Thank you for all the thoughtful responses everyone! It is much appreciated
Thank you for all the thoughtful responses everyone! It is much appreciated
Natural light for Earth is the Sun. Its light is a temperature spectrum at almost 6000k, which peaks yellow but has optical output from UV to IR.
While it’s output doesn’t change, the amount of atmosphere between the sun and your eye does. It’s something like a factor of seven (?) times more atmosphere when the sun is on the horizon vs. straight above your head. Because of scattering and absorption, 7x is “e” raised to the 7th power. A factor of 1000x darker.
Additionally, shorter wavelengths scatter a lot more than longer ones (Rayleigh’s law), which is why the sky is blue and why sunsets are red. (Convince yourself)
So what’s the point? The spectrum and amount of sun light changes dramatically over the day. An evolutionary adaptation is plausible if not likely.
Electronic devices that use LEDs can be very bright and white, like the flashlight feature on a cell phone or monochromatic like on a flat video display. For a dark adapted eye reading email at night in bed, the amount of light can be very very low.
The question then is, is it the amount of light, or of blue light, the ratio of blue light to yellow light, or just the presence of blue light that disturbs human sleep patterns? (Alternatively, did early man sleep better with a roaring bright fire and stress free, or pitch black and stealthy?)
I don’t think the answer is obvious and claims otherwise should be treated skeptically.
(This is a PR post)
I suffered with a sleep disorder for the first fifty years of my life, and I've learned a few things:
1. The brain falls asleep in stages. The visual center will shut off first. Once you close your eyes keep them closed. Make sure your room is completely dark and quiet. Complete sensory deprivation makes it more likely that your brain will switch over to sleep mode.
2. Light matters in the morning too. Consider making a light box with daylight spectrum bulbs and hooking it to a timer so that it turns on when your alarm clock does. Sit under bright light for the first thirty minutes of the day to help set your circadian rhythm.
3. If your circadian rhythm gets messed up (Hard to go to sleep and groggy till noon) it is much easier to move it forward than backward. By sleeping a couple of hours later every day and staying up a couple of hours later each night you can get back in sync in a couple of weeks. (it helps to have vacation time for this) If you can't forward reset it may take a few months of very strict morning light, evening dark and quiet, and extremely strict wake up times before you are in sync. Expect to be very groggy for the first two months and chronically sleep deprived as you make do on only 4 or so hours of sleep at times. You will typically get a good nights sleep only when you are exhausted and then struggle to go to sleep the next night. Whatever you do no matter what do not oversleep--even on the weekend.
Good luck.
Since this is a PR post, I hope I'm not interfering with your PR! Electronic devices are held very close to your face and since light is a distance-squared problem, way more light is hitting your eyes than one might realized. a 10 lumen screen 1 foot away will hit your eyes with as many lumens as a 640 lumen light bulb 8 feet away. My original question was rhetorical. Although we don't *know* whether its the amount of light, blue light, or the ratio of blue light to yellow light, we do know that (in general) a simpler biological system will win out over a more complicated once. Since there would be no evolutionary advantage of the more biologically complex adaptation, one should assume the simpler adaptation in the absence of evidence to the contrary (which hasn't emerged but that doesn't mean that it won't at some point). There is an appeal of something as simple as changing the light ratios on your phone as a means to improve health. I'm as skeptical of those claims as I am of any other health and fitness fad.
I would not have replied to your post just for this. I tried CBD last night after an hour of not falling asleep and it was like a miracle drug. As far as I know, legal here and Florida and in Texas. I don't think that's been suggested yet in this thread. And seems to lack the next-day impairment of other chemical mechanisms.
CBD oil knocks me out like a sledge hammer to the head, but only on the first night. It has zero effect on the second and on. I am one of two people I know who stay up all night from THC, plus a chronic insomniac, so my experience is probably not normal. But don’t be surprised if CBD does not keep working the miracle.
My experience is similar to Jovan. The first night was like a miracle drug. The second and third it did nothing. Even one extra night of good sleep per week would be miraculous for me. So maybe I'll pick a day and try to use CBD consistently on that day and only on that day.