Can Blocking Blue Light Help Bipolar Disorder As Well as Sleep Issues? (sciencealert.com) 230
A new experiment suggests sleeping with amber-tinted glasses can reduce the manic symptoms of bipolar disorder within three days. Slashdot reader schwit1 quotes a report from Science Alert:
The benefits of amber-tinted glasses are that they block blue light -- a major component of sunlight and the light beamed at us from our computer and phone screens. In the mornings, it's this blue light that helps reset our body clock each day. But a growing body of evidence is linking too much blue-light exposure in the evenings to problems including insomnia, obesity, depression, and other mental illnesses.
I wonder how many Slashdot readers are already trying to improve their sleep patterns by avoiding exposure to blue light?
I wonder how many Slashdot readers are already trying to improve their sleep patterns by avoiding exposure to blue light?
stay away from tech at night (Score:4)
Re:stay away from tech at night (Score:5, Funny)
Damn, I just wallpapered our bedroom with OLEDs.
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Damn, I just wallpapered our bedroom with OLEDs.
Hopefully not with that thick paste the grandparents used to make on the stove...
Don't rip it out just yet. It could be someone is looking at a little science with a rather large pair of rose-colored glasses.
Re:stay away from tech at night (Score:5, Funny)
It's fine as long as the LEDs are organic, not those nasty GMO LEDs.
Re:stay away from tech at night (Score:4, Interesting)
I have a pair of blue light blocking computer glasses that I use. Ever since I started using them, my sleep cycle has returned to normal.
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Re:stay away from tech at night (Score:5, Insightful)
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Blue-cut lenses have been popular in Japan for many years now. I bought some prescription glasses a few years back and noticed that I slept better when I wore them in the evening compared to my other pair with normal lenses. Same prescription on both, by the way.
So now all my glasses have blue-cut filters. Makes everything slightly yellow tinted, but it's really subtle. Kinda like those horrible old incandescent bulbs, but not as bad.
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Or maybe it doesn't affect you as much.
Not EVERYone who smokes gets lung cancer (including my grandmother who smoked for 50+ years), but that doesn't mean its bad.
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lol, missed the *not bad.
Re: stay away from tech at night (Score:3)
From years of personal experience, I found by reading a (real) book for 30-60 minutes after working on tech, at night, solves the insomnia problem.
I have always attributed this to tech over-stimulating the brain, nothing more fantastic than that.
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From years of personal experience, I found by reading a (real) book for 30-60 minutes after working on tech, at night, solves the insomnia problem
I find the same thing, reading something not on a device (a real book) tends to allow me to go to sleep more easily after staring at a monitor all day.
I wonder if the scanning/refreshing of the monitor or screen (which is to fast for us to perceive directly) has some effect on sleep cycles or the brain.
The screen refresh is apparently detected by our brain but for a variety of reasons we don't "see" it or perceive it directly. Perhaps just a bit of time away from the strobing of the screen allows our sleep
Re:stay away from tech at night (Score:5, Funny)
"I wonder how many Slashdot readers are already trying to improve their sleep patterns by avoiding exposure to blue light?"
I go to my local red light district!
Set the record straight (Score:2)
Histamine is responsible for drowsiness, not melatonin.
Re:Set the record straight (Score:4, Informative)
If you're going to set the record straight, shouldn't it be that the lack of histamine is responsible for drowsiness? Antihistamines typically make you drowsy.
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True, I stand corrected.
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You just got out-pedanted!
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Most antihistamines contain dimenhydrinate the same stuff that's used in gravol(anti-nausea meds) which is why it makes you drowsy. So for people who have problems sleeping, most doctors will tell you to take 1/4 to 1/2 up to a full gravol or generic 30 minutes before you go to bed. When that doesn't work, they'll usually move onto something like zolpidem/ambien or a barbiturate with an included hypnotic.
For me, I've been on and off again with stuff like that for ~3 years but it's due to pain issues. Sin
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Ambien leads to sleepwalking for me.. that was scary shit..
Never had that problem myself, but one of my ex-gf's from a few years ago was taking it because she worked a swing shift and could never readjust properly. She was one of those odd people who had a sleep-eating problem while taking anything like that. Though the first time it happened it was hilarious to see her face covered in chocolate and peanut butter.
