15 ms·
Lack of sunlight during the day is worse than electric lighting at night
- exabrial 3y agomy personal experience agrees.
- throwaway9980 3y agoSame. Sample of 1 anecdata reporting for duty: can confirm 100%.
- thierrydamiba 3y agoI’ve always thought night jobs should have limitations on how long an individual can consecutively work an overnight shift to limit the toll it takes on mental and physical health.
- BadCookie 3y agoMy dad preferred to work the night shift because it was less stressful at his workplace. He tried day shift a couple of times, but always ended up going back to nights by choice. For that reason, I have trouble agreeing with your suggestion, but I understand that you mean well.
- thierrydamiba 3y ago[dead]
- dathinab 3y ago> mental and physical health. It doesn't necessary. You could rephrase the title from > Lack of sunlight during the day is worse than [..] to > Lack of sunlight during the day has a larger effect on your bio rhythms then [..] but that effect isn't per-se bad it's bad if you life is out of sync with your bio rhythms to a point where it can have sever effects on you mental and physical health also additionally the way various factors can affect (mainly but not exclusively) shift our bio rhythms there is also the fact that people have various "dispositions" (not the right scientific term), dispositions which also change with age and which seem to have naturally evolved to improve the survival chances of human by making sure that in a pack of human (\j) there is always someone "fit" to spot danger/react fast/etc. the reason I'm pointing that "dispositions" out is because they can have a major affect on how likely (and more important how much) the bio rhythms of a person and their life with night shifts are out of sync as far as someone like me who doesn't know much about sleep science can tall the most harmful think is the switch between night and day shift making your bio rhythms fall completely out of sink (leading to fun thinks like potentially constantly increasing exhaustion every day) and/or the bio rhythms not adapting to night shifts worse as far as I can tell from personal experience there can be a big mismatch between what your bio rhythms are and what your "habits of sleep/work" are, especially if other factors like huge external stress come into play :\ Anyway examples of people living healthy lives with unusual bio rhythms (longer, shorter, shifted) are quite many.
- Broken_Hippo 3y agoWhat is your solution, then? Places that limit overnight shifts tend to have variable shifts - folks will work all three shifts, have one night a week, and so on. This definitely takes a toll on mental and physical health - just in a different way. At least with regular overnight shifts, you can get into some sort of rhythm with regular sleep and eating times. The other solutions mean things like paying folks more so they can work fewer days (make a full time salary in 3-4 days a week), but few places are going to do that and taxpayers are going to foot some of that bill - some pretty vital places have staff at night. 911 operators, police and fire services, snow plowing, nursing homes and hospitals tend to need around the clock staffing.
- thierrydamiba 3y ago[dead]
- tripdout 3y agoFor fruit flies. Also, what? >... circadian rhythms are the 24-hour changes in our physiology that synchronize with the day-night cycle and modulate when we are hungry, sleepy, want sex and have asthma attacks or a fever in the afternoon.
- kkoncevicius 3y ago> Also, what? Is this about that circadian rhythm line? It look true, if not under-stated. Shift between nights and days was one of the major constant things throughout the evolution of life. And the influence of this rhythm goes deeper than just physiology - it reaches a molecular level. Almost every cell in the body has a mechanism for keeping internal time of the day [1]. And they are kept in synch through suprachiasmatic nucleus, mainly via the light through the retina, changes in temperature, and food intake [2]. It is so prevalent, that even small things, like your sense of smell or which nasal side is more active and which one is congested falls under circadian regulation [3]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circadian_clock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circadian_clock [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suprachiasmatic_nucleus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suprachiasmatic_nucleus [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasal_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasal_cycle
- kwk1 3y agoI doubt it's that the circadian rhythm is news to the person you're replying to, but rather that that line is fairly badly written, particularly the "want sex and have asthma attacks or a fever in the afternoon" part. Summarizing: > [They] are the [...] changes [...] that [...] modulate when we [...] have asthma attacks or a fever in the afternoon. That does not read clearly to me!
- kkoncevicius 3y agoYou might be right, thou I don't see that sentence as being exceptionally unclear. The first remark in the OP - stating that this is about fruit flies, made me think they might not have heard about circadian rhythms and were genuinely surprised, as it portrays a certain view often shared by people who have studied little about biology.
