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I found the basic premise of this blog post to be incredibly flawed. The author seems very sure of himself that blue light filters don't work, but making arguments related to cell types and emissions spectra and circadian rhythms is not the way to make a conclusive argument in a topic like this. Science is littered with recommendations about things that "plausibly" made sense, but that turned out to be flawed or just absolutely wrong when actually put to a real, scientific test. One example most people are familiar with: the recommendation against eating eggs in the 90s was based on the fact that eggs have a lot of cholesterol, and we knew high LDL levels in blood were associated with a greater risk of vascular and heart problems. So, "logically", it seemed that limiting dietary cholesterol would reduce heart disease. Except when scientists actually tested those recommendations, they turned out to be largely wrong - when you eat a lot of cholesterol, for most people their body's natural production of cholesterol goes down, so unless you're in the small subset of people who are particularly sensitive to dietary cholesterol, eating eggs is fine.

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.

His argument seems to be that the night modes don't remove much blue. My initial assumption was that it was about physical filters. Yellow or amber 99%+ safety lenses are a thing and several of my coworkers wear them. Looking through them at those painfully bright blue leds makes them appear to be off. Yes everything looks strange, but they work. Likewise a different coworker manually removes all blue in the monitor settings themselves independent of the brightness setting. That also works. The author's assertion should be qualified amd narrowed a bit.

I can absolutely confirm that night mode works wonders. Since ten years ago I discovered them I no longer have dry eye like problems.

This is great it works for you but hopefully you realize the weakness of anecdotal evidence when it comes to declaring something is universally effective.

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”.

You're right, it's not valid to make any broader conclusions from an anecdote. But it's about just as valid as the author making conclusions based solely on physical "this is what I should expect to happen" hypotheses.

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 love redshift as well. I actually keep it 24x7, and my eyes don't get tired at all even after 12 hours of programming. Nowadays, turning off redshift feels like an attack on the eyes.

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.

It’s more like, "Some people have something going on that ameliorates the cardiovascular and cancer problems caused by smoking."

Blue light blockers are a scam that was created when some circadian rhythm research went viral (in a highly misrepresented way) online a few years ago. It's a stunt to make some quick cash from unwitting buyers.

"It's a stunt to make some quick cash from unwitting buyers."

I've used a number of blue light filters, and I've never paid for them.

My Gunnars give me immediate eye relief after a day of work looking at a display. Are you sure it's a scam?

To the extent that there's some sort of clinical statistically significant lift over, say, however you might control for a placebo here, who knows? To the extent that it's working for you in a meaningful way, placebo or not... does it even matter? If they're working for you, they're tautologically not a scam, except insofar as you find yourself missing out on benefits promised that aren't being realized, or you feel that the price you've paid is disproportionate to the benefit because some much cheaper option exists in some sense.

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 same could be said about homeopathy, but homeopathy is a scam.

The problem is, how do you define "if there's an effect"? A placebo can not have an effect, yet, it has.

The whole point of placebo is that it has an effect though, just not one based on a real change.

That won't work for immediate relief; placebo is studied statistically as a cumulative change over a period of time. Not when I put Gunnars over my sore eyes from computing too much and get immediate relief. Frankly, I find this discussion a bit insane, a bunch of people trying to persuade me "it's all in my head" because they align with the opposite opinion, not with reality.

Plus there’s a lot of protein eggs, so they’re filling, and have to eat less to feel full, resulting in less food consumed and therefore less opportunity to intake further sources of cholesterol

Did you read the article? He points out “It’s possible that Night Shift does something, but the biggest study I could find of Night Shift mode (still a pretty small study) found little effect on sleep, so if there’s an effect, it must be tiny.” He links the exact type of observational study you asked for

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

If the author goes "I couldn't find enough high quality studies on the topic I'm discussing", then the conclusion should be that we need more studies, not to come to unwarranted conclusions in the absence of actual data.

> 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.

That sentence does not give me a lot of confidence. The conclusion does not follow the initial statement at all.

Even the premise of the idea is wrong, as evenings are either blue from the blue sky, or white from the clouds. It takes exceptional circumstances to have a reddish evening, and even then it's just around the sunset.

