I find it somewhat pleasant, but by far the best thing I did to help my eye strain was greatly lower the brightness. Basically, I was told to make it so that my phone's camera could see something on the screen and my desk at the same time without washing out.
After doing that, I have found that the "temperature" of the screen doesn't really matter to me that heavily.
> Basically, I was told to make it so that my phone's camera could see something on the screen and my desk at the same time without washing out
+1. The low-tech version of this I've heard and I've been doing is:
Hold a printed white paper sheet right next to your monitor, and adjust the amount of brightness in monitor so the monitor matches that sheet.
This of course requires good overall room lightning where the printed paper would be pleasant to read in first place, whether it's daytime or evening/night
I confirm that this helps me as well. Quite often I don't have any fancy filter, I'm permanently setting display/monitor to low temperature and my eyes/vision couldn't be happier. I don't even need darkmode, regular mode works just fine for me as long as blue light is toned down. Granted, I'm not doing any color correction or anything color sensitive work.
I used to have terrible headaches about 20 years ago when I started spending a lot of time in front of the screen. I went to an optometrist who tested my eyes and told me I could get low prescriptions (.5) but warned me that there's no way back and that many people are fine with my current vision, choosing not to get a prescription. Luckily I figured out that it was blue light that was bothering me and once I turned it down I haven't had any problems since. I'm in my mid 40s and my vision has naturally deteriorated a bit but I am still fine with no prescriptions.
And I don't believe this to be placebo. Every time I stare at a regular screen for longer than 5 minutes I get eye strain. At the same time I suspect this doesn't help everyone, but at least to me this is a great solution that still works.
Not OP, but when I got glasses as an adult and while they really improved the sharpness of my vision I could feel my unassisted vision getting worse, so I stopped using them and get by with slightly unfocused but unassisted vision. I assume if I wore them full time my unassisted vision would degrade to the point where I then need the glasses full time.
I got glasses 2 years ago for a very minor prescription. Your eyesight sucked before you’ve just forgotten how badly. I had an eye test very recently for
Contacts and my prescription is the same 2 years later
I've got half a diopter (ish) of astigmatism in my right eye and it can be slightly annoying but interesting to know that using glasses would risk making it worse.
The weird thing is it seems to get noticeably worse or better depending on how much time I spend outside
I meant that once you decide to wear prescription optics you can’t go back to not wearing them, of course excluding eye surgery. In my case I could stick to good enough vision and luckily 20 years later Im still not wearing glasses. My main point was that I was getting eye strain from blue light and once I reduced it the problem dissapeared.
This isn’t true? Myopia develops rapidly in youth then stabilizes in adulthood. It gets a worse with age, not corrective lenses. Then sometime after 40 you flip to presbyopia when your lenses lose flexibility.
I don't have severe myopia and I'm fine with no glasses for now. The optometrist detected .5 correction needed but advised me to not go for it for the reason I mentioned. I think they are more qualified to give this advice than some rando on the internet. If they were a mercenary they'd tell me to go for it, that optometry practice was part of an eye glasses store and I'm sure they'd gain from my business there. And here I am 20 years later not wearing glasses yet. As I'm getting older my vision is getting slightly worse, I'll probably get to wear them at some point but that's beside the point.
I actually cannot use my monitor without nightshift, any white page just makes my eyes water, painful even. I had it off for a day when I switched to linux and immediately my eyes started drying out.
Safe to say it works for making your eyes less tired at least.
My Windows 10 PC glitches out most days where the 3rd monitor doesn't properly apply the Night Light setting. So I turn it off and on to fix it. The full blue brightness is awful and definitely harsh on my nighttime eyes. I'm not sure I could believe it's placebo
I'm not an MD or expert in this field enough to know if OP is right or wrong, but I think it's fairly reasonable to be irritated people are claiming software has a health benefit based on vibes/feels.
I thought we as a society had moved on from superstition to evidence-based medicine, but in this very post there are plenty of replies countering OP's scientific analysis and data with anecdotes (which is disappointing regardless of if TFA is correct or incorrect).
Is it superstition to deduce that I get gassy after eating beans? I need a scientific study to tell me this? Same for if a screen hurts my eyes (not long term, like truly my eyes hurt) when using bright white colors at night.
Yes, actually, if someone has direct scientific evidence contrary to the claim (I doubt such evidence exists for your first example as to the best of my knowledge the relationship between beans and gastrointestinal changes is well understood).
Your eyes could hurt for a variety of reasons - brightness, too long screen time, being dry for external reasons, etc. Most humans are poor at identifying the cause of one-off events: you may think it's because you turned on a blue-light filter, but it actually could be because you used your phone for an hour less.
That's why we have science to actually isolate variables and prove (or at least gather strong evidence for) things about the world, and why doctors don't (or at least shouldn't) make health-related recommendations based on vibes.
It's pretty clear, even on monitor, night and day difference at a push of a button. I'm not arguing if this helps you sleep better but it is pretty arrogant of you to tell me I can't figure out from my own experience if something is comfortable or not.
It’s about the equivalent of someone claiming my saying I find woollen clothing directly touching my skin to be irritating / itchy requires double blind randomised controlled studies to determine whether this is true at the population level.
There are eight billion of us, we can’t all be different, there must be at least some categories we can’t be sorted in to, maybe those who find woollen clothing itchy and those who don’t, and those who find blue-light reduction more comfortable and those who don’t.
One of my pet theories is that this hyper fixation on The Ultimate Truth via The Scientific Method is what happens when a society mints PhDs at an absurd rate. We went up with a lot of people who learn more and more about less and less, and a set of people who idolise those people and their output.
If your eyes routinely hurt when doing something, and then they stop routinely hurting after you make a change, that's pretty good reason to believe that there's a causal effect there.
Sometimes the causality is clear enough that you don't need sophisticated science to figure it out. Did you know that the only randomized controlled trial on the effectiveness of parachutes at preventing injury and death when jumping out of an airplane found that there is no effect? Given that, do you believe there really is no effect?
To be fair, I should have said something like "claiming software has a health benefit based on vibes/feels". I personally prefer the look of night/dark mode (or whatever you call it) in apps and the browser, but I'm not going to claim it makes me healthier or improves my sleep or whatever.
If you just like how something looks, that's fine, but there's a difference between "I like how X looks" (subjective opinion) than "X helps me sleep better" (difficult to prove but objectively true or false).
Edit: Changed this in my original message as it seems multiple people got confused by my prior poor wording.
End of the day, dark mode would've been totally ignored if there wasn't a perceivable benefit, placebo or not. People want to make everything difficult, I guess.
because if you read the article its about blue light filters to aid sleep not ease of reading.
The the grift wheel on this particular bandwagon is strong. To the point where my fucking glasses have a blue filter on them, which fucks up my ability to do colour work becuase everything is orange.
> Unless your strategy is to create a photo-lab-like screen in pure black and red, or wear deep-red-tinted glasses, it’s unlikely that a pure colorshift strategy will cut out that big of a chunk of the spectrum.
I absolutely think this is the right approach. The glasses which do 'blue light filtering' which barely change your perception are clearly placebo, but a very strong redshift I think is obviously a different creature.
Absolutely, although dark orange seems to work well enough. If you can put them on and still tell the difference between most colors, they aren't working. I use my pair for one purpose: reading in bed with a backlit e-reader. I can't imagine trying to do much else with them on, they have plastic wings to block light from the side and they're not light.
Regardless of the sleep effect (or lack of) they absolutely do work for reducing eye strain for migraineurs.
It's noticeable to me all the time, but if I'm borderline migraining, or recovering from a migraine, the difference between shifted and not is something I can feel instantly. Shifting all the way over enables me to eek out some work after a migraine without it flaring back up again.
Absolutely and this is something that can be tested rather easily. If blue filters aren't immediately helpful to eye strain then they probably don't work for you but if they are they probably do work for you.
You're saying that my eyes straining going away from reduced blue light is placebo? I can feel it right away and it gets worse in minutes, time and time again. As soon as I remove blue light the strain is gone. Honestly, I don't care what other people have to say, to me it's obvious that it helps and I stick to it. Again, I don't think this is universal and it may not help you if you don't notice immediate improvement.
I am aware that meta-studies of glucosamine chondroitin show No Significant Gains in joint pain. I would never waste my money on it.
But my newly adopted dog had hip issues, and I bought a few months worth of a diet supplement in the hopes of doing something meaningf... dammit, it's glucosamine.
They claimed double-blind studies showed decreases in limping in just two months.
Two months, more or less, I stopped seeing him limp by the time we left the dog park. He still does sometimes, but it's rare - not every damn day, by any means.
