Why office workers can't sleep and why that's bad | Hacker News Reader

Why office workers can't sleep and why that's bad

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Interesting however there is data going back to the 1920's about changing lighting at work (Taylor I think) that shows that the very fact of changing light levels improved output.

However when the changed the lighting levels back output improved again. It looks to me this is based on poorly designed studies, the including of trigger words like "kids" "iPad" is a bit of a red flag.

There are a whole bunch of effects that you tend to get when conditions change. Same thing happens in traffic where (say) a set of traffic lights goes out, and suddenly there are fewer accidents. Of course, this is because the lights being out puts everyone on their best behaviour and the accident rate goes back up as people get used to it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect

Thank you that is the guy who I was thinking of - its a long time since I did my production engineering courses.

Hawthorne was a place.

I could also be the change itself and not the final state that causes it, or not?

That's one of the conclusions. People assumed the changes lighting meant they were being monitored or watched in some way, so they performed better.

The main reason why offices have gotten dimmer is that energy conservation codes limit the amount of power you can use for lighting. Most office type spaces are only allowed 0.9 - 1.1 watts per square foot compared to 3 watts per square foot in the past. Part of that reduction is also that lights are vastly more efficient, but designers are also incentivized to use as little lighting power as possible.

Lighting power is also tradeable among spaces. If you want to use some extra light for a fancy lobby space, you can make the office areas dimmer as long as you still come under the allowed total overall.

Energy codes are in general a good thing, but there are some tradeoffs and unintended consequences.

> 0.9 - 1.1 watts per square foot

So with LEDs, one and a half 60 watt equivalents per square meter? That's pretty bright. If I'm doing my math right that's enough for 1000 lux.

I'm not sure how you're calculating that, but if you're just looking at the lumen output of the bulb, the lighting level is measured at the work surface. In an office, that's at 3' off the floor and the light is at the ceiling which is at 8'-10'. Lighting intensity decreases with the square of distance, so if you have 1000 lux right next to the bulb, you're going to have considerably less 5' - 7' away.

Add to that that those aren't the kinds of fixtures that are used in offices. People don't want to look at bare bulbs (and they also create glare) so most lights have some sort of lens that is going to reduce the light output somewhat.

The target lighting level for offices is 30 footcandles or about 322 lux. Even 1000 lux is nowhere close to being outside on a sunny day which is more like 100,000 lux.

> Lighting intensity decreases with the square of distance, so if you have 1000 lux right next to the bulb, you're going to have considerably less 5' - 7' away.

But you're in the range of square-of-distance bulbs. An array of lights on a ceiling gives approximately the same lighting as if you had a uniformly glowing ceiling and all the light went exactly down.

You'd be outputting a good amount more than 1000 lumens per square meter of ceiling. Most of that hits the work surface of the same size, so you get 1000 lumens per square meter, which is 1000 lux.

> some sort of lens that is going to reduce the light output somewhat

A lens shouldn't reduce it by much if it's doing its job.

> Even 1000 lux is nowhere close to being outside on a sunny day which is more like 100,000 lux.

Yeah but it's a lot more than 300! If there's a problem it's probably not caused by energy rules.

I would be looking at the regs to see how the spaces are measured and see if I could create 1" high ceilings for some spaces that are pitch black (and stack those spaces) so that I could use more lighting elsewhere.

It doesn't work that way, you can't just define arbitrary spaces. They have to be actual habitable rooms, which means a minumum ceiling height if 6.5-7' in every jurisdiction I know of.

I've had insomnia for as long as I can remember and wish there was another culture about sleep. I saw this documentary about the Institute of Advanced Study (IAS) wherein a physicist was staying awake for 48 hours so he can focus on his work. The IAS is famous for hiring the best scientists and letting them work on whatever they want. I am not a genius like him but I wish I could use my restlessness to my advantage and work in long stretches of time and just sleep when my mind stops spinning.

I had medically diagnosed insomnia for a period. If your insomnia is anything like mine then you'd have a decent idea about if you're going to sleep that night or not. If it's 1am and I'm still wide awake then I'm not getting quality sleep that night. What do you have to lose by going to your PC at that time and working for 6 hours before work? You're going to be tired tomorrow anyway any attempting to sleep for another 5 hours isn't going to help.