I guess that it may help people with undercorrected myopia due to the chromatic aberration, but, I don't know.

When the sun goes down the amount of blue light goes down. Are you disputing that? Respectfully this feels like a crazy claim.

It is indeed about the sunset and especially the last phases of it. It's also why red light is recommended for night feeding when breastfeeding.

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.

The sunset and also fires. Humans have been making fires for a million years and in addition to allowing us to evolve much smaller guts they've also had time exert pressure on our behavior.

I thought red light was recommended for nighttime because it doesn’t interfere with natural night vision.

But you could make your same argument for the pro blue light filter side.

Sure, and I'd write the same thing if we were talking about a blog post that said everyone should use blue light filters because of some plausible physical mechanism.

>It doesn’t make any sense in 2026 that Gmail doesn’t have a dark mode

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.

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 think this was what I was told the first time. The advantage of taking a picture with my phone's camera is it kind of made it obvious just how much brighter the screen was then the paper.

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.

There's some overlap with bias lighting here - good overall room lighting works if you've got good daylight, but it's much easier to get bright bias lighting at night than to light up the entire room.

Concur that most displays are set 25-50% too bright by default.

Well he goes on to rant about how it changes the colors displayed by the monitor, so a publisher cannot show the intended color (cyan in the example).

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 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”?

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.

There is plenty of information about this in trusted sources, the way you're describing this is incorrect. Overcorrection and badly designed simplistic optics can make myopia worse in childhood when the eye is growing. Your eye is no longer growing.

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.

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.

Your assumption was false.[1]

[1] https://health.clevelandclinic.org/do-glasses-make-your-eyes...

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

Is the author arguing anything about eye strain? The word “strain“ doesn’t even appear on the page.

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.

Aggravatingly, you can't set Night Shift to actually be on 24/7. It always has a "seam" where it fades off and then turns back on.

One trick is to schedule this as a bedtime reminder to put down the phone for the night (phone fasting).

I kind of despise that part about nightshift, since i almost always like to keep it at medium anytime indoors and during winter. But in the later evening I want it max, and when i got to bed i want it even more. And ive always despised flux for that too. It's even worse since a lot of times i sleep in two phases each night and it doesnt allow to change the length of night time. So dumb.

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...

Can’t f.lux be controlled from the command line? I seem to recall it can.

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.

Ive never been aware of that and when I look it's just forum posts of people asking more than once with no reply.

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?

They are, just, don't realize it. Anything off white will be < luminance than white. People replying they need it need to be turning their monitor brightness down.

Best thing to do is use a scripting app that can make hotkeys for controlling monitor brightness. You can directly control the actual backlight of the monitor and lower it in the evening and at night. Same as pressing the physical button. Great when you have multiple displays

> What is the authors problem lol?

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 respect that other people have the right to their opinion, but 5000K lights 24/7 is so completely insane to me. How? How do you get by with "dentist office mall kiosk" lighting blaring every hour of the day?

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.

> they've done a grand job of royally fucking up the colors of whatever's on screen.

Pretty sure that's the point?

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.

I have direct scientific evidence contrary to the claim that parachutes improve the safety of jumping out of airplanes.

https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094

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?

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>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.

Benefit: saves battery on OLED and goes easier on the OLEDs themselves

> you can feel your eye muscles release tension when you go from light to dark mode

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.

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.

Regardless of "health benefits", the phrase "you can feel" seems pretty relevant when it comes to what someone finds comfortable.

A phrase like I'm more trained in science is an appeal to authority, which is pretty suspicious, as is not trusting your own observations. How do you trust the data you collect?

feel in this case is a muscle contraction not psychological as you're suggesting

As a complete psychopath:

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

> 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

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

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.

Let me explain how many times I went back-and-forth with the opticians about "is this coating/feature optional?"

My optician's office charges an extra $100 for blue light filtering. They at least make it clear it's optional but recommended for frequent screen use.

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.

I don't go to that optician anymore.

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.

Someone ran up to you and put them on your face?

If you wait long enough cataracts will give you that for free.

It is a placebo, it is an aesthetic thing. It is not something that helps anything at all physically.

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.

> It is not something that helps anything at all physically.

That's a pretty strong claim to make.