We aren't that fricking different biologically from dogs in our skeletal attachment system. Maybe it's still a placebo, but it seems to defeat that idea. Maybe enough human issues are based on things that don't translate to dogs - sitting at a desk all day, eating junk food, walking upright... - that it helps them, but not enough of us.
Don't know. These GC supplements have convinced me it's worth my money, and he loves eating them, so he votes 'yes', too.
I found it interesting that placebo effect is also sort of relevant in pet care: it makes owners believe the pet is doing better.
Unfortunately, the study that showed this used the same medicine my dog had been on, and since it was for epilepsy, I can totally believe that whether I thought it worked had no connection to its effectiveness.
Night shift seems to have a very strong causal effect on my sleep cycles. Up until about ten years ago I was a night owl, rarely falling asleep before midnight and rarely waking up before 8. Then I started getting serious about light hygiene and using night shift and now I'm a serious day person, rarely staying awake after 11 and rarely waking up after 7. But the real clincher is that when I travel I don't change the time zone on my computer (because it screws up my calendar). But my sleep cycle continues to track my home time zone for a very long time. I life in California, but at the moment I'm in Hawaii. I've been here three weeks so far. At home I'd fall asleep around 11 and wake up around 7, but here I'm getting sleepy at 9 and waking up at 5.
My wife, on the other hand, is a hard-core night owl even with night shift. So apparently there is a lot of individual variation.
This article has inspired me to do a control experiment by switching night shift off. Check back here in a week or so for the results.
The entire blue light madness is based on a poor study where N was around 8. And the difference in sleep was something like 15 mins. The entire study was based on crap but somehow the entire world has run rampant on the idea that blue light has this profound effect. It just goes to show that bad science is easily propagated, even when there's even more sources of information.
I bought some amber glasses from blublocker.com[1], because they link to a research paper that actually measured how much of each wavelength their filters allow (as well as other brands). They're pretty dark, so you have to crank up the brightness on your screen, but I'm confident that I'm not getting ANY blue.
Nice. The article also mentions BluTech lenses (BluTech LLC, Alpharetta, GA). I've found the marginal utility of bluelight blocking solutions are very context specific, indeed.
And mostly-completely bahokie garbage, sadly, but not when it's BluTech and BluBlocker. BluTech/BluBlocker for the screen-induced fatigue is the correct solution. I always get BluTech HI Indoor AR pucks for my prescription lenses. And just switch to prescription sunglasses when I go outside.
I replaced all the light switches in my house with smart dimmers and have the lights dim in the evening. It happens in steps so it's noticeable and it's like a clock ticking down. I don't know if there's anything scientific about it but it's pleasant, like the house is going to sleep so maybe I should too.
I have my phone in monochrome (i.e. greyscale) mode and just subjectively it's much easier to look at especially at night. I have it at the lowest brightness and it's still very readable. Human eyesight is basically monochrome in low light settings anyway.
I firmly believe this varies between people significantly.
Blue light filters do not work for me because I fall asleep on command everyday all the time regardless if WW3 is outside.
BUT it also seems the effect of poor sleep seems to be MUCH worse for me than other people. I go from extreme motor coordination to dropping cups in a span of 3 days of poor sleep.
There’s a chemical called adenosine which accumulates over the day that induces sleepiness and there are genetic variations that can affect your susceptibility to it. Receptors notice the accumulation of adenosine and use it as a signal to “scale down.”
I think that I am more sensitive, explaining my ease of sleep but also the effect of it when it accumulates due to poor sleep (sleep flushes it away). Yeah it’s great when I’m in bed but it’s not great when I want to throw a ball and my brain wants to be stingy. It basically means that someone else’s “helpful guide to sleep” is completely different from my “helpful guide to sleep.”
>the effect of poor sleep seems to be MUCH worse for me than other people. I go from extreme motor coordination to dropping cups in a span of 3 days of poor sleep.
Are you sleeping enough? When I was getting too little sleep, averaging 5.5 hours per night, this described me well. A single sleep interruption could make me lose most of a day of work. I'm sleeping better and longer now, and it seems I'm more able to tolerate small interruptions.
Yeah I’ve gotten 8 hours of sleep almost everyday for 15 years, ever since I put 2+2 together. In my early 20s, I didn’t like being bad at sports and I found sleep was my single most important factor.
Similar to you, I also noticed that if I miss good sleep for several days, it stacks. I treat sleep like a battery. A day uses up 20% and good sleep fills it back up, but only like 30%. One missed night isn’t that bad but I also can’t recover several nights’ worth.
I have had success with an extremely aggressive red filter. My unchecked sleep schedule has me going to bed around 4 am, consistent over decades. I don't consume caffeine or any other stimulant. In the last 4 months I switched my lights to LED bulbs to turn red at 6pm and use QRedshift on Linux (Mint) with the temperature set to 1000k at 6pm. I have consistently been falling asleep around midnight. What is remarkable to me is that I am actually feeling tired at night.
I agree for sleep. I prefer them because they focus better for me.
Blue creates a halo around letters that is distracting with my declining vision.
Also, Blue fluorescent OLED are ~50% less efficient than R/G phosphorescent OLED so you can reduce screen power consumption of a full white page by almost 30% using such a filter. That in turn might be 30% of active device power consumption (for a total of almost 10% in battery life during active operation). Ignoring that they also tend to burn out more quickly, since tandem blue has become fairly mainstream.
Many more reasons for these "filters", if you don't mind the white balance shift and reduced color gamut.
So what? If I could take a sugar pill that guaranteed I feel comfier looking at my screen, nobody can tell me it "doesn't work". I'm not trying to optimise my life, I'm trying to have my eyes feel better.
If somebody is "manifesting" themselves a sleep aid, I think they'd just call it meditation and everybody would more or less accept that it probably works for that individual. Maybe you'd have a few people with severe autism who start arguing on online forums about the scientific evidence behind meditation, but that's just them being them.
The placebo effect is a real, measurable mind-body response where belief & expectation can change your symptoms or how you feel. However, it does not directly alter external reality. Manifesting claims your thoughts or intentions can cause _outside events_ to happen, which has zero evidence to support it.
Not really. Most of the cultural notion about the remarkable effects of placebos came from flawed studies in the 1950s. As far as I can tell, the modern consensus is that there's no clinically significant placebo effect except for conditions that can only be measured by a subject self-reporting their own perception (like pain and fatigue).
If you aren't aware, your phone's screen can go much dimmer than the minimum brightness offered by the slider, if it supports HDR. There are apps that use an HDR screen overlay to lower brightness all the way down to the dimmest you can perceive. In my own experience, 'half' the brightness of 'minimum' brightness is plenty dark enough to not disturb sleeping at all if using my phone in bed.
Blue light filters definitely work for me. But it needs to be a strong filter (quite a bit stronger than the strongest setting of Apple's built-in filter).
Yes, article title is clickbait. Partial filters don't work, but as they suggest, 100% filter of blue light (resulting in no blue light present), DO work.
You can get this with Apple's strongest filter, the color filter, in Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Color Filters, rather than night shift. Only red sub-pixels are illuminated with it. It can be added to the triple click power button accessibility shortcut.
That's what I use. I have a shortcut set to enable it when I put my AirPods in at night.
It's funny, I'm so comfortable calling this guy an idiot purely based on the fact that I've taken up Bob Ross style painting in like the last 2 years.
Teaches you to pay attention to "objective" colors. And at night, guess what, the colors get more red and less blue. I don't have to pull out as much blue paint for the night scenes.
It would be utterly naive to not thing that there's -- perhaps purely "psychological" (not sure if that's the exact concept but hey) effect by making the "white" on your screen, look like like the "white" you will definitely see in real life, which is going to be orange-r.
It seems pretty clear in the OP that headline is misleading—they do work, just not as well as he would like. I think that a 50% cut in light emission is pretty good—and you can stack that with the other interventions listed, like auto-dark mode and reducing light in your room.
I use blue blocking glasses, like Bono but darker and they do work. I also use UV LEDs to help me wake up, which also works.
I agree with the premise that night shift and other color warmth features are insufficient to have a strong effect, though they do help with eye strain which is still a positive.
> I took a sample of 4 websites/apps (Google, X, Github, and VSCode) with the SpyderX colorimeter + a diffuser to average over a larger area of the screen, and found reductions in luminance ranging from 92% to 98%! That’s huge.
So the main claim presented here is that reducing blue reduces total "light" (lumens? watts?) by 50% (totally believable), and that reduction in light is all that matters for sleep?
That seems reasonable. The pseudoscience wankery that the fad has brought bothers me a lot too.
... but I'm not sure that's much of an argument against blue light filters, aside from color complaints. That seems to support that it's Useful and Good and is Achieving Its Intended Goal. It's reducing total luminance, because people prefer it over reducing screen brightness overall. I sure as heck do anyway (as night shift modes, they're a more comprehensive option than dark mode), though I think I'll experiment with just reducing brightness a bit.
