>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?
After doing that, I have found that the "temperature" of the screen doesn't really matter to me that heavily.
+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
Which, fair that it may be obvious to others to just scan their eyes from screen to paper. I've been surprised with how much people will just accept the time their eyes have to adjust to a super bright screen. Almost like it doesn't register with them.
Except he completely ignores that’s actually expected for a cyan object to be duller at night: it’s the albedo of the object and the perceived color will dramatically changed between daylight and nightlight. So the screen is more contextually correct by toning down cyan, and the colors we perceive will match (and reinforce) the circadian rythm: the user will recognize cyan.
Of course, doing color-sensitive work should not be done with such filters.
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.
Don't trust everything your doctor says verbatim, they often oversimplify and their information can be out of date. Give your doctor the benefit of the doubt but check it against other sources and use it to build a mental model.
[1] https://health.clevelandclinic.org/do-glasses-make-your-eyes...
The weird thing is it seems to get noticeably worse or better depending on how much time I spend outside
I think they’re purely talking about the idea that cutting back on blue light will help you sleep better. Nothing else.
Why would the author care? Honestly it does seem like one of those junk science things that popped up a couple years ago that all of a sudden was everywhere. I literally remember comments here on hacker news from people saying Apple was killing people because they were blocking F.lux and didn’t have night shift yet. Yes they were the most hyperbolic, but they were there.
I kind of like Night Shift too, for similar reasons. But I don’t think it ever did anything for my sleep. Nor did I ever expect it to.
One trick is to schedule this as a bedtime reminder to put down the phone for the night (phone fasting).
In a way it's mildly frustrating, but also slightly insane to me that some of these things are so limiting in control. I cant just be given a simple on/off toggle? There is a project manager(s), paid millions collectively that sit in a room and decide "No, you cannot keep nightshift on, it will turn off at 7 AM every morning." Like... WTF.
Stuff like this just keeps on getting worse and worse - and more and more common.
Ive created shortcuts to jump directly to night settings and a shortcut to enable color filters. Still...
If so, you should be able to cron it to do whatever you want.
I was using redshift on Linux for a while and had some aliases set to trigger various settings.
Safe to say it works for making your eyes less tired at least.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
You are going to HATE to find out about night-mode in the browser
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.
For those like me, i'd like to add, this is not universally true. For some, dark mode will provide a significant reduction in comfort and increase in your fatigue and other symptoms.
Quite a few years back now, I started having significant problems with my eyesight that for the longest time I failed to match up to the switch to significant dark mode usage.
Turns out for many (though perhaps not all) with astigmatism, dark mode can induce issues that will wipe any potential positive impacts normal people experience. In my case, it gave me horrific blurryness/double vision that I thought was my eyes developing some new problem.
I'd tell the eye doctors "it seems to start fine then get worse as the day goes on!"
No, in fact what was actually happening, was in the afternoon my machines were scheduled to start shifting to dark mode. At which point the issues would start and my eyes would feel "heavy." It would fatigue my eyes so heavily that even not looking at displays would be affected.
I can not believe it took so long to connect the two, but I never even considered dark mode because it was so heavily pushed (along with reductions in brightness) as the answer to general monitor usage fatigue that I never remotely considered it may do the opposite, which to be fair, is on me.
Point is...if you have astigmatism, verify for yourself before rolling over to the full commit. Hopefully you are fine, but if not, you'll know why.
Not invalid; suspicious.
feel in this case is a muscle contraction not psychological as you're suggesting
If I put your hand in a vice and do the vice up to the point where you start saying you can feel the pressure…
Yes, of course I’m going to be suspicious.
Gaslighting doesn’t exist, you made that up because you’re fucking crazy.
/s
Surely you didn't actually believe that unless you JUST landed here from space after being away for 60 years.
I'm not the author, but every time I've seen Night Shift (and things like it) being used, they've done a grand job of royally fucking up the colors of whatever's on screen.
> It feels a lot better on eyeballs to use warm light things.
That's, like, your opinion, man. The lights in my house are all 5000K lights, and I love it.
I expect you'd get way more out of reducing the brightness of your screen [0] than fucking with its colors. So many people seem to love having searingly-bright screens shining into their faces... I don't get the fascination.
[0] If you've got the monitor's brightness at minimum and it's still too bright, then there are software controls to further reduce it.
I have an adaptive Lifx bulb that changes from 5000K during the day and then shifts down to 3000K at night, before tapering down to 2700K for overnight and it's amazing. 5000K in the corner of a dark room is just so disjointed and intense and upsetting to me, if I stay at an Airbnb for more than a night or two and there are daylight bulbs installed, I'll literally buy replacement bulbs and change them out.
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.
The list of mistakes were as follows:
1) it corrected my eye with a slight astigmatism, but over corrected my other eye, so the agregate was pretty much the same
2) the aformentioned blue filter, which is part of the anti-glare coating.