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Wakefullness agents are suspected to operate now by central stimulation of H1 receptors. A few years ago, their mechanism-of-action was considered voodoo.
I tend to use non-central antihistamines daily because of a mold sensitivity I developed in an apartment (one day I just broke out in hives all over and couldn't sleep for days!). If I don't take 10mg Loratadine for 3 days, I start itching again; nowadays, after 4 years of continuous treatment, it seems to fade on its own less than an hour after onset
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Loratadine doesn't even (readily) cross the blood-brain barrier. You can kill yourself with Benadryl.
I tried Loratidine once, thinking that I had allergies. Turned out that I don't have allergies. But I do have a serious reaction with loratidine that causes irregular heartbeat. Six hours of the heart beating outside of a normal rhythm from taking a single pill.
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Use Fexofenadine then. Talk to your doctor BEFORE using Fexofenadine. Don't take Loratadine ever again. Tell your doctor Loratadine does that, and tell him it needs to be written into your medical history.
Loratadine works way better than Fexofenadine, and is counter-indicated only when a patient has a Loratadine sensitivity. Drug sensitivity is dangerous as hell; look up Monty Oum to see how that can work out. I historically have *no* drug sensitivities, and any sensitivities that the doctors discov
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Won't need to use it since I don't have any allergies after all. But of course that could change. I have an overactive immune system in a mostly good way.
Cure for Jet Lag (Score:2)
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Buy some hue bulbs and play for yourself. Setting the lights blue does seem to help a little with overcast mornings, although I generally can't stand the 6000K bulbs.
"Sleeping with amber-tinted glasses..." (Score:4, Funny)
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Perhaps one contributing factor is the use of CFL lightbulbs - many of them emit a bluish-white light. Save energy, but f*ck up your head? After all, you'll be more exposed to them at night.
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Honestly? The yellow tinted lights hurt my eyes at night. I buy 5000K LED bulbs.....even for my bedroom. The difference is that at that color temperature, I don't need to buy as strong of a wattage (or wattage equivalent). So instead of buying 60w equivalent, I'll get 40w equivalent. The colors are clear but not overwhelming. If I get a yellow bulb, I still need the 60w equivalent and the yellow color bothers me. For task focused areas (such as the kitchen and bathroom), I'll still get the stronger l
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I keep reddish bulbs for the bedroom, but 5000K everywhere else. For one thing, I can't differentiate color under soft white; everything has a yellow hue and life in sepia pisses me off.
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Your eye lids don't block light 100% effectively.
They do when the lights are turned off. Like when you turn off the lights and go to bed...
Re:"Sleeping with amber-tinted glasses..." (Score:5, Insightful)
Point ANY LED at your face while you're sleeping and I bet that you'll find it annoying...
Stop putting LEDs on everything. (Score:3)
Really do I need a red LED on my TV even when it is off?
Actually it is allowed by EU regulation (Score:2)
So as it is not functional, clearly there can be no LED. The TV is therefore OFF
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Really do I need a red LED on my TV even when it is off?
This "feature" has always bugged the hell out of me.
My TV has a red LED that's on when the set is off, but when you turn the TV on, the LED goes off. WTF? What's the point of that?
It makes NO sense.
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What if it is there to A- Tell you you are receiving power,
I don't need to know that it's receiving power when it's off. If I turn it "on" and no light appears, then I'll know I'm not receiving power.
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and B to inform you that the device isn't "off" it just has a no picture showing. I could be bit mining in the background for all you know.
It could be, but it's not hooked up to the internet.
And all that stuff aside, the point is that I don't need a light to be on to tell me the device is off. That's just silly.
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If the LED is still burning, it's not off.
Do you actually own any electronics?
Many (most?) modern electronics have an LED that is on when the device isn't powered up, just to tell you that the device has power. Many of them are red, some (such as my sound bar) are blue.
I usually cover up those LEDs with a piece of black electrical tape.
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The GP is right, that LED indicates that the device is in "standby" mode, not powered off. It's not using 0W of energy, it's wasting power looking for remote control signals or other activity. It also means it is vulnerable to mains spikes - I unplug valuable stuff so that if there is a storm it won't fry (yes I have surge protection too, it's not perfect).