It's not a strong claim. It's a settled one. The literature on blue light filters and screen-emitted blue light at display intensities is clear and has been for years, even if approaching it from first principles isn't convincing, or the first principles aren't known.

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.

so whats the takeaway? just turn down the brightness off your monitors? the blue light option of my benq monitor doesnt help?

username checks out

Hahaha in my 37 years I don't think anyones mentioned looking it up, cheers. I chose it when I was 8 by flipping open my mom's 2000 page tome of a Merriam Websters, closing my eyes, and putting my finger on the page.

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I love Night Shift.

My overall take (elephant in the room): Blue light filters don't work, it depends on what you do & how you do it.

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.

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!

You can and should! Just don’t go justifying that your choices are rooted in science when they aren’t.

What, you think Newton relied on a study to believe his own conclusions?

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.

Every dismissive reply talks about eye strain nada that is by far not what the author is taking about.

You can test the negative easily, but the positive is harder. Thus: placebos.

On the level of the individual a working placebo is a success.

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.

Neurotic is bad by definition, but using studies to inform your habits seems like a wise thing to do.

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.

Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be easy to understand what studies are actually demonstrating, based on how often you see people making giant leaps to conclusions that don't really follow from study results.

Yep. This attitude is utterly pervasive. We may as well just give up and start saying “science says…”, the way some people, especially some people here, seem to misunderstand what role studies play, what their limitations are, etc.

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.

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)

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Interesting take for me is that melatonin (over-)usage can be severely harmful for the individuals.

  ... 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.

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.

> light hygiene

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...

Bear in mind that chronotypes, as stated in the wiki, only varies about 2-3 hours from each other. This is just to say that there is no nocturnal person in terms of biology, we are all diurnal mammals after all.

I remember when I found Flux (third party predecessor to night shift) sometime in 2013. It worked in a week, I'd been staying up until 3am for most of the year and a started going to bed at midnight.

> 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!

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> 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.

I have a red flashlight I use at night to read books. It’s weird after an hour I don’t really see it as red anymore, just dim off white.

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.

the real variable is probably what you're doing before bed, not the wavelength. scrolling social media keeps the brain actively processing new stimuli -- notifications, comparisons, emotional content. reading on a kindle with blue light filter probably sleeps better than watching youtube with it on. the luminance thing the author mentions points in this direction 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 have an accessibility shortcut to turn my screen greyscale with triple taps but I kept turning it off so I could see the clues on sudoku and now I've forgotten I even had this for almost a year

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

> 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.

The writer is dismissing this out of hand but to me this sounds like a great idea.

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...

Those glasses state that they are the only pair that “blocked 100% of harmful blue light in the 400-450 range”

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.

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 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 recall studies showing that reading in poor lighting conditions is a cause of myopia in children. So I'm questioning whether we want to be reducing luminance on our devices at all.

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.

Significant outdoor exposure is essentially the only relevant factor for preventing myopia. I would be interested in seeing any studies that showed any meaningful relevance of low light reading, while controlling for time spent outdoors.

Main factor is genetics.

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.

I agree that genetics can protect you from developing myopia. For people who are genetically susceptible, outdoor exposure is critically important. Most people won't know which group their children are in.

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.

In summary blue light filters actually do work, through the indirect action of reducing overall light output, but the author has a larger axe to grind about the "technical details" (it's worth reading the article). The warmer color temperature reduces strain on my eyes, which I find both soothing and invaluable.

The author showed that Apple‘s implementation only cuts two colors by roughly 50%. And given we perceived light non-linearly aren’t they right that that really doesn’t make much of a difference?

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.

So which do you think it really is? Cutting two wavelengths' outputs in half, or reducing them by a mere 1% as per your trifling comparison?

This is just my own anecdotal experience but I usually get tired around 2130-22 but a few times I've turned off the red filter for various reasons (photo editing etc) and suddenly I'm still there at 0030-01.

I'm not saying it's like this for everyone, but it seems to work very well for me at least.

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 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 like to use the yellow anti-insect lights for the external lighting around my house as they tend to attract way fewer flying insects and fewer spiders as a result.

I also like them in lamps inside for illumination during the evening, with the added benefit of not requiring more IoT devices.