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For melatonin in particular, fully agreed. The recent trend of "can't even get <5mg in stores, and >10mg is appearing regularly" in the USA is mind-boggling to me. AFAICT it's exclusively because it's a "supplement" and therefore practically unregulated, and these companies don't give a shit about anyone they harm, just profit.
Start with something like https://a.co/d/0dISg7oa (0.3mg, this is what I personally use) and go up from there, slowly.
No, in the OP (after an unclear intro that confuseed many readers), there is a graph that shows blue wavelength intensity is important, but software light filters don't filter a lot of it, and the effect is cancelled by increasing overall brightness.
If software filters are reducing total light by 50% while only affecting blue-ish tones, and that's a total light level comparable to multiple brightness steps on a Mac... tbh I think it's reducing it quite a lot. Many I see using them (myself included) don't tweak brightness when enabling it, and many (all?) systems don't adjust their brightness to match the perceived change from a software filter (on my Linux machines in particular I have never seen this happen, don't know about Macs though).
Half is not a lot, sure, but their ultimate suggestion is to do the same ~half change:
>You can decrease the amount of light coming from your screen by more than half simply by dimming the screen by several notches.
which is definitely significantly more than I see people doing voluntarily in the hundreds of millions.
Do they have any evidence that people are raising system brightness to match the 50% loss from the filter? If not, it still seems like a rather significant mark in their favor. Perhaps not sufficient to meet the goals (they seem to be recommending a larger change, but aren't specific), but I see no claim that a lesser decrease in light is worse.
---
Late edit: on second thought... let's go through this more rigorously. For both myself and any other readers, because I want to make sure I'm following it accurately too.
The main explicit points in this article are, in order:
- night shift does not help with sleep (the main claim)
- blue light is not special, in particular because the "[most] sensitive to blue" research is mis-quoted to mean "blue is bad", but it's actually sensitive to blue and green (seems very well supported)
- night shift reduces blue and green by about half (tested themselves)
- half of absolute is not a lot because vision and a lot of the related biology is logarithmic (100% agreed)
- halving light affects 25%-50% of melatonin levels (linked research)
- many people use Night Shift (100% agreed, and they have decent data to back it up)
- dark mode is better than night shift (>90% vs ~50%, implied leaning on the linked research earlier. agreed, seems straightforward)
- dimming your screen by several steps is the same or better than night shift (as it decreases brightness more, same reasoning as dark mode. agreed.)
That still sounds rather in favor of Night Shift. It's targeting the correct color range (NOT the pseudoscience blathering of just blue blue blue), it has a moderate affect on melatonin levels at the light level changes it creates, and it's used by a huge amount of the population.
Nowhere in there that I can see is anything to back up "Night Shift does not work". Only "it seems to be doing things right, it just isn't quite enough on its own" and "ARGH it's not just blue light STOP PROMOTING FAD PSEUDOSCIENCE". That seems... fine? Most things are not silver bullets.
that'd give you 2.5mg, which is still almost 10x more than what I linked.
it's possible to split and separate them enough of course, but beyond "roughly half" it gets rather difficult. I've considered getting the liquid ones and a micro-dropper for smaller doses (if they'd even be small enough, many combinations are not), but 0.3mg pills are rather convenient and worth the small amount of money for me.
Some research indicates people over 50 (includes me) achieve best results at 0.3 microgram dosage, which is 1,000 lower(!). Higher dosages reduce the effect.
You might take a quick sec to look into the data. You can buy 5mcg on Amazon, although 5 mg is more common (and 10mg, and ...).
after an initial "... is that a misquote too? sounds super low" I decided to hunt around. I haven't seen anything on that low of a dose... but doing the math, it does seem to make some sense I suppose. a rough check of the total amount of melatonin in your blood at night implies something like 0.5mcg at peak (peak concentration at ~100pg/ml times 5L of blood). lots more is produced in a night because it has a short half-life, but yea, blood concentration is lower than I remembered.
what I also haven't seen though is anything covering how well it's absorbed through your digestive system. 0.3mcg intravenously I can certainly see being effective, but orally? sublingually? not sure. but you've definitely got me interested in looking more :)
(initial results: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melatonin_as_a_medication_and_... implies it varies quite a lot, but I'm seeing it centering around 15%-ish many places. so you might want like 3mcg to hit normal levels? and https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5405617/ is implying 1-5mg -> 10x-100x normal concentration peak, so that does hit the right ballpark reasonably well... I guess I'm going to start experimenting with even smaller doses!)
Based on my experience, most health benefits are from personal habits over external hardware.
But people care health so much, it's a great opportunity for merchants to get revenue.
These are the kinds of articles that give science a bad name, and that make people anti-science.
You might as well try to claim hot tea doesn't help you get to sleep, or reading before bed doesn't, or whatever else you do to wind down.
I personally don't care if some narrow hypothesis about blue light and melanopsin is false. I know that low, warm, amber-tinted light in the evening slows me down in a way that low, cold, blue-tinted light does not. That's why I use different, warmer lamps at night with dimmers, and keep my devices on Night Shift and lower brightness. It works for me, and seems to mimic the lighting conditions we evolved with -- strong blue light around noon, weaker warmer light at sunset, weakest warmest light from the fire until we go to sleep. Maybe it doesn't work for everybody. That's fine. But it certainly does for me.
And maybe it's not modulated by melanopsin. Or maybe it's not about blue light, but rather the overall correlated color temperature (CCT), e.g. 2100K instead of 5700K. Who knows.
But this type of article is bad science writing. It shows why one hypothesis as to why a warmer color temperature would result in one other physiological change isn't supported. That doesn't mean "blue light filters don't work" as a universal statement. It's hubris on the part of the author to assume that this one hypothesis is the only potential mechanism by which warmer light might help with sleep.
And it's this kind of science writing that turns people off to science. I know, through lots of trial and error and experimentation, that warm light helps me fall asleep. And here comes some "AI researcher and neurotechnologist" trying to tell me I'm wrong? He says it's "aggravating" that people are "actually using Night Shift". I say it's aggravating when people like him make the elemental mistake that showing one biological mechanism doesn't have an effect, means no other mechanisms can either.
> But this type of article is bad science writing. It shows why one hypothesis as to why a warmer color temperature would result in one other physiological change isn't supported
I don't know if I'd even give them that credit (emphasis mine):
> Halving the luminance, at best (around 20 lux baseline) might get you from 50% to 25% melatonin suppression.
> These are the kinds of articles that give science a bad name, and that make people anti-science.
No, it is attitude like yours that brings humanity a bad name.
"Blue light effects" have always had highly questionable evidence behind it, what has been sold and marketed under the guise of it has had _zero_ evidence behind it. But now that you are reminded that it is actually bullshit, you react with skepticism.
"Feels good to me" is hardly evidence to begin with. It's something that is even more flimsy than sociology. I have my doubts it should even be called medicine.
You have to remember that a shitton of people day after day "show" "evidence" that homeopathy works. Even though it has no plausible mechanism of action. So clear mechanism of action is about as important as the evidence itself. (see Science-based medicine)
I could understand (not justify) skepticism in many cases (such as "common wisdom" from 1000 years ago) but this particular topic should have raised your skepticism 20 years ago back when the craze/marketing stunt was starting, and not now.
> "Feels good to me" is hardly evidence to begin with
Where did I say anything like that? Please don't mischaracterize my comment, that's not helpful. It's not that it "feels good", it's that it helps at least some people fall asleep more easily, and I know this from personal experience. And many, many other people have written that it does the same for them.
> "Blue light effects" have always had highly questionable evidence behind it... But now that you are reminded that it is actually bullshit
You're right that the evidence for it is questionable. But you know what else there's no conclusive evidence for? That hot herbal tea helps you fall asleep. Or soothing music. Or bedtime stories. Because the funding usually isn't there to perform the kind of large-scale studies required to establish these things, because it's just not a priority or even a good use of our dollars. And lack of evidence for, is not the same as evidence against.
My point is, nothing in this article does establish that it is "actually bullshit". That's a gross misreading of the science, and that's what I'm criticizing the article over.
People experiment with things and discover what works and what doesn't. Again, nobody's going around complaining that there's no scientific evidence lullabyes don't help put you to sleep. And neither lullabyes, nor turning your lights down to amber, have anything to do with homeopathy. You can't possibly suggest they're doing harm. People aren't using amber lighting at night instead of getting their cancer treated.
But for some reason, low amber lighting to help with sleep makes you and the article author upset? Why? Why does that make you upset, but not hot tea or lullabyes? Or do those make you upset too?