How much power is wasted depends on the device. Years ago I had a cable box that used the same amount of power in standby mode as when it was on, because
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Yes I know that it is not really off but I do not see the need for an LED to tell me that it is in standby mode. If nothing else At least let me turn off the led. It is a waste of power. Even better a real off switch would be nice.
Also streetlights (Score:3)
Re:Also streetlights (Score:5, Interesting)
The LED traffic light issue is a funny one though, the lights are efficient enough that they don't put out enough heat, and can get covered by snow.
So now they need to put heaters in to melt the snow. :)
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You don't seem to grasp that it is still more efficient than having short-lived bulbs that constantly waste heat (when it's not snowing). Your smiley betrays your ignorance.
Those Damn Blue LEDs (Score:3)
The Blue LED a relatively new invention got really popular especially a decade ago. Having Blue LED Alarm Clocks, Blue LED indicators on electronics (as Green LED and Red LED are so old fashioned)
I had a Blue LED Alarm clock... And I really hated it. It did effect my sleep, because if in the middle of the night I wake up there is a blue glow that tricked me into thinking it was day time. I had sense went back to the boring Red LED clock where I can see the time, without feeling like I am glaring into the Sun at the middle of the night.
I am not sure about bipolar, but sleep issues with Blue LED do mess with me.
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I gave up on alarm clocks over a decade ago -- I wake up within about 10 minutes of 5 AM every day without any alarm clock. I found that all alarm clocks did for me was give me anxiety when I woke up in the middle of the night, reminding me how punishing it would be to not go back to sleep or some other time-related anxiety. If I absolutely have to be up at a certain time Or The Gates of Hell Will Open, I set an alarm on my smartphone, but when you can wake automatically at 5 that's almost never.
Any fucki
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Don't you feel special. Normally I wake up naturally around 4:30 every morning. However once in awhile I will oversleep, from an overly exhausting day, or if I am just not feeling 100%. Or if I just didn't sleep well that night.
I a soft alarm on so it isn't garring. But waking me up in about 20 seconds. Red Lights from a clock isn't that bad and if you wake up say at 4:10 you can see if you should wake up now vs. trying to go back to sleep.
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I stayed in a hotel for a week which, in addition to the parking lot lights had an architectural illumination light *right* outside my window. So not only did I have orange sodium vapor parking lot light, I had a white spotlight beaming into my room.
What's stupid is that the curtains do a great job of blocking the light, but they don't close/overlap completely. Never thought of the pants hanger option -- that's a great idea, but in this hotel I got 4 large binder clips from the front desk to pin the curta
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I just keep one eye closed until I turn the light out again.
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The Blue LED a relatively new invention got really popular especially a decade ago.
I'm not sure, but I think that the change from red to blue LEDs was driven by some international consortium on electronic standards or something.
They wanted to standardize "red" lights to indicate an error condition or something like that, and stated that it shouldn't be used to indicate "on" or any other normal, non-error condition. I looked for information on this but couldn't find anything right off.
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The sky overhead is blue before/at dawn. It may not be to the east, but certainly is elsewhere.
A little dubious. (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm a little dubious, on general principles. Plus my optometrist just suggested this new "blue-blocker" option for my glasses, it stops blue-laser light dead, a very impressive demonstration, but it paradoxically doesn't remove any blue from what you're looking at. Must be a very fine-tuned filter that just blocks one wavelength of blue. He talked on and on about the effects of blue light on sleep. Quite a hard-sell. And they want $140 for that option. Sounds like blue snake-oil to me.
Re:A little dubious. (Score:5, Interesting)
A few years ago I noticed that I was getting a lot of headaches from eyestrain due to looking at computer monitors all day. I was flipping through some electronics magazine and noticed an add for special gaming glasses for FPS "sports". $200 for non-prescription tinted glasses. I thought of trying those, but not for $200 down. Fast forward 3 months and I'm due for getting new glasses and I find that my ophthalmologist's office is having a buy one pair, get a second pair free sale. Thinking back to the ad I asked him if I can have the second pair an adjusted prescription with a yellow tint akin to my Yellow #8 [google.com] camera filters. The adjusted prescription gives me optimum clarity at between 1-3 feet in front of me (about the same as readers), and the yellow tint blocks out enough of the blue light that I don't get any headaches anymore. If I had to pay full price for the second pair, the tint was only going to add $20 on top of the normal prescription lens price (for me with all the additional options I usually get like anti-scratch, polycarbonate, etc is roughly about $200-300).
tl;dr version: There's definitely something to blue blocking to reducing the effects of looking at a computer screen, but it shouldn't raise the price of your normal lenses by any significant amount.