3) my non-astigmatic eye was incorrectly marked with a prescription
4) I don't actually need glasses because I can see to the bottom of the eye chart without them. Its just as I'm now older, my vision is not as good as they used to be.
5) these were designed for "close work" but actually don't really help me focus closer to me.
However, arguing that, as a non-proffesional with only a passing understanding of optics (non-biological) with a large multinational company doesn't seem like a good use of time.
This was always well known. It didn't matter 5 years ago, 10 years ago, when OS added it. Easier to let it go than argue.
But with HDR, it matters enormously people are well educated on this. Monitors are approximately light bulbs, and we've gone from staring into a 25W light bulb to a 200W one. (source: color scientist, built Google's color space)
> What is the authors problem lol? It feels a lot better on eyeballs to use warm light things. Why does he care?
I think it's better to avoid stuff like this. Been here 16 years and a flippant "whats his problem" "lol" and "why does he care" is 99th percentile disrespectful. It's not about what you're arguing, its just such a fundamental violation of what I perceive as the core tenant of HN, "come with curiosity." You are clearly curious, just, expressing it poorly.
That's a pretty strong claim to make.
The thing about color science is that everyone has eyes, so everyone assumes they already have the full picture. One can experience warm light feeling "nicer," and the jump to "this is physically helping me" feels so self-evident that anyone saying otherwise must be the one making a strong claim. But "I prefer the aesthetic" and "this is physiologically beneficial" are two completely different statements, and only one of them survives controlled study.
I don't care if people use night shift. I'm not trying to take anyone's warm tint away. But we are now in an era where consumer displays are pushing luminance levels that are physically, measurably significant - not "I feel like it's bright" significant, but "this is a fundamentally different amount of light entering your eye" significant. Getting the basics right matters now in a way it didn't when we were all staring into dim LCDs and the worst case was people shifting white balance so the color temperature was incandescent, not D65.
I've been using dark mode on gmail for years, not sure what OP is talking about here.
But also, my sleep quality got much better when I turned on f.lux. And it got better still when I added a second light to my bathroom that can do a 1800K super-warm light (that's also very dim).
And as an added pro-tip, I use f.lux during the day to cut my color temp to 5900K (instead of the default 6500K) and it made a huge difference for how long I could work without getting tired eyes.
For example, most people keep watching/scrolling Instagram Reels and TikTok videos. They keep stimulating the brain constantly, not just at electrical level but also in emotional/chemical level too.
I have seen people who are addicted and cannot get rid of the addiction. This is not only the dopamine-boost, it has deeper connections of neuro-chemical stimuli. Just observe around you; people pick up their phone to directly open Insta/TikTok, start scrolling right away every 5-10 seconds. (watching stories included too)
This is to some extent that when you mention even the possibility of such addiction and abnormal behavior, one gets outright resistance and denial of addiction itself. Much like substance abuse...
My point is, majority of the population watches/scrolls these, needing 10g of melatonin to fall asleep.
Obviously if I get engaged in an interesting stuff continuously, the existence of blue light does not matter that much. It matters if/when I am reading a novel which is in a mediocre chapter where nothing that interesting going on. The existence of blue-light or lack thereof may tip the scale at that point.
Try things, if you like them, do them!
Try not living a neurotic “study” based life, I am trying it and its pretty great!
Obviously you shouldn't follow studies blindly, especially because many studies are poorly conducted and do not replicate, but in general, we know that just following your gut is suboptimal and sometimes dangerous in cases when studies give us clear information.
Imagine if you have a rare genetic mutation that causes Night Shift to be extremely, extremely effective, and you don’t even try to use it because A Study Didn’t Tell You To.
You are indeed allowed to just…try things and see for yourself, especially such ostensibly low-risk things like this. The literature is not a bible.
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.
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.
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.
But they work.
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.
Awesome, hadn’t come across this term before.
You might appreciate the concept of chronotypes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronotype
The DOAC podcast recently hosted Dr. Michael Breus on same.
Apple Podcast link, or conjure your own:
https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-diary-of-a-ceo-wit...
Low brightness is great though. I didn't realize most of the battery drain on a phone is often just the screen. Lowering the brightness to as little as I need has been great for battery life
... over-the-counter melatonin supplements can contain anywhere between 10 to 30 times as much melatonin as is optimal to maintain circadian hygiene. If you have ever taken melatonin and got immediately knocked out cold, had weird dreams and woke up in the middle of the night sweaty or shivering, you likely took too much—which, to be clear, is not your fault, it’s the default in the US and Canada. The mega-doses in stores serve as hypnotics (punches you to sleep), but wreck sleep architecture. The right dose is ~0.3 mg, which is hard to find in pharmacies but can be found online.1: https://www.blublocker.com/blogs/news/what-blue-light-blocki...