"feels good to me" and "helps me sleep more easily" are about the same thing: flimsy and almost non-quantifiable personal experiences. About the same level with "I dream of nicer things".
> And many, many other people have written that it does the same for them.
So people write for homeopathy. Homepathy actually is the precursor for using this type of "evidence" for development and study of new "drugs" (hint: this evidence ends up going nowhere useful, quickly).
> Or soothing music. Or bedtime stories. Because the funding usually isn't there to perform the kind of large-scale studies required to establish these things, because it's just not a priority or even a good use of our dollars.
Oh, there is. There are way more studies about this than you can possibly think of. There are medical journals reporting clinical experiences about this daily. You are saying this on an article about study about one of these, ironically enough.
> And lack of evidence for, is not the same as evidence against.
> My point is, nothing in this article does establish that it is "actually bullshit".
Why not?
> But for some reason, low amber lighting to help with sleep makes you and the article author upset? Why? Why does that make you upset, but not hot tea or lullabyes? Or do those make you upset too?
You are the one who suddenly claims this makes people "anti-science", when this particular bullshit is not even 20 years old, and it was already known to be suspect 20 years ago. It is just ridiculous that it is now suddenly such a core belief of your persona that even being reminded that it is most likely bullshit is going to drive you to reject science outright.
As I said, I could at least _understand_ (but not justify) much older claims, such as ancient chinese practices or whatever. This makes they make me upset indeed (this is pseudoscience, after all), but what makes me even more upset is the creation of new pseudo-scientific or even anti-scientific "popular wisdom" _in this age_.
I think you have not actually understood what I wrote, because of this part:
>> My point is, nothing in this article does establish that it is "actually bullshit".
> Why not?
I've already said it multiple times. Allow me to repeat myself:
> make the elemental mistake that showing one biological mechanism doesn't have an effect, means no other mechanisms can either.
You've written a lot, but you haven't understood that this is the core mistake of the article, and the core mistake of what you're trying to argue.
You reply with a reference to Russell's teapot, and that would be fine if you were merely trying to make the point that the effect of amber light on sleep has not been sufficiently proven. But you're the one literally calling it "bullshit", i.e. disproven. That's wrong. There's no high-quality study conclusively demonstrating it doesn't have an effect.
Certainly you can claim that because not all mechanisms have been disproven yet, then there could still be an effect. That is why I quote Russell's teapot. Your claims are technically not disproven, and may not even be possible to disprove, but that doesn't mean that the existence of the teapot is (most definitely) bullshit. This is what the example of Russell's teapot is trying to show.
I also keep continuously putting the example of homeopathy because it is exactly the same. Homeopathy has plenty of (weak) evidence, but no known mechanism of action. All the proposed religious, memory of water, etc. have been disproved.
Certainly you can argue that homeopathy could still be a thing because there could be some physical/biological mechanism that has not yet been disproved! But this is just nitpicking: homeopathy is still bullshit. In the same way that a teapot in space is bullshit.
Anything else is a (useless) nitpick.
In any case, even from day #1 it's been known that blue light could possibly have a mechanism, but there's always been a big stretch from there to claiming that blue light filters/night shift have an effect, and the evidence for the latter is substantially lacking. https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/blue-light/
I'm sorry, but using the idea of Russell's teapot to claim anything without rock-solid proof is "bullshit" is a deep misunderstanding of the idea. It's wrong, it's offensive, and it's not helpful to genuine understanding.
Amber light is not Russell's teapot. There's widespread anecdotal reporting that it helps with sleep. It's not something nonsensical like a teapot between Earth and Mars. And for you to suggest that they're the equivalent is, frankly, arguing in bad faith.
The world of knowledge is not divided, black-and-white, between things that are scientifically proven and "bullshit". Probably the vast majority of practical facts we rely on daily are not "proven" with empirical studies. That doesn't make them "bullshit". I hope you can understand that.
No, I do not understand why I cannot call homeopathy bullshit. There's plenty of widespread positive anecdote for it, too!
Why would you think calling one bullshit is "offensive" and not the other? You realize that this "gray" scale that you claim is as unscientific as it gets, right? After all, it worked for me! And I hear that it works for my friends! How can homeopathy/blue light filters/whatever-ritual-you-like-today not work? How can there not be a teapot on the sky?
If the problem is with the word "bullshit", call it pseudo-scientific, but it is almost the same thing.
Tomorrow there could be some evidence of an effect shown in the opposite direction (e.g. blue light filters _harming_ sleep quality*, or performance the day after, or whatever) and you would be as skeptical as with claims of no effect, if not more. See the recent article of white noise in HN and how it was met in the comments.
* Because of people (or worse, software) turning their screens' brightness up to compensate, which I already read an article about long time ago...
No, he said "this gives science a bad name"/"makes people anti-science" because some article published something that contradicts his anecdote of how well he thinks he sleeps. That gives humanity a bad name. And your direct insults do, too (which fortunately have been edited out).
Well they work in that the color temperature of the light in my house is much cooler during the day than at night, and it's nice to match it so it doesn't look jarring.
Bro, as someone who had brutal insomnia for a couple of years and now sleeps "normally" for whatever that means, I can tell you that I don't think about my sleep quality at all. I'm happy to be sleeping.
If you too sleep "ok" for whatever that means, maybe stop worrying about optimizing it and go do something else less insane.
The charitable reading of "better sleep" is "sleep habits that allow for a healthy amount of sleep". A lot of people have habits that give them insufficient sleep.
My experience is being surrounded by people who sleep eight hours a night and then check their ring data or whatever nonsense to convince themselves that they could do better.
Waking up tired and with the brain full of fog is nearly as fun as not sleeping and ending up tired, with the brain full of fog. Truth be told, most cases of "poor sleep quality" are not as brutal though.
Disturbed sleep / inability to settle / anxiety can have physical causes although these are poorly recognized / diagnosed by regular allopathic medicine where I live.
Anecdata: 1) A good friend whose anxiety was largely alleviated (and sleep improved) by recognizing and treating their iron deficiency. 2) I have to (can't take the Western drug which was prescribed any more, and the Western doctors can't seem to bang the rocks together) take herbs for my hypertension but as opposed to the side effects I was experiencing from the drug I joke that all of the "side effects" from the herbs are good, they're targeting imbalances which were not recognized / treated previously and lo and behold I settle and sleep better... which helps reduce the blood pressure.
Primary, idiopathic insomnia doesn't really exist. It's almost always anxiety, although a few other mental and physical conditions can also cause it. But more likely anxiety.
I have Night Light perpetually on with all of my devices because I find it softens everything and makes viewing displays less harsh, less garish, less vivid, and less intense. I don't need eye searing HDR constantly cooking my retinas.
Why is it that a few people seem to get bent out of shape by redshift and/or dark modes? If you don't like it, don't use it. Whining about scientific evidence is pointless, even if it all only comes down to user preferences with no science behind it, so what? Let people enjoy things.
They absolutely help my eyes not be so strained. If its placebo, its a working placebo.
>Are people actually using Night Shift? >Aggravatingly, yes.
What is the authors problem lol? It feels a lot better on eyeballs to use warm light things. Why does he care?
I find it somewhat pleasant, but by far the best thing I did to help my eye strain was greatly lower the brightness. Basically, I was told to make it so that my phone's camera could see something on the screen and my desk at the same time without washing out.
After doing that, I have found that the "temperature" of the screen doesn't really matter to me that heavily.
> Basically, I was told to make it so that my phone's camera could see something on the screen and my desk at the same time without washing out
+1. The low-tech version of this I've heard and I've been doing is:
Hold a printed white paper sheet right next to your monitor, and adjust the amount of brightness in monitor so the monitor matches that sheet.
This of course requires good overall room lightning where the printed paper would be pleasant to read in first place, whether it's daytime or evening/night
I confirm that this helps me as well. Quite often I don't have any fancy filter, I'm permanently setting display/monitor to low temperature and my eyes/vision couldn't be happier. I don't even need darkmode, regular mode works just fine for me as long as blue light is toned down. Granted, I'm not doing any color correction or anything color sensitive work.
I used to have terrible headaches about 20 years ago when I started spending a lot of time in front of the screen. I went to an optometrist who tested my eyes and told me I could get low prescriptions (.5) but warned me that there's no way back and that many people are fine with my current vision, choosing not to get a prescription. Luckily I figured out that it was blue light that was bothering me and once I turned it down I haven't had any problems since. I'm in my mid 40s and my vision has naturally deteriorated a bit but I am still fine with no prescriptions.
And I don't believe this to be placebo. Every time I stare at a regular screen for longer than 5 minutes I get eye strain. At the same time I suspect this doesn't help everyone, but at least to me this is a great solution that still works.