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I completely agree, I've been wearing yellow tinted glasses for three years now. Just last week, I forgot to switch glasses at night and I was up tossing and turning rather than passing out in less than five minutes.
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I have this option on all my glasses and I'm a fan of it, but I paid about $10 for it.
I think we get screwed on glasses in the west. They make out like they are some huge deal. Takes two weeks to get the lenses, so they must be precision, custom made devices right? And the light weight options, the nice thin frames, they all cost a small fortune because, I dunno, precision engineering or something.
In Japan the basic frames are light weight and durable, the basic lenses are light weight and blended don't dis
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I wear progressive bifocals which gave me fits on computer monitors due to the narrow focal length on the lens they provide at computing distances.
I asked the ophthalmologist for a prescription specifically for computer distances and it's been a miracle, so much so that I sprung for a second pair to keep in my work laptop bag. It's a single distance prescription, but less strong than my nearsighted distance prescription. It's flexible enough that it works for laptops and large displays set back on desks o
Clickbait Science (Score:4, Informative)
OB xkcd [xkcd.com], and OB PhD Comics [phdcomics.com].
Not long ago, we were all being told that illumination that mimics natural sunlight cures Seasonal Affective Disorder. Now we're being told it causes insomnia and bipolar disorder. If you look at the original article [plos.org], the effect is tiny at best.
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Blue light exposure in the morning can help with SAD. Blue light in the evening might cause insomnia and other mental health problems. It's all about how the blue light exposure timing ties in with your circadian rhythms.
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My bad. here [wiley.com] is the main paper referred to in TFA (although the one I posted is also referenced.).
However, the point stands: the press report is breathless hype of one very small study, with only 23 patients and a threshold of p , using a largely subjective test as a measure. That doesn't mean the study is wrong, but it does mean that everybody running out and buying blue blocking sunglasses to fight bipolar disorder is an insane and utterly unscientific response.
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Typo: Should read "threshhold of p less than 0.05".
f.lux & sleep hygiene (Score:5, Informative)
I'm guessing most of the Slashdot crowd already knows about f.lux [justgetflux.com], which I use on my PC's to (attempt to) reduce nighttime exposure to blue light. I don't know how well it does or doesn't work for me, but it helps just as a reminder to unplug an hour or two before my intended bedtime, if possible.
Practicing good sleep hygiene [harvard.edu] has tangibly improved my sleep and well-being over the past several years, though I noticed results within a week, once I learned and adopted good practices from my sleep doctor. Keeping the right ambient temperature (a surprisingly low 65-70 degrees for me), avoiding light exposure (completely blocked bedroom windows, taped over LED lights, removing all light sources but two red night-lights), getting a truly comfortable mattress, avoiding late meals/snacks/fluid intake, and (more challenging for couples) sleeping alone make the biggest differences for me.
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The 80's had it right, wearing sunglasses at night (Score:4, Funny)
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The 80's had a lot of things [google.com] right.
Sounds pretty crappy. (Score:2)
So, it is supposed to "reduce the manic symptoms of bipolar disorder." Instead of being depressed some of the time, now you can be depressed ALL the time.
Many people with this disorder decide that they'd rather have the highs where they can get a million things done and are more creative, than to be dull all the time.
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Re:Sounds pretty crappy. (Score:5, Interesting)
Hypomania is kind-of-sort-of awesome. Not really, but it feels that way, like cocaine or a small dose of meth might.
Full mania involves a facial rictus like the Joker, being unable to stop grinning, giggling at everything. You drive fast, you make bad decisions, you don't care. Everything is awesome, all things are awesome. The inside of your skull burns, and it's awesome; you can feel your neurons screaming, and you want to shoot yourself in the head with a shotgun to make it stop, because it's so awesome, too much awesome, it burns so much and it's awesome like a vicious nuclear fire inside your skull.
