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Why office workers can't sleep and why that's bad
- RugnirViking 7y agoThe part where they spoke about various populations sleeping for around an hour longer each night in the winter is very interesting to me.
- AdrianB1 7y agoIt is quite logical, the night is much longer and we used to depend on the light cycle. Also many animals hibernate in the winter, we just sleep a bit more, it is an adaptation to environmental conditions: less light, less food, movement in lower temperatures require more energy, sleep conserves energy. In my country we have a bit less than 9 hours of light in December and over 15 hours in June, we continuously adjust for it.
- RugnirViking 7y agoWell yes, it makes sense evolutionarily, but I don't think I had ever specifically heard someone suggest that not following such a pattern in modern times might have bad effects
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- aussieguy1234 7y agoThis study mentions blue light as from smartphones as a problem. My phone has a blue light filter which I have on all the time. Linux gnome desktop also has one for late night coding sessions.
- vfc1 7y agoTurned it on just now, thanks for sharing I didn't know that existed.
- globuous 7y agoThese things are incredible. I used to turn it on for my eyes, but i noticed that when on my laptop in bed, without it on, i wont feel tired at all. I turn nightshift on and suddenly i feel sleepy :)
- mk89 7y agoNot only that, try to switch it on and off a couple of times. You'll see that when the blue light is ON after having used the blue filter for like a couple of seconds, you'll feel like someone punching your eyes! It's almost like having a lamp in your face all the time in the night - of course you can't sleep! We just got used to it. Now thankfully someone has implemented such filters.
- dugite-code 7y agoAdditionally Windows 10 has also introduced this option in Display Settings -> nightlight
- haolez 7y agoChromeOS supports this as well.
- greenbush 7y agof.lux is awesome - it's been around for many years, and is free. Available for Linux, Mac, iOS, Android, and Windows! https://justgetflux.com/ https://justgetflux.com/
- brobdingnagians 7y agoI use f.lux on Windows and it awesome. Also, redshift is available for at least Linux, the BSDs, and an experimental version for Windows.
- eemil 7y agoSunsetScreen is good if you live at an extreme latitude. Don't know if this has been addressed in recent updates, last time I used flux it wanted to start dimming my screen at 18.00 in the winter and close to midnight in the summer. At the time, f.lux's devs seemed completely opposed to any kind of adjustable schedule for people who cannot follow the sun.
- rimliu 7y agoiOS and OS X has Night Shift, which is native implementation of the same idea.
- nucleardog 7y agoYou can solve this globally by getting eye glasses that filter blue light as long as you're not doing any sort of colour-sensitive work. After a day or two you don't notice the colour difference anymore.
- croon 7y agoIf everyone wears them you should to when doing color-sensitive work. Granted that's a mighty big if.
- NKosmatos 7y agoI came here to say the same thing, ever since I've gotten a new pair of glasses with blue filter coating, I don't get that match eye strain and headaches in the office. you get used to them immediately and can see the difference in many places you wouldn't expect.
- AdrianB1 7y agoI had my glasses with the blue light filter lenses for a couple of years, the problem is that I wear it all the time and I got used with it very easy, but the entire world was skewed. Also the monitors were looking yellow, an ugly kind of yellow, I switched back to regular lenses and I am perfectly fine with it.
- MaximumYComb 7y agoHow do you personally find the balance between blue light keeping you awake verse mental stimulation keeping you awake? I don't do any math or coding in the ~2 hours before bed, as a general rule.
- nucleardog 7y agoI got the filtered glasses mostly because of the purported benefits regarding eye strain, so I hadn't put a lot of thought into trying to compare the effects on sleep. Definitely wouldn't discount blue light having some effect, but I'm totally on the same page as you here regarding limiting stimulation and I'd have a hard time believing anyone that claimed lighting had anything even close to the effect that other habits did. Had trouble sleeping for years. Made my bed and bedroom a place for sleep and only sleep. When I go to bed the phone goes on do not disturb, there's no computer/TV/etc in the room at all and no clock (I can't look at a clock without thinking of all the things I have to do!). I just get into bed and lay there until I'm asleep. Some days I'll try and read a little, but I find these days that I don't make it very far at all before I'm asleep. Haven't even had to go as far as limiting activities before bed or anything all that much. At some point my body and brain got conditioned to sleep when in bed, so it's usually a pretty painless process now.
- rob74 7y agoI guess this varies from person to person. Maybe it is a problem if you have trouble sleeping anyway, but as far as I'm concerned, I guess the blue light just keeps me awake as long as I need to finish whatever I'm doing, after that I usually have no trouble at all going to sleep. When using a blue-light-reduced "night mode" however, I find I can barely keep my eyes open...
- bitL 7y agoThere are special Gunnar glasses that seem to work well by reflecting blue light - they completely eliminated any eye strain I felt while coding in the night. Coupled with natural light lamp, it's a great combo for a winter coder.
- graeme 7y agoHas anyone tested bright indoor lighting and its effect on their own sleep. I have some LED studio lights for video work by my desk all the time. I'm wondering if I should just turn them on while I work each morning. From what I can tell: 1. LEDs won't cause sunburn/skin damage 2. There's no blue light risk of them if they're not rates above a certain level of light output and you don't stare directly at them. I have to check the light rating, but it seems like there shouldn't be negative side effects to this. My new apartment gets little direct sunlight, so I've been feeling daytime darkness more acutely.
