Lamp.

Not really true. The fancier halogen lamps (e.g. MR16s with reflectors that pass IR) have CRI below 100. Halogen lamps do buzz, especially when connected to a dimmer. (Many halogen lamps are 12V, too, and most of the transformers also buzz.) And they all flicker — the power delivered to the filament is roughly sinusoidal at 120Hz, and the thermal mass is low enough that there is a good amount of modulation in the light output. IIRC it’s about 30%. It just so happens that the residual 120Hz modulation is low enough that it doesn’t affect most people.

A crappy LED driver modulates much deeper than 30% at 120Hz and might even modulate at 60Hz. A good LED driver doesn’t.

The Philips Hue (I use this)/pretty much any smart lighting system has lights in it range that can shift white balance and most have some kind of software to schedule the shift over the course of a day, often in the form of an iOS/Android app.

These things are super easy to buy generally speaking - Best Buy/Home Depot style stores stock them, as well as pretty much all major online retailers. The Hue system is pretty popular right now.

All the site looks like an ad. It is interesting, but does not take in consideration factors like the damage that blue light can cause to children's eyes: https://vu.ca/en/journal/blue-light-a-danger-to-your-childre...

The irony of responding with a link to an eyewear shop's website!

Sure, but it was the first one that I found about the subject.

Was it also the best one you found?

Undark has never run an ad. It's a nonprofit magazine, published through the Knight Science Journalism Fellowship Program.

The sun puts out enormous amounts of blue light. Yet actual research[1] shows that children with more exposure to UV-B (obviously highly correlated with sunlight exposure) are less likely to suffer from myopia. This site just says 'blue light is bad for you' and presents no scientific research. And is literally selling blue light blocking lenses.

[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaophthalmology/fullartic...

Lots of sunlight = outside a lot = lots of far objects to focus on

Staring at a screen all the time = eye constantly focused close

It doesn't seem like rocket science to me. Blue light seems like a very odd explanation, unless you're selling something...

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