Even a hypomanic episode can completely cancel any urge to sleep. You wake up the next day still feeling awesome, but also tired; your eyes burn, your head hurts, your body creaks and cracks around you, and you drag yourself, nauseated and battered by sleep deprivation, out of bed because you just can't stay still. It's bad but it's cool because you feel kind of great and kind of shitty at the same time. You might spend days or even several months without more than a few hours sleep each night; you start feeling high all the time, like you're smoking opium constantly, but the sedation is just extreme sleep deprivation. You can't think straight and can't get anything done, and you feel useless, but also pretty awesome, actually.
Unless you're stable against suicide, mania is a good time to kill yourself, since it's both terrible and uninhibited: it's a shitty way to go through life, and you feel a lot more confident about going on and offing yourself. Most bipolar suicides occur during a manic episode.
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I have found, over the years, that learning various disciplines is invaluable.
I have studied Tai Chi to the point that, to physics students, I often explain how it is just about seeking extreme mechanical efficiency (and then applying that in a martial arts context), and is basically physics in disguise: the major difference in how it is thought of and explained, traditionally, is due to two things, one of which is the cumulative effect of 'Chinese Whispers', and the other is that you do not have time to ge
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Of course I'm a polymath, too. Not as much as I'd like (re: ADHD; working on that, currently decided to light myself up with 100mg of Phenotropil and yeah, as I decided years ago, that's too much. Minor jaw-clenching, i.e. too much stimulant).
Tai Chi and Meditation are familiar, and have become less-interesting to me. Meditation is fine, but doesn't do what I want; learning to draw would be a boon, but requires more investment than meditation of many forms. I may take up a boxing-type sport (solitary
How about (Score:2)
Re: How about (Score:2)
I've been making screen dimming apps for Android (RootDim and ScreenDim) for a long time, and have often wondered why the minimum system brightness on just about all devices is so high. Here is my hypothesis. If one sets the display to a level where it's visible but not bright in pitch black conditions, the display may be invisible in normal conditions. This could result in customers complaining their device is broken as they can't see the screen. (But there are alternatives to just setting the minimum high
f.lux (Score:2)
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It is pretty striking when it changes but after a few minutes my eyes adjust and I don't even notice it. It does seem to help, haven't had any problems sleeping after I started using it.
It can no doubt have different effects with different people. I have never been one to need 8 hours a night, andAfter trying it, it made no difference. Not too surprising because I didn't get 8 a night even before computers were prevalent.
If I get 5 a night, I'm fine. I fall asleep when I'm tired, wake up refreshed after five, and i'd probably strees if I bouthg the latest " If you don't get 8 hours, you are killing yourself" FUD.
But I have no doubt there are lot of people who do need the straight 8.
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f.lux (and redshift if you prefer F.LOSS on X11) is great until you're doing something color corrected and its f.ucked up your calibration.
And how! I forgot to mention I use Photoshop a lot, and made the mistake of using it with f.lux turned on.
Heh... (Score:2)
From what I heard from friends that are bipolar as well as pop books written on the subject (supplied by them in order to understand them better), the manic part is actually quite nice - you feel sharp and full of energy and creativity. Many a creative work has entered society from those heights. Of course, they also tend to make very bad (over-confident) life decisions in that stage... Which is why treatment is geared towards attenuating that stage (as well as the depressive stage, obviously) towards (very
Amber tinted glasses really work. (Score:3)
I don't sleep with them, I just don't keep anything that emits blue light in the room I sleep in. But if I need to be sure of getting a good night's sleep I'll put a pair of amber safety glasses on a few hours before I want to go to bed. It makes a noticeable difference. Google S1933X for cheap, optically OK amber tinted safety glasses which are dramatically opaque to far blue spectrum light. As a bonus when you put them on all those annoying super-bright blue LEDs simply disappear. You have to take the glasses off to see whether a blue LED is lit.