Can you elaborate on “no way back”?
Not OP, but when I got glasses as an adult and while they really improved the sharpness of my vision I could feel my unassisted vision getting worse, so I stopped using them and get by with slightly unfocused but unassisted vision. I assume if I wore them full time my unassisted vision would degrade to the point where I then need the glasses full time.
I got glasses 2 years ago for a very minor prescription. Your eyesight sucked before you’ve just forgotten how badly. I had an eye test very recently for Contacts and my prescription is the same 2 years later
Your assumption was false.[1]
[1] https://health.clevelandclinic.org/do-glasses-make-your-eyes...
I've got half a diopter (ish) of astigmatism in my right eye and it can be slightly annoying but interesting to know that using glasses would risk making it worse.
The weird thing is it seems to get noticeably worse or better depending on how much time I spend outside
I meant that once you decide to wear prescription optics you can’t go back to not wearing them, of course excluding eye surgery. In my case I could stick to good enough vision and luckily 20 years later Im still not wearing glasses. My main point was that I was getting eye strain from blue light and once I reduced it the problem dissapeared.
This isn’t true? Myopia develops rapidly in youth then stabilizes in adulthood. It gets a worse with age, not corrective lenses. Then sometime after 40 you flip to presbyopia when your lenses lose flexibility.
I don't have severe myopia and I'm fine with no glasses for now. The optometrist detected .5 correction needed but advised me to not go for it for the reason I mentioned. I think they are more qualified to give this advice than some rando on the internet. If they were a mercenary they'd tell me to go for it, that optometry practice was part of an eye glasses store and I'm sure they'd gain from my business there. And here I am 20 years later not wearing glasses yet. As I'm getting older my vision is getting slightly worse, I'll probably get to wear them at some point but that's beside the point.
I actually cannot use my monitor without nightshift, any white page just makes my eyes water, painful even. I had it off for a day when I switched to linux and immediately my eyes started drying out.
Safe to say it works for making your eyes less tired at least.
Are you sure you are not also changing total luminance?
My Windows 10 PC glitches out most days where the 3rd monitor doesn't properly apply the Night Light setting. So I turn it off and on to fix it. The full blue brightness is awful and definitely harsh on my nighttime eyes. I'm not sure I could believe it's placebo
I'm not an MD or expert in this field enough to know if OP is right or wrong, but I think it's fairly reasonable to be irritated people are claiming software has a health benefit based on vibes/feels.
I thought we as a society had moved on from superstition to evidence-based medicine, but in this very post there are plenty of replies countering OP's scientific analysis and data with anecdotes (which is disappointing regardless of if TFA is correct or incorrect).
Is it superstition to deduce that I get gassy after eating beans? I need a scientific study to tell me this? Same for if a screen hurts my eyes (not long term, like truly my eyes hurt) when using bright white colors at night.
Yes, actually, if someone has direct scientific evidence contrary to the claim (I doubt such evidence exists for your first example as to the best of my knowledge the relationship between beans and gastrointestinal changes is well understood).
Your eyes could hurt for a variety of reasons - brightness, too long screen time, being dry for external reasons, etc. Most humans are poor at identifying the cause of one-off events: you may think it's because you turned on a blue-light filter, but it actually could be because you used your phone for an hour less.
That's why we have science to actually isolate variables and prove (or at least gather strong evidence for) things about the world, and why doctors don't (or at least shouldn't) make health-related recommendations based on vibes.
> if someone has direct scientific evidence contrary to the claim
Except they don't. This is evidence about one potential mechanism. Not evidence saying there are no other potential mechanisms.
This is actually a very common mistake in popular science writing, to confuse the two.
It's pretty clear, even on monitor, night and day difference at a push of a button. I'm not arguing if this helps you sleep better but it is pretty arrogant of you to tell me I can't figure out from my own experience if something is comfortable or not.
It’s about the equivalent of someone claiming my saying I find woollen clothing directly touching my skin to be irritating / itchy requires double blind randomised controlled studies to determine whether this is true at the population level.
There are eight billion of us, we can’t all be different, there must be at least some categories we can’t be sorted in to, maybe those who find woollen clothing itchy and those who don’t, and those who find blue-light reduction more comfortable and those who don’t.
One of my pet theories is that this hyper fixation on The Ultimate Truth via The Scientific Method is what happens when a society mints PhDs at an absurd rate. We went up with a lot of people who learn more and more about less and less, and a set of people who idolise those people and their output.
Nobody really cares if it's comfortable or not for you, the debate at hand is whether it's measurably more comfortable for the population at large.
That’s how it should be but the poster is literally calling the individual experiences of others “superstition” based on the population at large.
If your eyes routinely hurt when doing something, and then they stop routinely hurting after you make a change, that's pretty good reason to believe that there's a causal effect there.
Sometimes the causality is clear enough that you don't need sophisticated science to figure it out. Did you know that the only randomized controlled trial on the effectiveness of parachutes at preventing injury and death when jumping out of an airplane found that there is no effect? Given that, do you believe there really is no effect?
>I think it's fairly reasonable to be irritated people are pushing software based on vibes/feels.
You are going to HATE to find out about night-mode in the browser
To be fair, I should have said something like "claiming software has a health benefit based on vibes/feels". I personally prefer the look of night/dark mode (or whatever you call it) in apps and the browser, but I'm not going to claim it makes me healthier or improves my sleep or whatever.
If you just like how something looks, that's fine, but there's a difference between "I like how X looks" (subjective opinion) than "X helps me sleep better" (difficult to prove but objectively true or false).
Edit: Changed this in my original message as it seems multiple people got confused by my prior poor wording.
It's not about how it looks aesthetically, you can feel your eye muscles release tension when you go from light to dark mode.
End of the day, dark mode would've been totally ignored if there wasn't a perceivable benefit, placebo or not. People want to make everything difficult, I guess.
As someone more trained in science than software, the phrase "you can feel..." is suspicious, even if it's my own feelings.
Not invalid; suspicious.
> I thought we as a society had moved on from superstition to evidence-based medicine
Surely you didn't actually believe that unless you JUST landed here from space after being away for 60 years.
> I think it's fairly reasonable to be irritated people are pushing software based on vibes/feels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_industry
because if you read the article its about blue light filters to aid sleep not ease of reading.
The the grift wheel on this particular bandwagon is strong. To the point where my fucking glasses have a blue filter on them, which fucks up my ability to do colour work becuase everything is orange.
Blue light filtering lenses come at a premium. You don't accidentally get them.
I wasn't paying for them, so it was very much accidental.
You should go back and demand they be replaced. Such a mistake isn't something you should tolerate.
Someone ran up to you and put them on your face?
If you wait long enough cataracts will give you that for free.
I love Night Shift.
I added the “Noir” extension to mobile Safari, now I automatically get dark mode on all websites including Hacker News.
> Unless your strategy is to create a photo-lab-like screen in pure black and red, or wear deep-red-tinted glasses, it’s unlikely that a pure colorshift strategy will cut out that big of a chunk of the spectrum.
I absolutely think this is the right approach. The glasses which do 'blue light filtering' which barely change your perception are clearly placebo, but a very strong redshift I think is obviously a different creature.
Absolutely, although dark orange seems to work well enough. If you can put them on and still tell the difference between most colors, they aren't working. I use my pair for one purpose: reading in bed with a backlit e-reader. I can't imagine trying to do much else with them on, they have plastic wings to block light from the side and they're not light.
But they work.
Regardless of the sleep effect (or lack of) they absolutely do work for reducing eye strain for migraineurs.
It's noticeable to me all the time, but if I'm borderline migraining, or recovering from a migraine, the difference between shifted and not is something I can feel instantly. Shifting all the way over enables me to eek out some work after a migraine without it flaring back up again.
You can just do things. Not everything needs a study, you don’t have to justify yourself to anyone!
Try things, if you like them, do them!
Try not living a neurotic “study” based life, I am trying it and its pretty great!
Absolutely and this is something that can be tested rather easily. If blue filters aren't immediately helpful to eye strain then they probably don't work for you but if they are they probably do work for you.
You can test the negative easily, but the positive is harder. Thus: placebos.
You're saying that my eyes straining going away from reduced blue light is placebo? I can feel it right away and it gets worse in minutes, time and time again. As soon as I remove blue light the strain is gone. Honestly, I don't care what other people have to say, to me it's obvious that it helps and I stick to it. Again, I don't think this is universal and it may not help you if you don't notice immediate improvement.
I am aware that meta-studies of glucosamine chondroitin show No Significant Gains in joint pain. I would never waste my money on it.
But my newly adopted dog had hip issues, and I bought a few months worth of a diet supplement in the hopes of doing something meaningf... dammit, it's glucosamine.