This is especially nice if you use bulbs that get warmer as they dim. (See the Kruithof curve.)

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.

I actually get head ache after a long session in front of my computer, but putting anti blue light glasses it goes away or never happens.

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.

> That’s all great, but there are websites that still don’t have dark modes. It doesn’t make any sense in 2026 that Gmail doesn’t have a dark mode. If the activity you’re doing most at night is reading email, you might consider an alternative email client.

This reads funny on a website that does not respect your device's dark mode. Guess I'll look for an alternative blog.

I get frustrated with my dim and red shift app that is the default on my android phone for neither being very red nor very dim...but it's the type of app where every scammy body will put a red shift app whoch sucks up your location, contacts, etc, so I haven't changed.

Best thing to actually do is use as dim a screen as possible closer to sleep. You can do this with external monitors using DDC and actually directly control the physical backlight of multiple monitors.

Also properly color calibrate your monitors

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.

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…

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.

Melatonin pills seem to have extremely bad quality control:

"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 pills seem to have extremely bad quality control:

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.

One more relevant study, but on the health effects of long term melatonin use:

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.

I really wish they'd name-and-shame the brands. I don't see how hiding it helps encourage better behavior. If anything, it seems like they should be publishing legal ranges, and rewarding testing labs that catch things outside it by fining failures.

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!)

I'm not finding any 5mcg on amazon tbh. Likely in no small part because its search is trash nowadays. Mind sharing a link?

> Is half a lot?

> 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"

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.

> That’s all great, but there are websites that still don’t have dark modes.

Such as that very website? ;)

I have a triple-click shortcut in iOS to use the accessibility features to go below the min dim settings.

Otherwise even dark mode is way too bright in a dark room.

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 added the “Noir” extension to mobile Safari, now I automatically get dark mode on all websites including Hacker News.

I’m surprised by how may don’t have a dark mode though. I decided to do it for my blog despite not really using it myself, and ended up sticking with it on. Still getting blasted in the face by eggshell white everywhere I click.

"Dark Reader" does the same thing on desktop Firefox/Chrome/etc. (& mobile Firefox, maybe also available on mobile Safari?).

Mobile Safari only does this for sites that implement dark themes (and when you have dark mode enabled in iOS). But many sites don’t have these themes. The Noir extension seems to fix the problem for now. There is a reader mode that can go dark but it’s manual, per article

I see. Not a Safari user myself. On Firefox & Chrome Dark Reader can force its own dark theme even if the site doesn't provide one. Like Noir does on mobile Safari.

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.

What if these filters also cure cancer by some mechanism that isn't known yet? Who knows, it might be true! After long experimentation with warmer lighting my cancer is gone, so it definitely worked for me.

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.

> 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?

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 don't know enough to defend the study, but I don't think 15 minutes of sleep is insignificant. If I'm consistently woken up 15 minutes before my normal wake time it's going to have a negative effect on me.

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 would discuss this with you in some detail privately, with bona fides. You should consult with an herbalist. The herbalist I see doesn't mix themes / traditions. The one we've chosen, together, to work with is TCM. Inside of TCM there are "strategies" or themes. We tried a few, the gou teng + tian ma theme seems to work, minor changes happen seasonally. Underneath that are herbs addressing inflammation (ability to settle / get comfortable), immune system (allergies) balancing (post nasal drip / congestion / anxiety), circulatory health (e.g. cold feet), and tonifying some of the major metabolic / detoxifying organs (sweating / digestion). I have a renewed commitment to exercise and making sure I eat the right things for my body.

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.

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.

The argument about luminance ranges is wrong. I measure the brightness of monitors regularly as part of my job, and typical maximum luminance values are in the range of 100-500 lux. That puts you right in the steep range of the visual response (especially if you are turning it down and near a max of 100), which is natural — maximizing the slope of the neuronal response to light means that more information will be available to the brain. In fact a good monitor will be tuned according to the just-noticeable difference which aims precisely to maximize the information available according to this characteristic curve. See e.g. the DICOM standard:

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.

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.

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.

my phone has a buried setting for ultra dim, which does help, except outside, where it makes the phone unuseable, and then it's impossible to do the 5 taps and scroll to find it, fuck android going to a linux phone

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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.