I'm curious about this idea of insomnia. I'm between jobs right now which means I don't have to get up. That means for whatever reason (my genes?) I find I'm not tired until 5am, 6am often. I sleep 7 hours just fine. So the only thing about it being "insomnia" as in "unable to sleep" would be some artificial reason I have to get up in the morning. Am I making any sense? It seems like it's only insomina because someone/something is forcing you out of the schedule your body wants. Well, I don't know your body. I'm talking about mine but just saying. I'm getting my sleep just not a the times other people claim I should be getting it.

Mine wasn't related to a schedule. I had medication-induced insomnia and it was a complete inability to sleep. I would feel incredibly tired but my mind was wide away. I'd lay in bed but whatever makes you fall asleep just wouldn't happen. In the first week, I slept [0,0,2,0,2,0,2] hours.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_disorder

Also:

https://circadiansleepdisorders.org/

There is also a email discussion list (toward the bottom of the left side).

> medically diagnosed insomnia

What is the difference between this and just regular insomnia.

Did you have sleep studies done?

I used to term to mean I sought medical help and wasn't self-diagnosed. There is a lot of self-diagnosis on the internet, especially in relation to conditions like this or psychological ones.

I'm not getting paid for those 6 hours so why should I work?

sounds hypomanic at the very least, you should get that checked out

This study mentions blue light as from smartphones as a problem. My phone has a blue light filter which I have on all the time. Linux gnome desktop also has one for late night coding sessions.

You can solve this globally by getting eye glasses that filter blue light as long as you're not doing any sort of colour-sensitive work.

After a day or two you don't notice the colour difference anymore.

Your solution to this is just to look at the world through rose tinted glasses?

Not sure if joking, but in case you're not familiar with the product... more like light-brown tinted?

It only blocks some small-ish percentage of the blue light. Really roughly, I could describe it as replacing flourescent bulbs with some warm LED bulbs on your entire vision. Just a very light warm tinge to everything.

I stopped noticing it about 20 minutes after putting the glasses with the filtering on. Now I don't know how I lived without it. If I take my glasses off and try and look at my computer screen I feel like I need to squint it's so harsh.

I got a pair of glass that filter some of the blue light for computer screens, it just add a very light brown edge to the colors.

the GP solution puzzles me too. i don't want this to be the solution. i wear glasses and my eyes are already damaged and now i need to filter out the color blue? what about we start making better monitors and screens instead?

That would be great. When they're done replacing every screen in existence, if they could replace all lightbulbs in places people visit during the evening with warmer bulbs (hotels, common spaces, street lights, etc), the lights in all the new car dashboards, everyone's headlights, every cheap piece of electronics that's covered with blue status LEDs...

Or you can just filter out some of the light right in front of your eyes and achieve a workable solution today.

As an added bonus, I think you'll find it actually reduces your eye issues. Tried out the filtering basically because I couldn't think of a reason not to and the first time I put the new glasses on it felt like I'd stopped squinting and relaxed my eyes for the first time in years. I get way fewer eye-strain induced headaches now.

My anecdote: I got glasses this year specifically to counteract astigmatism related to the past 20 years of looking at screens for 8+ hours/day. I was beginning to get headaches every day from working. I didn't even know my eyesight was suffering until someone suggested I go get an exam.

When I saw the blue-light filter option, I jumped at it because I knew I'd be spending most of my time wearing glasses looking at a computer screen anyway.

The blue filter they treat lenses with is very mild, though. It's maybe a 20% reduction. I now wear the glasses all the time even though I don't really need to, and the filter isn't noticeable at all.

I came here to say the same thing, ever since I've gotten a new pair of glasses with blue filter coating, I don't get that match eye strain and headaches in the office. you get used to them immediately and can see the difference in many places you wouldn't expect.

I had my glasses with the blue light filter lenses for a couple of years, the problem is that I wear it all the time and I got used with it very easy, but the entire world was skewed. Also the monitors were looking yellow, an ugly kind of yellow, I switched back to regular lenses and I am perfectly fine with it.

But then you have to wear indoor glasses which is no fun. Light shift is baked into MacoOS, iOS, and Windows at this point, so there is no excuse to fall victim to these instagram adverts selling these cheap glasses.

How do you personally find the balance between blue light keeping you awake verse mental stimulation keeping you awake? I don't do any math or coding in the ~2 hours before bed, as a general rule.