They claimed double-blind studies showed decreases in limping in just two months.
Two months, more or less, I stopped seeing him limp by the time we left the dog park. He still does sometimes, but it's rare - not every damn day, by any means.
We aren't that fricking different biologically from dogs in our skeletal attachment system. Maybe it's still a placebo, but it seems to defeat that idea. Maybe enough human issues are based on things that don't translate to dogs - sitting at a desk all day, eating junk food, walking upright... - that it helps them, but not enough of us.
Don't know. These GC supplements have convinced me it's worth my money, and he loves eating them, so he votes 'yes', too.
I found it interesting that placebo effect is also sort of relevant in pet care: it makes owners believe the pet is doing better.
Unfortunately, the study that showed this used the same medicine my dog had been on, and since it was for epilepsy, I can totally believe that whether I thought it worked had no connection to its effectiveness.
(just nothing from Goop)
Night shift seems to have a very strong causal effect on my sleep cycles. Up until about ten years ago I was a night owl, rarely falling asleep before midnight and rarely waking up before 8. Then I started getting serious about light hygiene and using night shift and now I'm a serious day person, rarely staying awake after 11 and rarely waking up after 7. But the real clincher is that when I travel I don't change the time zone on my computer (because it screws up my calendar). But my sleep cycle continues to track my home time zone for a very long time. I life in California, but at the moment I'm in Hawaii. I've been here three weeks so far. At home I'd fall asleep around 11 and wake up around 7, but here I'm getting sleepy at 9 and waking up at 5.
My wife, on the other hand, is a hard-core night owl even with night shift. So apparently there is a lot of individual variation.
This article has inspired me to do a control experiment by switching night shift off. Check back here in a week or so for the results.
> Night shift seems to have a very strong causal effect on my sleep cycles.
> light hygiene and using night shift
The OP article is primarily about separating the variables you lumped together.
>inspired me to do a control experiment
Delightful, see ya the 27th!
The entire blue light madness is based on a poor study where N was around 8. And the difference in sleep was something like 15 mins. The entire study was based on crap but somehow the entire world has run rampant on the idea that blue light has this profound effect. It just goes to show that bad science is easily propagated, even when there's even more sources of information.
I bought some amber glasses from blublocker.com[1], because they link to a research paper that actually measured how much of each wavelength their filters allow (as well as other brands). They're pretty dark, so you have to crank up the brightness on your screen, but I'm confident that I'm not getting ANY blue.
1: https://www.blublocker.com/blogs/news/what-blue-light-blocki...
Nice. The article also mentions BluTech lenses (BluTech LLC, Alpharetta, GA). I've found the marginal utility of bluelight blocking solutions are very context specific, indeed. And mostly-completely bahokie garbage, sadly, but not when it's BluTech and BluBlocker. BluTech/BluBlocker for the screen-induced fatigue is the correct solution. I always get BluTech HI Indoor AR pucks for my prescription lenses. And just switch to prescription sunglasses when I go outside.
I replaced all the light switches in my house with smart dimmers and have the lights dim in the evening. It happens in steps so it's noticeable and it's like a clock ticking down. I don't know if there's anything scientific about it but it's pleasant, like the house is going to sleep so maybe I should too.
I really don’t care if they “work” or not. I find it incredibly cozy to have a warmer, calmer screen in the evening.
I have my phone in monochrome (i.e. greyscale) mode and just subjectively it's much easier to look at especially at night. I have it at the lowest brightness and it's still very readable. Human eyesight is basically monochrome in low light settings anyway.
I firmly believe this varies between people significantly.
Blue light filters do not work for me because I fall asleep on command everyday all the time regardless if WW3 is outside.
BUT it also seems the effect of poor sleep seems to be MUCH worse for me than other people. I go from extreme motor coordination to dropping cups in a span of 3 days of poor sleep.
There’s a chemical called adenosine which accumulates over the day that induces sleepiness and there are genetic variations that can affect your susceptibility to it. Receptors notice the accumulation of adenosine and use it as a signal to “scale down.”
I think that I am more sensitive, explaining my ease of sleep but also the effect of it when it accumulates due to poor sleep (sleep flushes it away). Yeah it’s great when I’m in bed but it’s not great when I want to throw a ball and my brain wants to be stingy. It basically means that someone else’s “helpful guide to sleep” is completely different from my “helpful guide to sleep.”
>the effect of poor sleep seems to be MUCH worse for me than other people. I go from extreme motor coordination to dropping cups in a span of 3 days of poor sleep.
Are you sleeping enough? When I was getting too little sleep, averaging 5.5 hours per night, this described me well. A single sleep interruption could make me lose most of a day of work. I'm sleeping better and longer now, and it seems I'm more able to tolerate small interruptions.
Yeah I’ve gotten 8 hours of sleep almost everyday for 15 years, ever since I put 2+2 together. In my early 20s, I didn’t like being bad at sports and I found sleep was my single most important factor.
Similar to you, I also noticed that if I miss good sleep for several days, it stacks. I treat sleep like a battery. A day uses up 20% and good sleep fills it back up, but only like 30%. One missed night isn’t that bad but I also can’t recover several nights’ worth.
I have had success with an extremely aggressive red filter. My unchecked sleep schedule has me going to bed around 4 am, consistent over decades. I don't consume caffeine or any other stimulant. In the last 4 months I switched my lights to LED bulbs to turn red at 6pm and use QRedshift on Linux (Mint) with the temperature set to 1000k at 6pm. I have consistently been falling asleep around midnight. What is remarkable to me is that I am actually feeling tired at night.
But have you considered that it feels better?
so do placebos
I agree for sleep. I prefer them because they focus better for me.
Blue creates a halo around letters that is distracting with my declining vision.
Also, Blue fluorescent OLED are ~50% less efficient than R/G phosphorescent OLED so you can reduce screen power consumption of a full white page by almost 30% using such a filter. That in turn might be 30% of active device power consumption (for a total of almost 10% in battery life during active operation). Ignoring that they also tend to burn out more quickly, since tandem blue has become fairly mainstream.
Many more reasons for these "filters", if you don't mind the white balance shift and reduced color gamut.
So what? If I could take a sugar pill that guaranteed I feel comfier looking at my screen, nobody can tell me it "doesn't work". I'm not trying to optimise my life, I'm trying to have my eyes feel better.
Placebo and “manifesting”—the latter sounds mockable but pretty much the same thing, harmless if helpful so hey!
If somebody is "manifesting" themselves a sleep aid, I think they'd just call it meditation and everybody would more or less accept that it probably works for that individual. Maybe you'd have a few people with severe autism who start arguing on online forums about the scientific evidence behind meditation, but that's just them being them.
The placebo effect is a real, measurable mind-body response where belief & expectation can change your symptoms or how you feel. However, it does not directly alter external reality. Manifesting claims your thoughts or intentions can cause _outside events_ to happen, which has zero evidence to support it.
Not really. Most of the cultural notion about the remarkable effects of placebos came from flawed studies in the 1950s. As far as I can tell, the modern consensus is that there's no clinically significant placebo effect except for conditions that can only be measured by a subject self-reporting their own perception (like pain and fatigue).
and? placebo is often effective.
If you aren't aware, your phone's screen can go much dimmer than the minimum brightness offered by the slider, if it supports HDR. There are apps that use an HDR screen overlay to lower brightness all the way down to the dimmest you can perceive. In my own experience, 'half' the brightness of 'minimum' brightness is plenty dark enough to not disturb sleeping at all if using my phone in bed.
Also for third-party monitors with MacBooks: BetterDisplay
Can even use an external keyboard’s native brightness buttons. Can still use f.lux if desired too though Night Shift maybe Sherlocked there a bit…
Blue light filters definitely work for me. But it needs to be a strong filter (quite a bit stronger than the strongest setting of Apple's built-in filter).
Yes, article title is clickbait. Partial filters don't work, but as they suggest, 100% filter of blue light (resulting in no blue light present), DO work.
You can get this with Apple's strongest filter, the color filter, in Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Color Filters, rather than night shift. Only red sub-pixels are illuminated with it. It can be added to the triple click power button accessibility shortcut.
That's what I use. I have a shortcut set to enable it when I put my AirPods in at night.
It's funny, I'm so comfortable calling this guy an idiot purely based on the fact that I've taken up Bob Ross style painting in like the last 2 years.
Teaches you to pay attention to "objective" colors. And at night, guess what, the colors get more red and less blue. I don't have to pull out as much blue paint for the night scenes.
It would be utterly naive to not thing that there's -- perhaps purely "psychological" (not sure if that's the exact concept but hey) effect by making the "white" on your screen, look like like the "white" you will definitely see in real life, which is going to be orange-r.