- spaceman_2020 3y agoOT but does anyone have a good recommendation for a lumen lamp to simulate sunlight?
- subhro 3y agoWaveform Lighting makes awesome full spectrum bulbs. You are welcome. ;)
- sooheon 3y agoThere are a few other mfgs, Yuji is another great one, but the best price/performance IMO is SunLike from Seoul Semiconductor. They are in GE Sun Filled and Norb SMILE bulbs in the US. http://www.seoulsemicon.com/en/technology/sunlike/casestudy/ http://www.seoulsemicon.com/en/technology/sunlike/casestudy/
- User23 3y agoI’m not sure what you mean by lumen lamp, but good old incandescent bulbs radiate with a spectrum quite close to that of the setting sun.
- graphe 3y agoYou can't do a 'lumen' lamp. The IR rays are what help. Anecdotally it felt good to cover my hands with the old lamps, and the cfls and LED lights never "felt" good.
- b112 3y agoBe careful of eye damage. Cataracts form from certain frequencies of blue light, and IR can damage your retina. (There was an article about some guy with an IR heater on his desk, which was partially faulty, and emitted too much IR in a certain frequency, and damaged his eyes)
- graphe 3y agoCan you link me?
- ryanjshaw 3y agoAdding this to my collection of reasons why remote work is better. My home office has direct sunlight from 10:00-16:00 every day of the year. I've never been to a commercial office that comes close.
- noitpmeder 3y agoYou mean why work from home is better _for you_. Can't imagine most people have uninterrupted access to sunlight throughout the day. If we're using personal experiences, I certainly have never lived in a house or apartment where any of the rooms had that luxury.
- hackernewds 3y agowhich is why the _option_ of working in the office is the best :)
- draven 3y agoI've never lived in a house or flat where the rooms didn't have a window. I wonder if that's a regulation here (France), that wouldn't surprise me. Also, the labor law mandates windows and as much natural light as possible in offices.
- jwestbury 3y agoEh -- most home offices tend to end up in bedrooms, which in the US are obligated to have a window that a person could fit through (or to have some other secondary exit aside from a door). One problem is where the window faces. A north-facing window, or a window facing into a hillside or into a courtyard, does not allow sufficient sunlight. In London, my flat is in a Victorian terraced house, and the bedroom I'd use as a home office has a window which only has views of the house next door, and very little natural light. (That said, probably still more natural light than I got in my office, where I'm essentially in a corridor.)
- Broken_Hippo 3y ago
- qingcharles 3y agoI went practically 10 years without seeing the sun (jail) and I always wonder what damage it did to me, if any.
- pelasaco 3y agodoing what in Jail?
- Doxin 3y agoTime, presumably.
- hackernewds 3y agofor doing what?
- TheSpiceIsLife 3y agoCrime.
- rvba 3y agoInnocence
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sebstefan 3y agoPerl
- swader999 3y agoCreating Clippy?
- pelasaco 3y agodownvoted for what? He could be working there, or served by hacking and want to talk about it. If people post they were in jail in a post about "sunlight during the day", the "in jail for what?" should be expected..
- elchief 3y ago> One of the things that flies and privileged people have in common is napping and sleeping at night Come on
- dathinab 3y agoI mean to some degree it's true. Most people on HN probably have the privilege to have grown up in a somewhat semi healthy society and now have reasonable decent jobs. But compared to people which are semi forced to do stuff like working 24h shifts frequently or living in a area with so much noise pollution (and or danger or hunger (it's really hard to sleep if you haven't eaten anything for 30h and not much before that either)) that it's hard to sleep at all. Or which have to work 3 jobs sleeping only 4 hours a night it's really quite privileged. A privilege which _should be the norm and not having it is inhuman_. But if we consider that there are _many millions_ of people which do not have it calling it a privilege is sadly not absurd.
- vintermann 3y agoI think the word privilege should be reserved for those things which inherently everyone can't have. You can imagine a world where everyone has a flying car, but you can't imagine one where everyone has a personal servant (because then the servants would also have servants, who would have servants etc.) To be an elected representative, or a leader, is a privilege because if everyone was, no one would be. To be rich in absolute terms isn't a privilege, but to be richer than average is a privilege. Same with status, beauty, talent etc. Calling things privilege which aren't, conflates things which are zero-sum and things which aren't.
