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Comment by tylerwhipple | Hacker News Reader

If anyone is struggling with sleep, I highly recommend episode 1-3 of the Huberman Lab podcast (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-XfCl-HpRM), it has literally changed my life. Dr. Huberman is a Neurobiologist at Stanford and explains the science of sleep vs just telling you to not look at bright screens at night.

I struggled with sleeping for 20+ years, now I easily wake up early.

The biggest game changer: Sunlight in your eyes within 30 minutes of waking up. Try morning walks for 1 week (without sunglasses) and your life will be changed.

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>The biggest game changer: Sunlight in your eyes within 30 minutes of waking up. Try morning walks for 1 week (without sunglasses) and your life will be changed.

For me I had to also really avoid light at night. F.lux or Windows Night Mode is not enough. You gotta suffer with strong indoor lightblocker glasses, or use e-ink or something at night.

And in the winter there sometimes isn't enough sun. You need a LOT of lightbulbs to make up the difference. A minimum of 10 100-watt bulbs in my experience, and even more is better.

The real test if this will help you: think back to a time when you were camping, or maybe a child at a summer camp in the woods, or a vacation somewhere without lots of light at night and where you got lots of sun in the morning. Did your sleep schedule naturally shift to become more regular? If it did, then light therapy has a very high chance of helping you.

> You need a LOT of lightbulbs to make up the difference.

Indeed. You can measure ambient light with your phone: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.vonglasow.michael.satsta...

Pointing my phone towards the sun gives upward of 4000 lux, whereas the two bulbs in my room barely add up to 1000 from 1m away.

Those apps aren't at all accurate: https://www.dialux.com/en-GB/news-detail/luxmeter-app-versus...

Value for sunlight should even be higher, the bulb is only a little too high. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight

The outside at midday in summer on a sunny day is more like 120,000 Lux.

Yeah, point the phone camera to the sun will saturate the camera sensor and not lead to an accurate value for flux.

> Did your sleep schedule naturally shift to become more more regular? If it did, then light therapy has a very high chance of helping you.

You just made me feel I might be on the brink of a startling discovery. Holy hell, I have tried a lot to improve sleep. I haven't tried this. And while there was one confounding variable in my case with camping, it did indeed shift my sleep rhythm to the day/night cycle of the country I was in!

Also remember that when you're out camping, you're probably getting more exercise, too, not just sunshine. A walk in the sunshine is both walk and sunshine. The two in combination may explain more than sunshine alone.

It didn't. Now what?

> A minimum of 10 100-watt bulbs in my experience, and even more is better.

Plugging in some rough numbers, that seems equivalent to a ~170W LED flood light. A 200W version is $70 from Amazon (e.g. [1]). Are the emitted wavelengths crucial or is such a lamp on a timer a viable way to get early "sunlight" in the winter?

1: https://www.amazon.com/Waterproof-Daylight-Security-Floodlig...

I think CRI does matter, I’m guessing the parent post saw something like this article.

https://www.benkuhn.net/lux/

That may have been exactly the article I saw, there's certainly more useful information in there than I can answer. I pretty much just took away MORE BULBS.

The setup that I have... I have 5 led flood lights, 1 3000K, 2 4000K and 2 6000K.

I point them at the ceiling to get diffused light. I use different combination of some on / off to get the right warmness depending the time of day. Ie. 3000K in early morning / late in the day. Combination of 3000K and 4000K for around 9am. 2 4000K if I feel sleepy.

They work quite well. I suggest trying it out if you have seasonal affective disorder or trouble sleeping

I rock a pair that is this strong: https://www.swanwicksleep.com/pages/code-red-rebels

Absolutely changed my life in a positive way. I routinely just want to fall sleep now around 10pm if I slip those on around 6:30-7.

Before i wore the blue light blockers. I’d often lie awake until 12-1am while watching my partner sleep. It was so distressing.

I've thought about trying to simulate an outdoors awakening. With Phillips hue lights you can simulate the sunrise, then a smart thermostat for having the air become warmer. You could play bird chirping noises as well. Can't do much about making the air smell different in the morning like it does outdoors.

Opening a window?

Less helpful in winter.

you can definitely have one of those perfume sprayers, and there's bound to be lots of companies making a "morning woods" fragrance somewhere that you can plug in there

You cannot smell while you are asleep Rachel Herz, professor of psychiatry at Brown University.

This is why we have smoke detectors...

I worked some pretty grueling swinging shift work as a Stationary Engineer in a high pressure steam boiler plant for a couple of years. I bought a "bright light therapy" lamp and it seemed to make a difference for a while, but I was never able to make it's usage a sustainable habit. Just throwing its existence out there in case it could be helpful to someone.

I also tried colored LED lighting in my computer space. I turn it down and red, kind of like those rooms where people develop photographic film. It works wonders for getting me to feel tired after a while.

>The biggest game changer: Sunlight in your eyes within 30 minutes of waking up.

I don't think the sun rises for another hour after I wake up for work.

You can emulate this effect via Dawn Simulators

Buy a wake-up light alarm clock. Costs max. 50€ for a base version. Popular here in the Nordics for obvious reasons.

The suggestion is sunlight without sunglasses after waking up. That is extremely bright light hitting your eyes. Wake-up alarm clocks may be helping you, but not as a substitute for whatever is being suggested here.

> Sunlight in your eyes within 30 minutes of waking up.