I got the filtered glasses mostly because of the purported benefits regarding eye strain, so I hadn't put a lot of thought into trying to compare the effects on sleep.

Definitely wouldn't discount blue light having some effect, but I'm totally on the same page as you here regarding limiting stimulation and I'd have a hard time believing anyone that claimed lighting had anything even close to the effect that other habits did.

Had trouble sleeping for years. Made my bed and bedroom a place for sleep and only sleep. When I go to bed the phone goes on do not disturb, there's no computer/TV/etc in the room at all and no clock (I can't look at a clock without thinking of all the things I have to do!). I just get into bed and lay there until I'm asleep. Some days I'll try and read a little, but I find these days that I don't make it very far at all before I'm asleep.

Haven't even had to go as far as limiting activities before bed or anything all that much. At some point my body and brain got conditioned to sleep when in bed, so it's usually a pretty painless process now.

If everyone wears them you should to when doing color-sensitive work. Granted that's a mighty big if.

These things are incredible. I used to turn it on for my eyes, but i noticed that when on my laptop in bed, without it on, i wont feel tired at all. I turn nightshift on and suddenly i feel sleepy :)

Not only that, try to switch it on and off a couple of times. You'll see that when the blue light is ON after having used the blue filter for like a couple of seconds, you'll feel like someone punching your eyes!

It's almost like having a lamp in your face all the time in the night - of course you can't sleep! We just got used to it. Now thankfully someone has implemented such filters.

f.lux is awesome - it's been around for many years, and is free. Available for Linux, Mac, iOS, Android, and Windows! https://justgetflux.com/

SunsetScreen is good if you live at an extreme latitude. Don't know if this has been addressed in recent updates, last time I used flux it wanted to start dimming my screen at 18.00 in the winter and close to midnight in the summer.

At the time, f.lux's devs seemed completely opposed to any kind of adjustable schedule for people who cannot follow the sun.

I use f.lux on Windows and it awesome.

Also, redshift is available for at least Linux, the BSDs, and an experimental version for Windows.

iOS and OS X has Night Shift, which is native implementation of the same idea.

Additionally Windows 10 has also introduced this option in Display Settings -> nightlight

ChromeOS supports this as well.

I guess this varies from person to person. Maybe it is a problem if you have trouble sleeping anyway, but as far as I'm concerned, I guess the blue light just keeps me awake as long as I need to finish whatever I'm doing, after that I usually have no trouble at all going to sleep. When using a blue-light-reduced "night mode" however, I find I can barely keep my eyes open...

There are special Gunnar glasses that seem to work well by reflecting blue light - they completely eliminated any eye strain I felt while coding in the night. Coupled with natural light lamp, it's a great combo for a winter coder.

Turned it on just now, thanks for sharing I didn't know that existed.

For those not using Gnome, gtk-redshift is great if using X11.

I use it on cinnamon all the time.

There is also a convenient Redshift applet for Plasma. Its package is called plasma-applet-redshift-control in Debian.

The part where they spoke about various populations sleeping for around an hour longer each night in the winter is very interesting to me.

It is quite logical, the night is much longer and we used to depend on the light cycle. Also many animals hibernate in the winter, we just sleep a bit more, it is an adaptation to environmental conditions: less light, less food, movement in lower temperatures require more energy, sleep conserves energy.

In my country we have a bit less than 9 hours of light in December and over 15 hours in June, we continuously adjust for it.

Well yes, it makes sense evolutionarily, but I don't think I had ever specifically heard someone suggest that not following such a pattern in modern times might have bad effects

Here are links to more concrete studies concerning this effect.

Action spectrum for melatonin regulation in humans: evidence for a novel circadian photoreceptor. Brainard et al. https://www.jneurosci.org/content/jneuro/21/16/6405.full.pdf

Phototransduction by retinal ganglion cells that set the circadian clock. Berson et al. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/295/5557/1070.ful...

Has anyone tested bright indoor lighting and its effect on their own sleep.

I have some LED studio lights for video work by my desk all the time. I'm wondering if I should just turn them on while I work each morning. From what I can tell:

1. LEDs won't cause sunburn/skin damage 2. There's no blue light risk of them if they're not rates above a certain level of light output and you don't stare directly at them.