But melanopsin contained in the cells that regulate circadian rhythms have an absorption spectrum extends to slightly beyond 540 nm (see the OP’s post). As the author says, “It’s not sensitive to blue, it’s sensitive to cyan (and blue and green).”
Those glasses probably do what they say in terms of wavelengths they filter, but they are only partially filtering out light relevant for circadian rhythm regulation and sleep.
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.”
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.
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.
The writer is dismissing this out of hand but to me this sounds like a great idea.
I like my (warm-coloured) lights and screens set to max brightness. I find it's easier to read and lets me work with more distance from the screen.
But what about easier sleep? Could we exercise more? Leave screens out of the bedroom? I have no idea.
I was gaming on a blurry CRT and reading on a dim light while hardly ever going outside during my teens and I only have light myopia on one eye.
I don't know if it has ever been studied, but I suspect eye socket morphology from my own family anecdata.
large eyes + small socket = squashed eyes.
It could be different genetic factors for different populations too.
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.
If someone put up an article saying “Turning down your headphones 1% will help stop hearing loss!“ most people are going to ignore it. OK yeah technically it will, but not to any meaningful amount.
I also like them in lamps inside for illumination during the evening, with the added benefit of not requiring more IoT devices.
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.
I'm not saying it's like this for everyone, but it seems to work very well for me at least.
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.
Also properly color calibrate your monitors
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.
What about TikTok or Youtube?
This reads funny on a website that does not respect your device's dark mode. Guess I'll look for an alternative blog.
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.
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.
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.
"Melatonin content varied from an egregious −83% to +478% of labeled melatonin and 70% had melatonin concentration ≤ 10% of what was claimed. Worse yet, the content of melatonin between lots of the same product varied by as much as 465%.
[...]
The last disturbing finding was more than a quarter of melatonin products contained serotonin, some at potentially significant doses."
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5263069/
"In products that contained melatonin, the actual quantity of melatonin ranged from 74% to 347% of the labeled quantity. Twenty-two of 25 products (88%) were inaccurately labeled, and only 3 products (12%) contained a quantity of melatonin that was within ±10% of the declared quantity. [...] Serotonin was not detected in any product."
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2804077
"Half of the products tested met the label’s claim for melatonin, which means they fell between 76 and 126 percent of the claimed amount. Of the products tested, 20 had between 0 and 76 percent of the labeled content, and 35 had between 126 and 667 percent."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2025/06/25/melatonin...
Melatonin is treated as a dietary supplement in the US rather than a drug, and this seems to be a widespread problem with supplements, given the incredibly lax regulatory regime.
https://newsroom.heart.org/news/long-term-use-of-melatonin-s...
"The main analysis found:
* Among adults with insomnia, those whose electronic health records indicated long-term melatonin use (12 months or more) had about a 90% higher chance of incident heart failure over 5 years compared with matched non-users (4.6% vs. 2.7%, respectively). * There was a similar result (82% higher) when researchers analyzed people who had at least 2 melatonin prescriptions filled at least 90 days apart. (Melatonin is only available by prescription in the United Kingdom.)
A secondary analysis found:
* Participants taking melatonin were nearly 3.5 times as likely to be hospitalized for heart failure when compared to those not taking melatonin (19.0% vs. 6.6%, respectively). * Participants in the melatonin group were nearly twice as likely to die from any cause than those in the non-melatonin group (7.8% vs. 4.3%, respectively) over the 5-year period."
However they were not able to control for severity of the insomnia and used dosage, because that data weren't in the dataset.
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 ...).
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!)
I'm not finding any 5mcg on amazon tbh. Likely in no small part because its search is trash nowadays. Mind sharing a link?
Otherwise even dark mode is way too bright in a dark room.
> No. Human light perception works on a log scale, allowing us to maintain useful vision over 6 orders of magnitude of luminance, from the sun at noon to moonless nights, whereas halving is .3 orders of magnitude. In relative terms, halving light is a tiny blip of the dynamic range of vision.
Kind of missing the point that:
a) a display emits spectacularly less light than the sun, even on very overcast days
b) said "blue light" reduction is presumably intended to happen at night where 1) any comparison with the ability to maintain unsaturated vision in plain sun on a clear day is largely irrelevant and 2) backlight itself is typically lower than in daylight (not for OLED which does PWM)
So given that the amount of artificial light to not screw up with sleep is about equal to "none at all" I'll take a cut in half of what essentially constitutes a flashlight aimed straight at my retinas any day.
> Here are four things that can help. [...] Use dark mode [...] found reductions in luminance ranging from 92% to 98%! That’s huge.
From my anecdotal experience dark mode and other low contrast themes are mostly used by people who set their brightness too high, and conversely people switching to dark mode immediately crank brightness up.