- ehnto 7y agoLEDs could still have all the same issues, it depends on the LED and it's particular output spectrum and the energies for each wavelength. I would check all that before concluding they would be good or bad.
- imgabe 7y agoThe main reason why offices have gotten dimmer is that energy conservation codes limit the amount of power you can use for lighting. Most office type spaces are only allowed 0.9 - 1.1 watts per square foot compared to 3 watts per square foot in the past. Part of that reduction is also that lights are vastly more efficient, but designers are also incentivized to use as little lighting power as possible. Lighting power is also tradeable among spaces. If you want to use some extra light for a fancy lobby space, you can make the office areas dimmer as long as you still come under the allowed total overall. Energy codes are in general a good thing, but there are some tradeoffs and unintended consequences.
- RandomBacon 7y agoI would be looking at the regs to see how the spaces are measured and see if I could create 1" high ceilings for some spaces that are pitch black (and stack those spaces) so that I could use more lighting elsewhere.
- imgabe 7y agoIt doesn't work that way, you can't just define arbitrary spaces. They have to be actual habitable rooms, which means a minumum ceiling height if 6.5-7' in every jurisdiction I know of.
- Dylan16807 7y ago> 0.9 - 1.1 watts per square foot So with LEDs, one and a half 60 watt equivalents per square meter? That's pretty bright. If I'm doing my math right that's enough for 1000 lux.
- imgabe 7y agoI'm not sure how you're calculating that, but if you're just looking at the lumen output of the bulb, the lighting level is measured at the work surface. In an office, that's at 3' off the floor and the light is at the ceiling which is at 8'-10'. Lighting intensity decreases with the square of distance, so if you have 1000 lux right next to the bulb, you're going to have considerably less 5' - 7' away. Add to that that those aren't the kinds of fixtures that are used in offices. People don't want to look at bare bulbs (and they also create glare) so most lights have some sort of lens that is going to reduce the light output somewhat. The target lighting level for offices is 30 footcandles or about 322 lux. Even 1000 lux is nowhere close to being outside on a sunny day which is more like 100,000 lux.
- wrnr 7y agoI've had insomnia for as long as I can remember and wish there was another culture about sleep. I saw this documentary about the Institute of Advanced Study (IAS) wherein a physicist was staying awake for 48 hours so he can focus on his work. The IAS is famous for hiring the best scientists and letting them work on whatever they want. I am not a genius like him but I wish I could use my restlessness to my advantage and work in long stretches of time and just sleep when my mind stops spinning.
- MaximumYComb 7y agoI had medically diagnosed insomnia for a period. If your insomnia is anything like mine then you'd have a decent idea about if you're going to sleep that night or not. If it's 1am and I'm still wide awake then I'm not getting quality sleep that night. What do you have to lose by going to your PC at that time and working for 6 hours before work? You're going to be tired tomorrow anyway any attempting to sleep for another 5 hours isn't going to help.
- dominotw 7y ago> medically diagnosed insomnia What is the difference between this and just regular insomnia. Did you have sleep studies done?
- MaximumYComb 7y agoI used to term to mean I sought medical help and wasn't self-diagnosed. There is a lot of self-diagnosis on the internet, especially in relation to conditions like this or psychological ones.
- greggman2 7y agoI'm curious about this idea of insomnia. I'm between jobs right now which means I don't have to get up. That means for whatever reason (my genes?) I find I'm not tired until 5am, 6am often. I sleep 7 hours just fine. So the only thing about it being "insomnia" as in "unable to sleep" would be some artificial reason I have to get up in the morning. Am I making any sense? It seems like it's only insomina because someone/something is forcing you out of the schedule your body wants. Well, I don't know your body. I'm talking about mine but just saying. I'm getting my sleep just not a the times other people claim I should be getting it.
- hownottowrite 7y agoFor a more historical take on our relationship with the night, I highly recommend At Day's Close by A. Roger Ekirch
- C1sc0cat 7y agoInteresting however there is data going back to the 1920's about changing lighting at work (Taylor I think) that shows that the very fact of changing light levels improved output. However when the changed the lighting levels back output improved again. It looks to me this is based on poorly designed studies, the including of trigger words like "kids" "iPad" is a bit of a red flag.
- taneq 7y agoThere are a whole bunch of effects that you tend to get when conditions change. Same thing happens in traffic where (say) a set of traffic lights goes out, and suddenly there are fewer accidents. Of course, this is because the lights being out puts everyone on their best behaviour and the accident rate goes back up as people get used to it.
- sokoloff 7y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
- La1n 7y agoI could also be the change itself and not the final state that causes it, or not?
- iamtheworstdev 7y agoThat's one of the conclusions. People assumed the changes lighting meant they were being monitored or watched in some way, so they performed better.
- wjakob 7y agoHere are links to more concrete studies concerning this effect. Action spectrum for melatonin regulation in humans: evidence for a novel circadian photoreceptor. Brainard et al. https://www.jneurosci.org/content/jneuro/21/16/6405.full.pdf https://www.jneurosci.org/content/jneuro/21/16/6405.full.pdf Phototransduction by retinal ganglion cells that set the circadian clock. Berson et al. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/295/5557/1070.full.pdf https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/295/5557/1070.ful...
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