I have to check the light rating, but it seems like there shouldn't be negative side effects to this. My new apartment gets little direct sunlight, so I've been feeling daytime darkness more acutely.

Plural of anecdote doesn't make data, but I've got one for you in any case:

I used to suffer quite badly from winter dips, I've since installed a IKEA Floalt panel right next to my desk. I turn it on when I sit down and turn it off when I'm done for the day. I run it at full brightness at the medium color temperature (which is still fairly reddish in my opinion). Since then it definitely seems that my winter dips have gotten significantly less severe, though actual sunlight still seems to work better.

Now all that said I'm aware it might just be a placebo effect, but honestly if a placebo stops me getting all gloomy I'm all for it. To me at least it seems that my winter dips are heavily influenced simply by environment brightness.

I bought a huge 10,000 lux lamp that was supposed to emit similar wavelengths to daylight because I found myself to be a bit sleepy during winters all day long. That one managed to "wake me up" and I ended up as productive as in summer. Some people also use it to alleviate their seasonal depression (never had that). I have it illuminating my workspace behind my back. I believe our eyes have some special "wake up" receptors that react to sunrise and this type of lamp seems to engage them.

Can you provide some details on that lamp, especially power consumption? It seems an interesting experiment that I would like to try.

I have one of these, but honestly haven't used it enough to assess it. It seems well made and bright enough to make a difference without being intolerable. I think it draws 14 watts.

Verilux HappyLight VT43 Luxe 10,000 Lux LED Bright White Light Therapy Lamp ($100)

https://verilux.com/products/happylight-luxe

for anyone interested - HL-NHB285-NP08B is a 30k lumen light for 150 dollars. it's 5000 kelvin color temperature. i parked one over my home office desk. it's like being outside at the park feeding birds, but inside. says 92 dollars per year power consumption. i dont know the terms of that calculation

tbf i know your unit of lux takes into account the distance over which the energy is dispersed and mine of lumens, does not

edit: a friend asked how to wire it. this is probably illegal in your jurisdiction but you can just lop the ends of an extension cord off, and direct wire the copper ends in and plug it into a wall outlet. you dont even need to buy wire nuts or any other accessory, other than possibly a hook, to hang the hook mount that comes with this unit. it took me like 10 minutes. this is not advice, no warranty is implied by my comment, i disavow all your actions if you do this. someone please correct my post and i will edit mine.

I looked up the CRI, and it's 80. That's fairly low, it has a different spectrum from daylight.

It probably works fine for this purpose mind you. I like the idea of mounting it overhead and illuminating the whole room.

https://images.homedepot-static.com/catalog/pdfImages/ee/ee8...

Interesting. Why behind rather than in front? And which type did you get?

The light is very strong even while diffuse, having it behind my back doesn't hurt my eyes and the effect is same. It's a non-LED one, not sure what is inside but it initially took 10 minutes to light up fully (now it's instant, probably some firmware for initial burn-in). I'll have to find box somewhere to tell you exact type.

Ah makes sense. Just checked mine and it's 3360 lux, so yours is 3x stronger.

I checked daylight, sunlight is 100,000 lux, and shade on a day with clear sky is 20,000. Our indoor lighting is way off!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight

https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B072Q42GXQ/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_.Fl...

I use similar ones for cinematography. Never occurred to me to use them at home as well :D When I think about it now, studios have huge lights that take a bit to warm up but then it feels like daylight, maybe my 10k lux is a similar tech...

LEDs could still have all the same issues, it depends on the LED and it's particular output spectrum and the energies for each wavelength. I would check all that before concluding they would be good or bad.

Exactly! Blue light doesn't mean just the colour of the light, but the wavelength, power output, flicker rate and so on. It's a good step, but pay attention to details ;-)

Which same issues - do you mean some LEDs emit UV?

They (usually) don't, but they do have a peak at blue frequencies[0].

[0] https://i.stack.imgur.com/lkyXG.png

Yeah. I think a high CRI would be what you'd want for this purpose. Those aim to match sunlight.

In college I lived in a windowless room for a year. I would have to get a light on a timer to flick on when I wanted to wake up, or else I'd wake up completely delirious at like 1-2pm rather than around 9am. I eventually switched to a full spectrum bulb and that helped with waking up a lot.

For a more historical take on our relationship with the night, I highly recommend At Day's Close by A. Roger Ekirch

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