Hacker News Reader

Comment by emrah | Hacker News Reader

It may not help with sleeping better but nightshift mode seems to make it easier on the eyes at night in my experience so still worth enabling I think

View on HN

I understand that technology is often a young-man's game. The drivers of the professional and hobbyist culture starts with college aged kids with lots of time on their hands, more or less. And a lot of that time is staying up late when it's quiet and no one is bothering you, coding, gaming, playing online, doing projects, etc.. at night, stereotypically while jacked up on caffeine.

But the stark reality is, when looking at anxiety and depression rates in this country we need to focus more on just how technology has become total immersion and reality augmenting to the point our brains never get to calm down from all the over-stimulation.

Quality sleep is one of many factors we could promote to reduce suicides and psychiatric disorders. The professional, educational and even hobbyist requirement that 20 somethings and teenagers spend endless hours at night attached to a screen needs to come with health hazard awareness akin to government warnings on packs of cigarettes, IMHO.

I think FOMO fuels a desire to stay attached to screens (or fuels a rejection of mind-calming activities), which in turn increases FOMO when 90% of social media is about productivity life hacks, boasting about doing fun things, impressive personal projects, and side hustles making money. People expect a public health solution to this problem but I suspect there is none besides increasing access to tools like therapy or digital sabbaticals.

It isn't FOMO, it is just that the real world is boring since nothing happens without a lot of effort. From a computer you can go and see what most parts of the world looks like via Google maps, play any game, watch people do anything you can think about on youtube etc, all with no effort from you. It is very hard for reality to compete with that.

For me it isn't the world is boring, it's just horribly painful all the time. So I numb myself in tech instead of trying to deal with it.

It's not productive to my happiness or sustainable, yet here I am just waiting it out.

One big change is to not have a TV in your bedroom.

This is why I change the color temperature in the evening, as well as using light theme during the day and dark themes in the evening/at night.

If it would help with sleep, then great. But even if it doesn't help with sleep, then I will still continue for the sake of my poor, old eyes.

It's a very faint side effect but the temperature change on my screen is often a very soft but very efficient trigger for me to shift into bedtime mindset.

I've had the same experience. I keep a deep orange filter on my monitor all the time, and I noticed my eyes started hurting a lot when I forgot to turn the filter back on after I had temporarily disabled it. There is also some evidence that prolonged exposure to blue light is correlated with macular degeneration, but there's no conclusive evidence that it causes it.

> I keep a deep orange filter on my monitor all the time

I've also started doing this recently and it helps a lot. The only time where it's a problem is when working with design/photography obviously. It's not a pleasant surprise when I turn it off and realize that colors are not that great.

I’ve been using f.lux for maybe 10 years on a fixed lower color temp. This is basically killing blues and renders everything pinkish. This has been a very good solution for my eye strain. Another very good one is to look at magic eye stereograms for 3-5 minutes a day

I tried using other people’s computer and the regular image is noticeably bothering my eyes.

I've never been able to see stereograms, and I'm pretty sure it's because my eyes are at slightly different roll angles from each other, due to a surgery when I was young. One of these days I should just try writing a program to decode them for me!

Eye convergence has always been marginal for me, and as I grow older it does tend to cause some mental strain when I'm tired. I haven't correlated that strain to blue light yet, though. I do use the blue light filter on my phone at night, though, and it does perhaps have a slightly positive psychological effect.

My eyes are sensitive to light (blue eyes are usually more sensitive) but the stereogram exercise is to exercise the eyes muscles. When we spend a lot of time reading off as screen close by we use a specific range. When looking at magic eye stereograms we are forced into a different mode and I found it helpful for myself. I could not see stereograms at first and had a hard time with a binocular microscope as well, the image would not converge into one. I first learned to use that (and I remember pulling one of the eyes from the side to make the two images converge into one and once converged I would let go the finger and let the eye muscles get used to the new position) then I struggled a couple of days with stereograms. After a day or two of trying I started to make the image pop up but would lose it quickly. After more exercises I could keep the image in focus and look change the gaze all over the image, stare at each corner, etc. When I managed to do that my eyes started to feel much better, the eye strain that had been bothering me for some months went away. The eye strain comes back when I spend too much time in front of the screen and looking at a few stereograms makes it go away. Not entirely sure if you had the same problem but I did hear a bunch of people healing eye strains with stereograms. It could possibly be a certain type of eye strain only. Hope you figure it out one day.

I set nightshift mode to automatically turn on in the evenings on my computer. I basically don't even notice it - unless I play a (certain) game at night that does not seem to honor the amber shift, and it seems very blue and very bright. Additionally, I will occasionally read my Kindle at night, and after using the computer in nightshift mode, the Kindle does seem extra blue and extra bright. I got a kindle OASIS for that reason, since it has a warm light mode, and it definitely makes reading more comfortable.

Yeah, I have mine cranked all the way to the most amber. And when reading in bed at night, I'll also have the brightness at the absolute minimum.

Sometimes even that's not enough and I'll use the accessibility settings to make things even redder.

YOu get the most eye-friendly setup by going further in Accessibility settings and enabling VoiceOver. Start off with a slow speech setting, and try reading a few pages of text with it. I guess the most useful gesture for this is two-fingers-swipe-down, which will introduce VoiceOver to read all page elements from the current select one onwards

iBooks also has (or at least had last time I tried) pretty good VoiceOver support, will turn the pages automatically if you read with the mentioned two-fingers-swipe-down gesture.

The speech synth might need a little getting used to, but rest assured, what you're getting is way better then what people used to use in the 90s and earlier. Speech synths sounded a lot more unnatural then these days. I am mentioning this because it is actually a built-in feature. No need to install third-party apps. Of course, strictly speaking, this is a screen reader developed for the blind, but that shouldn't stop anyone to benefit from it when it comes to giving your eyes a break.

It could be a placebo, or Apple's implementation (I don't use a mac at night to judge) but the Windows and ChromeOS implementations seem to work for me. It doesn't improve sleep quality so much as helps me wind down at night and actually get to bed.

I can't say it helps eyestrain for me, either. The only effect I get is that sleepy time feeling comes in smoothly and naturally.

If a little speaker starts playing the sounds of the ocean 2 hours before you want to go to sleep, or a little bell starts ringing, or the smell of almonds wafts through the air, or you set an alarm 2 hours beforehand and slap a yellow sticker on your left wrist. Or anything else that isn't overly annoying and yet noticeable - that would probably have the same effect. All you really need is for something to be informing you, continuously but not invasively, that you need to start winding things down and to not start up anything that gets you pumped back up.

In that sense, nightshift, etc – are overengineered lies. Placebo effect. The results are real, but they are because you've decided you want to go to bed at a certain time, and you don't want to wind yourself up in the hour or two before that moment. All you really need is a reminder. Any reminder.

The 'science' behind the effect of blue light on your sleep is probably complete hogwash (it was always dubious, and unless the linked-to experiment is a statistical fluke, a lie, or seriously mismanaged - very hard to continue to support). But you don't need such fancy things. All you really need is a function that stops you from 'winding up' in the 2 hours before sleep. Anything will do. Shifting the colours on the screen is one of a billion ways that works.

Even better, the analog (or old) solution: just shutdown or sleep the PC/screen for 20-30 min and meanwhile do anything else.

I try to stop being exposed to any electronic displays an hour before going to bed. There's enough to do, like meditate, read a bit, make lunch/es, shower, etc.

Exactly. Read a real book before bed. No blue light there.

Easier on the eyes -> more time spent using your phone and not sleeping?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com