Countless discussions I had:
"my battery holds poorly"
"using dark mode?"
"yes"
"try light mode"
"but my eyes!"
"turn brightness down"
"done. wow I just reclaimed 1-2h of battery"
Such as that very website? ;)
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.
What you're saying is not science either. The entire medical usage of blue light filters hinges on just a few papers. If you really can prove those studies inapplicable you can prove that there's no objective reason to use them (I'm not necessarily saying the author did that).
Whether these filters feel nice is entirely unrelated question, nobody stops you from decorating your living space as you see fit.
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.
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.
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?
> 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_.
>> 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.
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/
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.
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...
Maybe think on that a little bit.
I certainly stand by it now.
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.
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.
In the beginning I got hit with something and was misdiagnosed, and almost died; hypertension didn't fit the narrative so was initially ignored. By the way, when you don't sleep for three months it fucks you up. No attempt was ever made to even acknowledge that there might be a root cause for the hypertension. The hypertension drugs worked until they didn't, and they started gaslighting me about it. Bear in mind, in the context of the theme better sleep will help with hypertension (demonstrably true!).
You need to cultivate awareness as well as evidence-based skepticism for this to work. One of the herbs I take interacts with the beta blocker I still take, and if you weren't paying attention it could kill you (nobody told me, or the herbalist, about it). Some of the herbs are pricey, but none are over $80/pound. All in, it costs me about $100 / month, and two hours of my time every three days (to boil herbs). Quite frankly, if the pills work then just do that; but don't treat it as a "solve", get to work and identify some of the root causes and what can be done about it... before they stop working or start making you sick.
https://dicom.nema.org/medical/dicom/current/output/chtml/pa...
The author's basic problem is that he knows too much about the brain and not enough about monitors.
The author goes on to argue that you should be turning your brightness down, but most people already are turning their brightness down; the blue light filter is more comfortable. He does make a reasonable case that you should be reducing green light similarly, but people prefer the incandescent effect of the flux filter to a straightforward color filter — indeed a primary design goal of these filters has been to be pleasant to look at which is why people use them.
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.
Making recommendations based solely on a theoretical mechanism of action is bad science. The only way to actually test this is with a study that looks at different types of light restriction and its effect on sleep. Obviously it's kind of impossible to do a blinded study for blue light filters, but you could get close by testing various permutations of light changes (e.g. total luminescence, eliminating only very specific wavelengths, etc.)
As another commenter said, it may be a placebo effect, but if it is, who cares? All I care about is that I get a better night sleep, and as someone (unusual among programmers I know) who really doesn't like dark mode, a screen reddener greatly helps me at bedtime.
Your n of 1 argument is the equivalent of “my grandpa smoked until he was 95 so smoking clearly can’t be bad for your health”.
And no, reducing brightness on monitors doesn't have the same effect. I recently upgraded my monitors to 600nits brightness from 350nits and there has been no change in comfort level with redshift but without the redshift, the old monitors (and the new) stil feel very hostile to eyes.
More importantly, as an individual, the only thing that counts is when the n of 1 is you. As another commenter said, you don't need to live your life by studies. It's not like there is much expense or risk in trying a screen reddener, so try it out, and if it works for you, great - it's bizarre that the author thinks it is "aggravating" that a lot of people use things that they say work for them.
I've used a number of blue light filters, and I've never paid for them.
Put another way, placebo or not, if there's an effect, and it's a positive one for you, it really doesn't matter. It's working.
The problem is, how do you define "if there's an effect"? A placebo can not have an effect, yet, it has.
Regardless the maximum possible effect will be constrained by the biology of the cells responsible for responding to blue light. Maybe knowledge of the biology is incomplete or flawed but to not use it to inform what’s possible seems foolish.
So what if it’s a placebo effect? Well some people are spending money and time investing in blue light filtering glasses and other solutions. It’s potentially snake oil and it could keep them from pursuing better solutions that would actually help them sleep
> Well some people are spending money and time investing in blue light filtering glasses and other solutions.
Ironically, we actually do have a number of good studies on the effects of blue light filtering glasses (easily findable with a Google search) and they do demonstrably reduce onset of sleep time. Where more research is needed is on software-only filters for screens.
I guess that it may help people with undercorrected myopia due to the chromatic aberration, but, I don't know.
Works for me, both reducing the blue light and worked for my baby, too, using only deep orange and red light of a cheap LED color change lamp. Apparently works for many, since red nursing lights are suddenly sold everywhere.
All of humanity has been a witness to these observations and yet we blindly assume blue light filters must have such and such an effect.
But even if it did: suppose a modern concrete-cave-dweller has an out of phase shifted day/night pattern with respect to solar rhythm, having blue light as the last form of light actually seems more natural!