It seems pretty clear in the OP that headline is misleading—they do work, just not as well as he would like. I think that a 50% cut in light emission is pretty good—and you can stack that with the other interventions listed, like auto-dark mode and reducing light in your room.
Note that it's only 50% if you don't normalise back to absolute brightness.
Is this your article OP?
I use blue blocking glasses, like Bono but darker and they do work. I also use UV LEDs to help me wake up, which also works.
I agree with the premise that night shift and other color warmth features are insufficient to have a strong effect, though they do help with eye strain which is still a positive.
> I took a sample of 4 websites/apps (Google, X, Github, and VSCode) with the SpyderX colorimeter + a diffuser to average over a larger area of the screen, and found reductions in luminance ranging from 92% to 98%! That’s huge.
What about TikTok or Youtube?
So the main claim presented here is that reducing blue reduces total "light" (lumens? watts?) by 50% (totally believable), and that reduction in light is all that matters for sleep?
That seems reasonable. The pseudoscience wankery that the fad has brought bothers me a lot too.
... but I'm not sure that's much of an argument against blue light filters, aside from color complaints. That seems to support that it's Useful and Good and is Achieving Its Intended Goal. It's reducing total luminance, because people prefer it over reducing screen brightness overall. I sure as heck do anyway (as night shift modes, they're a more comprehensive option than dark mode), though I think I'll experiment with just reducing brightness a bit.
----
For melatonin in particular, fully agreed. The recent trend of "can't even get <5mg in stores, and >10mg is appearing regularly" in the USA is mind-boggling to me. AFAICT it's exclusively because it's a "supplement" and therefore practically unregulated, and these companies don't give a shit about anyone they harm, just profit.
Start with something like https://a.co/d/0dISg7oa (0.3mg, this is what I personally use) and go up from there, slowly.
No, in the OP (after an unclear intro that confuseed many readers), there is a graph that shows blue wavelength intensity is important, but software light filters don't filter a lot of it, and the effect is cancelled by increasing overall brightness.
If software filters are reducing total light by 50% while only affecting blue-ish tones, and that's a total light level comparable to multiple brightness steps on a Mac... tbh I think it's reducing it quite a lot. Many I see using them (myself included) don't tweak brightness when enabling it, and many (all?) systems don't adjust their brightness to match the perceived change from a software filter (on my Linux machines in particular I have never seen this happen, don't know about Macs though).
Half is not a lot, sure, but their ultimate suggestion is to do the same ~half change:
>You can decrease the amount of light coming from your screen by more than half simply by dimming the screen by several notches.
which is definitely significantly more than I see people doing voluntarily in the hundreds of millions.
Do they have any evidence that people are raising system brightness to match the 50% loss from the filter? If not, it still seems like a rather significant mark in their favor. Perhaps not sufficient to meet the goals (they seem to be recommending a larger change, but aren't specific), but I see no claim that a lesser decrease in light is worse.
---
Late edit: on second thought... let's go through this more rigorously. For both myself and any other readers, because I want to make sure I'm following it accurately too.
The main explicit points in this article are, in order:
- night shift does not help with sleep (the main claim)
- blue light is not special, in particular because the "[most] sensitive to blue" research is mis-quoted to mean "blue is bad", but it's actually sensitive to blue and green (seems very well supported)
- night shift reduces blue and green by about half (tested themselves)
- half of absolute is not a lot because vision and a lot of the related biology is logarithmic (100% agreed)
- halving light affects 25%-50% of melatonin levels (linked research)
- many people use Night Shift (100% agreed, and they have decent data to back it up)
- dark mode is better than night shift (>90% vs ~50%, implied leaning on the linked research earlier. agreed, seems straightforward)
- dimming your screen by several steps is the same or better than night shift (as it decreases brightness more, same reasoning as dark mode. agreed.)
That still sounds rather in favor of Night Shift. It's targeting the correct color range (NOT the pseudoscience blathering of just blue blue blue), it has a moderate affect on melatonin levels at the light level changes it creates, and it's used by a huge amount of the population.
Nowhere in there that I can see is anything to back up "Night Shift does not work". Only "it seems to be doing things right, it just isn't quite enough on its own" and "ARGH it's not just blue light STOP PROMOTING FAD PSEUDOSCIENCE". That seems... fine? Most things are not silver bullets.
So buy 5mg, and split the tablet in half.
that'd give you 2.5mg, which is still almost 10x more than what I linked.
it's possible to split and separate them enough of course, but beyond "roughly half" it gets rather difficult. I've considered getting the liquid ones and a micro-dropper for smaller doses (if they'd even be small enough, many combinations are not), but 0.3mg pills are rather convenient and worth the small amount of money for me.
Oops, missed the decimal position!
Some research indicates people over 50 (includes me) achieve best results at 0.3 microgram dosage, which is 1,000 lower(!). Higher dosages reduce the effect.
You might take a quick sec to look into the data. You can buy 5mcg on Amazon, although 5 mg is more common (and 10mg, and ...).
after an initial "... is that a misquote too? sounds super low" I decided to hunt around. I haven't seen anything on that low of a dose... but doing the math, it does seem to make some sense I suppose. a rough check of the total amount of melatonin in your blood at night implies something like 0.5mcg at peak (peak concentration at ~100pg/ml times 5L of blood). lots more is produced in a night because it has a short half-life, but yea, blood concentration is lower than I remembered.
what I also haven't seen though is anything covering how well it's absorbed through your digestive system. 0.3mcg intravenously I can certainly see being effective, but orally? sublingually? not sure. but you've definitely got me interested in looking more :)
(initial results: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melatonin_as_a_medication_and_... implies it varies quite a lot, but I'm seeing it centering around 15%-ish many places. so you might want like 3mcg to hit normal levels? and https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5405617/ is implying 1-5mg -> 10x-100x normal concentration peak, so that does hit the right ballpark reasonably well... I guess I'm going to start experimenting with even smaller doses!)
Based on my experience, most health benefits are from personal habits over external hardware. But people care health so much, it's a great opportunity for merchants to get revenue.
These are the kinds of articles that give science a bad name, and that make people anti-science.
You might as well try to claim hot tea doesn't help you get to sleep, or reading before bed doesn't, or whatever else you do to wind down.
I personally don't care if some narrow hypothesis about blue light and melanopsin is false. I know that low, warm, amber-tinted light in the evening slows me down in a way that low, cold, blue-tinted light does not. That's why I use different, warmer lamps at night with dimmers, and keep my devices on Night Shift and lower brightness. It works for me, and seems to mimic the lighting conditions we evolved with -- strong blue light around noon, weaker warmer light at sunset, weakest warmest light from the fire until we go to sleep. Maybe it doesn't work for everybody. That's fine. But it certainly does for me.
And maybe it's not modulated by melanopsin. Or maybe it's not about blue light, but rather the overall correlated color temperature (CCT), e.g. 2100K instead of 5700K. Who knows.
But this type of article is bad science writing. It shows why one hypothesis as to why a warmer color temperature would result in one other physiological change isn't supported. That doesn't mean "blue light filters don't work" as a universal statement. It's hubris on the part of the author to assume that this one hypothesis is the only potential mechanism by which warmer light might help with sleep.
And it's this kind of science writing that turns people off to science. I know, through lots of trial and error and experimentation, that warm light helps me fall asleep. And here comes some "AI researcher and neurotechnologist" trying to tell me I'm wrong? He says it's "aggravating" that people are "actually using Night Shift". I say it's aggravating when people like him make the elemental mistake that showing one biological mechanism doesn't have an effect, means no other mechanisms can either.
> But this type of article is bad science writing. It shows why one hypothesis as to why a warmer color temperature would result in one other physiological change isn't supported
I don't know if I'd even give them that credit (emphasis mine):
> Halving the luminance, at best (around 20 lux baseline) might get you from 50% to 25% melatonin suppression.
> These are the kinds of articles that give science a bad name, and that make people anti-science.
No, it is attitude like yours that brings humanity a bad name.
"Blue light effects" have always had highly questionable evidence behind it, what has been sold and marketed under the guise of it has had _zero_ evidence behind it. But now that you are reminded that it is actually bullshit, you react with skepticism.
"Feels good to me" is hardly evidence to begin with. It's something that is even more flimsy than sociology. I have my doubts it should even be called medicine.
You have to remember that a shitton of people day after day "show" "evidence" that homeopathy works. Even though it has no plausible mechanism of action. So clear mechanism of action is about as important as the evidence itself. (see Science-based medicine)
I could understand (not justify) skepticism in many cases (such as "common wisdom" from 1000 years ago) but this particular topic should have raised your skepticism 20 years ago back when the craze/marketing stunt was starting, and not now.
