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Comment by JonathanFly | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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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.

> 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

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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

This is why we have smoke detectors...

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

Opening a window?

Less helpful in winter.

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.

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.

It didn't. Now what?

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