- handoflixue 3y ago> Calling things privilege which aren't, conflates things which are zero-sum and things which aren't. We already have "Zero Sum" to describe the thing you're talking about. Privilege is a different word, which refers to "a right, immunity, or benefit enjoyed by a particular person or a restricted group of people" (Dictionary.com) You can try to fight to redefine the word, but recognize you're waging an uphill battle against how everyone else uses it
- Al-Khwarizmi 3y agoIt's amazing that, as mentioned in the interview, a question as apparently simple as "What is sleep for?" doesn't have a definitive answer in 2023.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- _thisdot 3y agoDon’t we? I could be wrong but my understanding is that the glymphatic system works very well during sleep. Basically excretory process of the central nervous system
- Pyramus 3y agoNo, we don't have a definitive answer. We are very good at describing what happens when we sleep and what goes wrong when we don't, and so there are a number of theories as to why we sleep. But a definitive answer? There isn't one (yet). Here is the most likely theory according to Wikipedia: >The essential function of sleep may be its restorative effect on the brain: "Sleep is of the brain, by the brain and for the brain."[95] This theory is strengthened by the fact that sleep is observed to be a necessary behavior across most of the animal kingdom, including some of the least evolved animals which have no need for other functions of sleep, such as memory consolidation or dreaming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep
- coldtea 3y agoI mean, it's kind of obvious. One is some extra light frequencies that might or might not disturb sleep. The other is preventing an essential function, there since evolutionary times, the disturbance of which is known to be associated with all kinds of problems, from depression to various cancers and general health.
- grecy 3y agoEven when I lived 60 degrees North of the equator and it was regularly -40 for a daytime high, I always went for a walk on my lunchbreak. Usually the coldest days are the sunniest, and I always felt better for having the sun on my face. I really noticed the days I wasn't able to - I felt horrible at the end of the day.
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- Madmallard 3y agoMy sleep schedule used to just permanently drift forward and it was super awful towards having any kind of regular lifestyle and work was borderline impossible. Sometime about 1.5 years ago I decided to start walking in the sun for about 30 minutes a day. I have since increased that amount to around 3 hours per day every day. I am no longer able to stay up past say 3 or 4 AM, even if I wanted to ! It is impossible!
- anotherevan 3y agoIf you listen to enough Huberman Labs podcasts you'll hear him talk about the importance of getting some direct sunlight in the morning on a daily basis. Here's one example: https://youtu.be/UF0nqolsNZc https://youtu.be/UF0nqolsNZc Also in the anecdotes folder, saw a sleep specialist with my (young adult) child and he stressed the importance of getting daily sunlight exposure.
- simonbarker87 3y agoAh yes the "People living in California forgetting the rest of the work isn't like California" phenomenon - I would love to get sunlight every day but living in the UK that just isn't viable. Sunlight into my eyeballs within 15 minutes of waking up? Forget about it between October and March. Further evidence to me that humans weren't supposed to stray far from the equator and that I was born in the wrong climate (yes I am working on moving south)
- waveBidder 3y agothis may be useful: https://meaningness.com/sad-light-lumens https://meaningness.com/sad-light-lumens the sun isn't magic, we now have the tech
- simonbarker87 3y agoThanks, I have a SAD lamp that I use but it's not the same as real actual sun you know? I appreciate the link though :-)
- michalf6 3y agoJust make sure you're getting enough lux, commercial SAD lamps are so dark it's borderline fraudulent. You need a LOT of light.
- anotherevan 3y agoI was thinking, "This is a strange thing to get pissy about," but then realised you're in the middle of winter, so probably not in a great mood. Living in the southern hemisphere it's hot here at the moment and were keeping an eye on the bushfire reports.
- fy20 3y agoI live in Northern Europe and in this time of years it is not uncommon to have cloudy days with little light (you need lights on indoors) for weeks at a time. I wonder people from before artificial lighting had adaptions to lower light levels.
- MauranKilom 3y agoNot necessarily contradicting this, but even overcast days still have a high amount of sunlight outside. We don't really notice the difference to room lighting because our eyes have a very high dynamic range, but during the day (unless you live in the polar circle), the intensity of sunlight outside (and also the broadness of its spectrum) are much higher than any common indoor lighting.
- hackerlight 3y agoThe amount of light your eyes get on cloudy days while outdoors exceeds the brightest SAD lamps on the market.
