Hacker News Reader

Comment by andor | Hacker News Reader

Apart from quantity, quality of sleep is also important.

I just realized how much a little light can disturb sleep. My blinds are opaque but hung 1-2 cm from the window frame, letting in just a few unwanted photons. I temporarily taped the blinds to the frame, leaving the room in almost complete darkness. I haven't felt this rested in years. Do try this at home!

View on HN

I've never understood how this could be the case, evolutionarily speaking. Even in the absence of electrical light, there is rarely complete darkness. Did our remote ancestors just sleep extremely poorly whenever there was a lot of moonlight?

Sleeping in cover, if just a rock outcropping or under some brush, is much safer than sleeping out in the open. Maybe that’s what happens, your mind maintains extra readiness at some cost.

Bingo. If there's light predators can see you. If it's pitch black you're in a cave or burrow.

Our ancestor's sleep might not have been optimal due to the fact we had other things to care about, like shelter. But that does not imply there is nothing to gain from feeling perfectly rested.

Yeah it's sometimes hard to understand that evolution is not a perfection machine, it's not survival of the fittest, and it does not select the "best" outcome and discard the second best. It's survival of the least unfit, and it selects any option that doesn't cause the individual to die before reproducing. Just because our ancestors did something and nature didn't punish them with death because of it does not mean it's the optimal way to go about life. It merely means that doing that thing didn't cause our ancestor to die before their kids were born. Evolution doesn't select for perfection, just reproduction.

Same argument when someone says "when I was a kid we did X and we lived". Doesn't mean sleeping on the back dashboard of the car on the freeway is a good idea, just that you in particular did not die from doing so.

The point of that argument is never "This is perfect." It's exactly as you say - "This is not bad enough to cause serious harm and therefore" (they're saying) "not bad enough to get worked up over it."

"It survived evolution" = "It won't kill you" = "It's good enough"

They're setting the bar a bit lower than optimum.

My understanding is that different wavelengths effect sleep hormones differently. My less than educated guess would be that evolutionarily speaking there are different optimal sleep environment cycles based on wavelength, intensity, and temperature variables depending on location and habits of ancestors.

You're absolutely right, our body most definitely reacts in different ways to different wavelengths of light.

A specific green has been shown to help reduce pain. [1] 525 nm seems to be the magic wavelength in this particular case.

I'm a chronic acute pain sufferer. I'd love for something as simple as an array of green LEDs to help with my pain. I keep meaning to get a large breadboard, a bunch of LEDs, and make such a device.

I wonder what effects other wavelengths might have? Would lights help sleep if they matched sunset darkening to night time through purple and indigo? It's fascinating stuff.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28092651

I have an amibilight built around WS2812 LED strip and esp8266. I use it to display a colorful rotating gradient during a day and as a night light with red color.

Small Haskell program using reactive-banana-automation feeds simple nodemcu firmware every second with UDP packets. It's quite easy to build RGB light this way as only one signal wire is required.

There was an interesting piece [1] on the BBC a couple of days ago about research finding exposure to Cyan might help keep us awake.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-44565320

Red light helps cells heal [1], ultraviolet light can kill bacteria. I'll find sources and measurements.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4148276/

Away from cities it gets very dark at night, unless there is a full moon. But near cities there is a lot of light pollution, so we're always in a state of near-twilight.

Celestial lights are quite bright when away from light pollution

That's not very true. Usually yes, but sometimes moonlight is actually very light and I find it pretty comparable to city lights. In cities, you don't realize how bright moon can get, and it's clearly not bright every single night, but about 2 nights every month it gets pretty bright.

Also would assume ancestors go to sleep with the sun and wake up with the sun. Modern humans rarely do.

Light can impact sleep to a smaller or greater extent depending on the person. My research group studies this and has developed an app (Android-only for now) to let people test what affects their sleep the most, since sleep outcomes are so different for everyone (depending on chronotype, etc.). We use a form of Bayesian statistics to compute certainties and effect sizes after each night of sleep.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=edu.brown.slee...

An $8 sleeping mask is another good option.

I use these!

Easier yet, use any opaque dark cloth (bath towel, handkerchief, etc.) and drape it over your eyes so that all light is extinguished.

I take a nap every afternoon preferably at 1:15 p.m.. I waken 20 minutes later, refreshed and ready for the rest of the day.

I’ve started throwing a black t shirt over my eyes at night. Looks stupid, but it works.

1) I thought I had lost my ability to sleep in when needed because of my age. Turns out I’m just more sensitive to light.

2) It even helps in the middle of a dark night. It’s a little darker, a little quieter, a little warmer. There was a paper recently about how maybe REM sleep warms the brain. Maybe there was something to nightcaps as well.

I do this and it’s amazing. A dark t-shirt or even a super soft pillow let’s me sleep whenever I have time.

Buff headwear (http://www.buffwear.co.uk/) is great for this as it’s a really soft material, much more comfortable than an eye mask I find, and will stay in place unlike a towel or whatever. Blocks out a pretty good amount of light too.

Quality of sleep is critical. It also gets an amazing lack of...shall I say "respect".

Most people have neighbors. Houses are often built poorly insulated. City regulations often have a very tight window of "quiet" hours (eg: 11pm to 7pm), that are only barely enforced, if at all. Stuff like you mentioned, lights and such, don't help. So you have a ton of undersleeping people, which is likely to affect society as a whole quite drastically.

Another solution to a too-bright room is those eye-covering masks like airlines give out. I try to use them at this time of year otherwise the 5AM sunrise wakes me up earlier than I'd like.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com