And if you feel like a dork wearing safety glasses around the house, just remind yourself this is brain hacking. I've contemplated trying EEG hedsets and TMS all that kind of stuff, but never have taken the plunge; but for $12 and being willing to look an ass you can actually alter the function of your brain to be more to your liking, which is kind of cool. Now I can unwind at the end of the day by watching Netflix -- after awhile your brain adjusts to the altered color temperature and in most cases you don't miss the bright blue. Instead of binge watching into the wee hours you'll get sleepy and go to bed at a reasonable time.
the truth (Score:2)
too much blue light can trick your brain into thinking it's daytime. the result of this is it requires more time for your brain to enter sleep mode leading to reduced amount of sleep overall.
what about people with bipolar disorder? well, we already know that not getting enough sleep also results in increased emotional volatility in people with bipolar disorder.
so yes, blocking blue light can help people that have sleep issue but then again, sources of blue light are completely artificial, so you're doing
iGadgets to the rescue (Score:2)
iOS 9.3 or so and on suitably new hardware (iPhone 6 or newer, equivalent on the rest of the zoo) came with Night Mode that filters out blue wavelength emmision on the screen within the specified nightly interval. Start time, end time and the amount of filtering adjustable.
Of course, that did not prevent scads of iGadget users perennially on autopilot to start moaning & bitching about how their fancy-shmancy screens had gone yellow, the night after they had willy-nilly upgraded their iOS version without
I find f.lux helpful...as does the family (Score:2)
https://justgetflux.com/ [justgetflux.com]
Turns down the blue at night then gets out of way during the day.
Works as advertised. Recommended.
Apple has finally caught up in iOS 9.3
http://metro.co.uk/2016/03/22/... [metro.co.uk]
As someone suffering from chronic insomnia (Score:2)
Not subtle (Score:2)
"I wonder how many Slashdot readers are suffering from bipolar disorder", the article asks. "You are programming nerds, surely there is lots wrong with you."
Which, on the whole, is not a very nice thing to say to your loyal readers.
View from a sufferer (Score:4, Interesting)
Apologies if what follows comes across as a rant. Thus is an extremely sore topic for me.
As someone with bipolar diagnosis (and an autistic spectrum disorder diagnised over a decade after the bipolar diagnosis), I can say from my experience that two different people with the same diagnostic label can have markedly different problems. What works is heavily dependent on what exactly is happing in the patient's life and mind, and upon what intellectual, social, family and other resources they have at their disposal.
The idea that you can treat all instances of a bipolar patient as sufficiently similar that a clinical trial of a treatment will yield useful, meaningful and reliable information as to what will help an arbitrary new patient with the same diagnosis is something for which I have yet to come across empirical support for (consider how different software can cause the same hardware to behave markedly differently, the futility of trying to fix serious software errors with simple hardware patches, and the foolishness of taking 1000 windows PCs which regularly blue screen, and conducting a double blind randomised controlled trial on treatments for PCs with 'compulsive blue screen disorder'). I am sorry to say, that to me psychiatric research is thus brain damaged in its basic methodologies.
The idea that chemical imbalances are a cause rather than a symptom is something yet to be justified, as is the idea that bipolar disorders can be understood at a biochemical level and remedied with chemicals with any degree of reliability. Then things like whether the person has a (possibly undiagnosed) autistic spectrum disorder or not are ignored (I have recently received an ASC diagnosis), and if not ignored, old trials are not revisited in the event that new diagnostic information has come to light regarding participants of old trials which would have affectee the trial and possibly the outcome. By comparison, if a physicist discovers a component in his exoerimental apparatus has a bias, he or she will not ignore the matter if it could significantly affect the conclusions of the experiment. The psychpharmalogical juggernaut just rolls on, turning mental health into a game of drug sales, cattle management, and explaining away all alternatives: behaviour reminiscent of hard sell marketing, not proper scientific inquiry.
As for blue light, at times when extremely sensitive, blue light can, due to extreme sensitivity, be confused with daylight, with consequences for how your brain tries to sync to daylight. In times of extreme sensitivity (which can be diagnosed as manic episodes, as can episodes of manic behaviour driven differently), it is like the gain on yout brain inputs is turned up too high, is saturated, distorting, and your brain then attempts to make sense of the distorted sensory input on the implicit assumption that it is free of distortion. That, at least, has been my experience in the past (once in hospital they used bright blue-tinted flashlights to see if we were in bed, for example, resulting in my being awoken so strongly when about to go to sleep that there was no possibility of sleep for a number of hours, and jobbing nursing staff often want their jobs to be as easy for themselves as possible, and care little if that has negative ramifications for the patients).