I live in Florida - our license plates don’t call it the sunshine state for nothing - but even here the sun doesn’t rise at 5am. Short of blasting my retinas with bright lights soon after reveille, I don’t see where I’m going to obtain sunlight this early in the morning.

(It’s 07:21 local time now, and the sun is just now coming up. It’ll be a beautiful sunrise, but I’ve already been awake 2.5 hours…)

Well, yes, waking up in the the middle of the night is not great for your ability to have a normal sleep schedule.

I don't think many would consider 5 am to be the middle of the night, nor does it make sense to change how much you sleep with the seasons

In my city during winter the Sun rises at 8:30am... so I'm afraid that won't be possible for people wanting (or needing) to wake up too early.

Do you think one of those "simulates natural light" LED lamps are actually equivalent in terms of faking real sunlight?

I have one of the Phillips alarms [0]. Do not currently use it, but regularly did for a year or two.

I don't feel it's bright enough to mimic true sunlight, but it is much brighter than typical light sources. Especially at full brightness on a nightstand.

I've never had problems waking up, so can't speak to those who do. But I would absolutely say it made the experience of waking up smoother and more pleasant.

I'd describe it as a normal waking being jarring, even without alarm, where I have a brief moment of confusion as my brain snaps into consciousness.

Whereas with the light almost every morning was a smoother transition, where I rose to consciousness more gradually, while still sleeping, and then basically opened my eyes already awake.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Philips-Simulation-Headspace-Subscrip...

Yes they are. It really does make a difference.

Sunlight in your eyes that early isn't very easy during winter months when the sun may not come up till 8 or later.

However I can confirm that sunlight in the eyes is a great way to stay awake during long road trips (ie sunglasses can make me drowsy).

Even now. I've been awake since 5, it's now 9 am and we're just getting to the point where I would consider it day time. And that's 3 months away from the darkest day of the year. Changing to standard time changes a bit for a bit, but up here in Canada we go to work and come home in the dark.

I'm pretty allergic to Smart Home sort of stuff, but I've wondered if it makes sense to get a bunch of lights I program to be "Bright and sunlike" during the day and "dim and reddish" at night for my home.

It seems like this might be a passive way to add in some of the benefits of "morning walk in the sun" and "avoiding screens at night", and one that might be more robust to winter. Obviously the lifestyle improvements stemming from going for a walk and not doomscrolling twitter go beyond the light hitting you.

Man, I was able to go from barely able to wake up with alarm at 8:30 to waking up at 7 or even before by my own, even on weekend when I was up a little longer. And all it took was to force my self 2 times to get out of bed and have a coffee on the balcony to soak up the sun. That podcast is golden. I think the main help was to be able to go to sleep earlier thanks to tuning the system. I feel tired at 10-11 PM. That never happened to me before.

Sun. One of requirements for rent—must have east/south-east facing window.

> Sunlight in your eyes within 30 minutes of waking up

Sure, that's super easy in summer. I wake up naturally no problem when the rise is up. I've thought many times of getting sun-equivalent lights that I can schedule to turn on for this reason.

Sucks for me who lives on a place where the first rays of sunlight come at 7:30ish at this point of the year, and 9:45 a few months later...

What if you're doing night shifts?

What really worked for me is having a full glass of water on my bed stand. Wake up and drink the entire glass. It really works immediately for me.

I think the parent comment is aimed at people who have trouble waking up because they didn't get enough sleep, not just because they're sleepy.

Sunlight in the eyes doesn’t fix that issue either.

Um, it actually does, if you have a circadian rhythm sleep disorder (for which one of the treatments is light therapy, aka getting sunlight in your eyes[1]).

Conversely, I'm not aware of any sleep disorders that are treated by drinking a glass of water in the morning.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circadian_rhythm_sleep_disorde...

Anecdotally it seems to work well even if I’ve had only 5-6 hours of sleep that night.

I don't think that you have a sleep disorder, and so your anecdote isn't even usable as anecdata for those of us who do (including the top-level comment, which reads "I struggled with sleeping for 20+ years" - this isn't just "occasionally sleeping poorly").

Podcast looks good. Thanks for sharing.

Heads-up for those who care: It's a commercial podcast with sponsors, trojan ads and all, sadly.

https://hubermanlab.libsyn.com/rss

I've found his recommendations/sponsors to be extremely useful. They are curated choices in market areas I am unfamiliar with.

It's not. I couldn't get through the first 2 episodes without rolling my eyes every 10 minutes. It's full of all the standard neuro-bunk that is everywhere these days. Making very obvious points about human behavior that neuroscience does not illuminate, but making it sound otherwise ("kids are more impulsive because their brains are different"...duh). And cherry picking studies to confirm some "blow-your-mind" point that is actually much more fuzzy and contentious than he is willing to describe ("brain rewiring ONLY occurs during sleep"...not remotely supported by any study anywhere, and conveniently he never posts any sources or studies in his description or on his website). The cherry on top was noticing that he invited noted neuro-bollocks offender Matt Walker (who wrote a book called "Why We Sleep" which literally never even attempts answer the titular question). I'd pass on this one.

I agree. Listened to the episode on ADHD and it was pretty lame, unstructured and somewhat wrong at times. Also saw there is an episode with Lex Fridman, so I guess it's the same pseudo intellectual bla bla bla sponsor juice. Not the best advertising for those big name universities, tbh.

Btw. I can wholeheartedly recommend the "big biology" podcast, if you are interested in biology in general.

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