> "Feels good to me" is hardly evidence to begin with
Where did I say anything like that? Please don't mischaracterize my comment, that's not helpful. It's not that it "feels good", it's that it helps at least some people fall asleep more easily, and I know this from personal experience. And many, many other people have written that it does the same for them.
> "Blue light effects" have always had highly questionable evidence behind it... But now that you are reminded that it is actually bullshit
You're right that the evidence for it is questionable. But you know what else there's no conclusive evidence for? That hot herbal tea helps you fall asleep. Or soothing music. Or bedtime stories. Because the funding usually isn't there to perform the kind of large-scale studies required to establish these things, because it's just not a priority or even a good use of our dollars. And lack of evidence for, is not the same as evidence against.
My point is, nothing in this article does establish that it is "actually bullshit". That's a gross misreading of the science, and that's what I'm criticizing the article over.
People experiment with things and discover what works and what doesn't. Again, nobody's going around complaining that there's no scientific evidence lullabyes don't help put you to sleep. And neither lullabyes, nor turning your lights down to amber, have anything to do with homeopathy. You can't possibly suggest they're doing harm. People aren't using amber lighting at night instead of getting their cancer treated.
But for some reason, low amber lighting to help with sleep makes you and the article author upset? Why? Why does that make you upset, but not hot tea or lullabyes? Or do those make you upset too?
"feels good to me" and "helps me sleep more easily" are about the same thing: flimsy and almost non-quantifiable personal experiences. About the same level with "I dream of nicer things".
> And many, many other people have written that it does the same for them.
So people write for homeopathy. Homepathy actually is the precursor for using this type of "evidence" for development and study of new "drugs" (hint: this evidence ends up going nowhere useful, quickly).
> Or soothing music. Or bedtime stories. Because the funding usually isn't there to perform the kind of large-scale studies required to establish these things, because it's just not a priority or even a good use of our dollars.
Oh, there is. There are way more studies about this than you can possibly think of. There are medical journals reporting clinical experiences about this daily. You are saying this on an article about study about one of these, ironically enough.
> And lack of evidence for, is not the same as evidence against.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot
> My point is, nothing in this article does establish that it is "actually bullshit".
Why not?
> But for some reason, low amber lighting to help with sleep makes you and the article author upset? Why? Why does that make you upset, but not hot tea or lullabyes? Or do those make you upset too?
You are the one who suddenly claims this makes people "anti-science", when this particular bullshit is not even 20 years old, and it was already known to be suspect 20 years ago. It is just ridiculous that it is now suddenly such a core belief of your persona that even being reminded that it is most likely bullshit is going to drive you to reject science outright.
As I said, I could at least _understand_ (but not justify) much older claims, such as ancient chinese practices or whatever. This makes they make me upset indeed (this is pseudoscience, after all), but what makes me even more upset is the creation of new pseudo-scientific or even anti-scientific "popular wisdom" _in this age_.
I think you have not actually understood what I wrote, because of this part:
>> My point is, nothing in this article does establish that it is "actually bullshit".
> Why not?
I've already said it multiple times. Allow me to repeat myself:
> make the elemental mistake that showing one biological mechanism doesn't have an effect, means no other mechanisms can either.
You've written a lot, but you haven't understood that this is the core mistake of the article, and the core mistake of what you're trying to argue.
You reply with a reference to Russell's teapot, and that would be fine if you were merely trying to make the point that the effect of amber light on sleep has not been sufficiently proven. But you're the one literally calling it "bullshit", i.e. disproven. That's wrong. There's no high-quality study conclusively demonstrating it doesn't have an effect.
Certainly you can claim that because not all mechanisms have been disproven yet, then there could still be an effect. That is why I quote Russell's teapot. Your claims are technically not disproven, and may not even be possible to disprove, but that doesn't mean that the existence of the teapot is (most definitely) bullshit. This is what the example of Russell's teapot is trying to show.
I also keep continuously putting the example of homeopathy because it is exactly the same. Homeopathy has plenty of (weak) evidence, but no known mechanism of action. All the proposed religious, memory of water, etc. have been disproved. Certainly you can argue that homeopathy could still be a thing because there could be some physical/biological mechanism that has not yet been disproved! But this is just nitpicking: homeopathy is still bullshit. In the same way that a teapot in space is bullshit.
Anything else is a (useless) nitpick.
In any case, even from day #1 it's been known that blue light could possibly have a mechanism, but there's always been a big stretch from there to claiming that blue light filters/night shift have an effect, and the evidence for the latter is substantially lacking. https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/blue-light/
I'm sorry, but using the idea of Russell's teapot to claim anything without rock-solid proof is "bullshit" is a deep misunderstanding of the idea. It's wrong, it's offensive, and it's not helpful to genuine understanding.
Amber light is not Russell's teapot. There's widespread anecdotal reporting that it helps with sleep. It's not something nonsensical like a teapot between Earth and Mars. And for you to suggest that they're the equivalent is, frankly, arguing in bad faith.
The world of knowledge is not divided, black-and-white, between things that are scientifically proven and "bullshit". Probably the vast majority of practical facts we rely on daily are not "proven" with empirical studies. That doesn't make them "bullshit". I hope you can understand that.
No, I do not understand why I cannot call homeopathy bullshit. There's plenty of widespread positive anecdote for it, too!
Why would you think calling one bullshit is "offensive" and not the other? You realize that this "gray" scale that you claim is as unscientific as it gets, right? After all, it worked for me! And I hear that it works for my friends! How can homeopathy/blue light filters/whatever-ritual-you-like-today not work? How can there not be a teapot on the sky?
If the problem is with the word "bullshit", call it pseudo-scientific, but it is almost the same thing.
Tomorrow there could be some evidence of an effect shown in the opposite direction (e.g. blue light filters _harming_ sleep quality*, or performance the day after, or whatever) and you would be as skeptical as with claims of no effect, if not more. See the recent article of white noise in HN and how it was met in the comments.
* Because of people (or worse, software) turning their screens' brightness up to compensate, which I already read an article about long time ago...
Someone says that other psychological factors (which have physical effects) help them sleep and they "bring humanity a bad name"?
Maybe think on that a little bit.
No, he said "this gives science a bad name"/"makes people anti-science" because some article published something that contradicts his anecdote of how well he thinks he sleeps. That gives humanity a bad name. And your direct insults do, too (which fortunately have been edited out).
The direct insult where I said "touch some fucking grass"?
I certainly stand by it now.
Why? You're proud of your insults?
Well they work in that the color temperature of the light in my house is much cooler during the day than at night, and it's nice to match it so it doesn't look jarring.
> Everybody wants better sleep
Bro, as someone who had brutal insomnia for a couple of years and now sleeps "normally" for whatever that means, I can tell you that I don't think about my sleep quality at all. I'm happy to be sleeping.
If you too sleep "ok" for whatever that means, maybe stop worrying about optimizing it and go do something else less insane.
The charitable reading of "better sleep" is "sleep habits that allow for a healthy amount of sleep". A lot of people have habits that give them insufficient sleep.
Yeah, "get better sleep" is usually followed with "by buying this thing". No one makes any money if you go to sleep earlier.
My experience is being surrounded by people who sleep eight hours a night and then check their ring data or whatever nonsense to convince themselves that they could do better.
Waking up tired and with the brain full of fog is nearly as fun as not sleeping and ending up tired, with the brain full of fog. Truth be told, most cases of "poor sleep quality" are not as brutal though.
What did you do to tackle your insomnia?
Disturbed sleep / inability to settle / anxiety can have physical causes although these are poorly recognized / diagnosed by regular allopathic medicine where I live.
Anecdata: 1) A good friend whose anxiety was largely alleviated (and sleep improved) by recognizing and treating their iron deficiency. 2) I have to (can't take the Western drug which was prescribed any more, and the Western doctors can't seem to bang the rocks together) take herbs for my hypertension but as opposed to the side effects I was experiencing from the drug I joke that all of the "side effects" from the herbs are good, they're targeting imbalances which were not recognized / treated previously and lo and behold I settle and sleep better... which helps reduce the blood pressure.
Which herbs do you take?
I spoke about it in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnNPRqLVtaM
Primary, idiopathic insomnia doesn't really exist. It's almost always anxiety, although a few other mental and physical conditions can also cause it. But more likely anxiety.
That was my experience as well.
I have Night Light perpetually on with all of my devices because I find it softens everything and makes viewing displays less harsh, less garish, less vivid, and less intense. I don't need eye searing HDR constantly cooking my retinas.
Why is it that a few people seem to get bent out of shape by redshift and/or dark modes? If you don't like it, don't use it. Whining about scientific evidence is pointless, even if it all only comes down to user preferences with no science behind it, so what? Let people enjoy things.