In addition, check out 'Deprived of our Humanity' by Lars Martensson (what he writes accords much with my experience), madinamerica, Joanna Moncrieff's books (myth of chemical cure, straight talking intro), Richard Bentall's books, Lucy Johnstone's books (straight talking intro), details of successful outcomes (beyond what is achieved with typical pharmacologically centred approaches) using alternative approaches (see e.g. Daniel Mackler's open dialog documentary, on youtube now).
Feynman had a wonderful couple of quotes in his Cargo Cult Science talk:
"But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselvesâ"of having utter scientific integrityâ"is, Iâ(TM)m sorry to say, something that we
Exercise, sleep hygiene (Score:3)
I've only ever had problems sleeping when I don't exercise, I work hard so I'm usually ready to sleep even after not exercising for up to a year. Best quality sleep I've found is when I have that sore feeling after a workout, I love that feeling and sleep is deep.
I've got a recipe for sleep hygiene as well, it's pretty simple.
I don't know if there is any significant impact when the above is considered, however I avoid blue light. I usually on the computer up until 5 minutes before I sleep. By which stage there is very little that will keep me awake. When I train my wife tells me I am usually asleep within 30 seconds of putting my head on the pillow.
I will relate one other experience though. I've found that knots in your back may not be painful to the point that you are aware of them however they will keep you awake by simply making you uncomfortable. I posted here months ago about the extreme physiotherapy I have put myself through [slashdot.org] and part of resolving the scar tissue from sports injury meant I went through a period of several months where the knots in my back were so painful that they would wake me up at night and I could not sleep again. Fortunately those knots were also destroyed and it no longer affects me.
Just because you don't have current injuries doesn't mean the former ones, stress and emotional issues aren't affecting you in unexpected ways by manifesting physical issues (especially knots in the back). Losing sleep effects a degenerative feedback loop which can be broken by resolving the scar tissue from the injuries and the knotted muscles from stress and emotional issues. The physiotherapy may be confronting, however it's preferable to the frustration of nights without sleep and feeling like a zombie the next day.
New Ghostbusters movie (Score:2)
it's bogus (Score:2)
clearly just a shill for the blublockers sunglasses corporation.
sleeping with amber-tinted glasses ? (Score:2)
I'm sure I would find that very uncomfortable. However, in light (a pun?) of this information I've decided to sleep with my eyes closed, preferably in a dark room, in hope that the blue frequency will be blocked.
Re:Placebo effect? (Score:5, Funny)
And how are we supposed to know those tests work if you use blind people?
Think, people, think!
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Any solutions for television outside of manually adjusting the temperature?
Turning it off?
Re: Flux screen gamma correcting software... (Score:2)
Drive the TV from a laptop and use color correction on the laptop?
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Not terribly useful for the TV in the bedroom....
I usually go to sleep with the TV on, with a timer set to shut itself off after about an hour.
It is kind of my nightlight....I actually have difficulty falling to sleep (or many things) to a 100% quiet and dark room. But that is a LOT of blue light coming in there now with new 65" tv....would be nice to have a "go to sleep" color setting...hmm.
Re: Flux screen gamma correcting software... (Score:3)
A projector can work great in a bedroom. Point it upward and project on the ceiling and you can watch while lying down. Or use a white wall or even vinyl rollup curtains (though the last shares the movie with the neighbors, so it needs to be family friendly).
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...or even vinyl rollup curtains (though the last shares the movie with the neighbors, so it needs to be family friendly).
I don't care if my neighbors find out that I'm into lesbian-nun fisting porn.
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You might be able to replace the television with a combination of light and sound generator on a timer, like lava lamp and white noise generator, or red lamp and background music, or whatever combination hits the right level of comfort for you.
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You might be able to replace the television with a combination of light and sound generator on a timer, like lava lamp and white noise generator, or red lamp and background music, or whatever combination hits the right level of comfort for you.
I find a fan provides a nice level of white noise, although sometimes I play a sound file of "rain on a roof" and that seems to be very pleasant to fall asleep to.
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Not to get pedantic, but rose-colored glasses let a lot of blue light in too. Not pure-red.
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