- vlabakje90 3y agoThis is definitely not as black and white as you put it. Today, where I live (53 degrees latitude, northern hemisphere), the brightest point of the day is just about 100W/m². That converts to about 12000 lumens, but that is only at the very brightest midday hour. Before that or after that, it is only about a third of that. There are plenty of days where it doesn't even reach 100W/m². On those days, daylight is more dim than regular lamps even at the brightest point of during the middle of the day.
- adamjc 3y agoTo the point the other siblings are making, you can get an app for your phone to measure luminosity, try it out on a cloudy day (like in the UK today)
- mrweasel 3y agoLiving in Scandinavia has really made me hate the kind of studies. You have stupid advise like "Get up early and get sun in your eyes first thing in the morning"... Okay so which is it, sleep til' 9:00 or get up early, in the dark? It's the same with, go to bed when it's dark, right now the sun set at 15:40. If the suggestion is that I reduce my working hours drastically during the winter I'm all for it, but it is getting a little tiresome that supposed scientists completely ignore the fact that a pretty sizeable chunk of the worlds population lives pretty far north and have done so for thousands of years. The research may very well be right, but it's not particularly useful if you don't address the fact billions of people live in areas where you're recommendation don't make sense.
- gbil 3y agoI'm not a native English speaker yet I have objections with the use of "adapted" in this sentence The Earth had been spinning on its axis for a billion years when the first living beings appeared. Since then, we have adapted to alternate between light and darkness. You adapt when the environment was in a state A and changes to state B while you are already there. When you start from "scratch" in a specific stable environment, you develop/grow in that environment, not adapt. Or not ?
- Symmetry 3y agoLUCA[1] almost certainly didn't care about day/night cycles, so it seems accurate. And even if it had, the ways in which a modern mammal with a central nervous system cares are new changes brought on by the day-night cycle. An organism if an organism is changing in ways that are caused by the a specific environment, it's still adapting to the environment even if the environment isn't continuing to change. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_universal_common_ancestor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_universal_common_ancestor
- gbil 3y agoIsn't that change/evolution though ? If the environment didn't change - talking about the very specific attribute of earth axes rotation - is it correct to use "adapt" ?
- pjc50 3y ago"Adapt" is perfectly valid here. After all, the beings have changed (evolved). It doesn't matter whether the environment has. Which is also the case - not just the seasons but also huge climate changes and the mass extinctions.
- darkerside 3y agoI think adapt is perfectly fine, but "since then" really throws a wrench in the sentence. Why not, "therefore" instead?
- mwest 3y ago
- gniv 3y agoI never heard this before: "Plants produce toxins to avoid being eaten, such as psoralen, which is abundant in celery. Snacking at night introduces toxins that, at that hour, our repair systems are not ready to eliminate. There is also speculation that the major epidemic of epithelial cancers, such as colon cancer, in the U.S. is because of this."
- amelius 3y agoStuff the food industry doesn't want us to know.
- jononomo 3y agoI have eliminated all plant-based calories from my diet and it is just incredible how much better it makes you feel.
- FrustratedMonky 3y agoThe problem is meat heavy diets then have increase in cardiovascular health problems. What to do ? Eliminate plants and meat? Just eat oreos?
- jononomo 3y agoNo, people who follow a meat-heavy diet simply have higher cholesterol, not an increase in cardiovascular health problems.
- shlant 3y agohigher LDL cholesterol is causative of ASCVD[1] so no, that's not the case. Stop spreading dangerous, dogmatic, unsubstantiated claims. [1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FoqlTVCWIAI81XY?format=jpg&name=medium https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FoqlTVCWIAI81XY?format=jpg&name=...
- Chiba-City 3y ago
- sandworm101 3y agoIt is december. The nights are quickly growing very long. For the next few months I will travel to work before dawn and return home after sunset. And the cold will soon mean i dont go out much during the day. If i work sat/sun during a push period i might not see sun for weeks. Since my health is therefore basically f-ed, I guess I can now take up smoking. Tell all those people working on ships and submarines that they are also free to smoke. Or, perhaps we are more adaptable than we think and annual cycles of darkness are no more dangerous than any number of lifestyles factors. Id bet good money that my risk of skin cancer drops considerably in winter.
- hackerlight 3y agoBuy a SAD therapy lamp they're cheap.
- loloquwowndueo 3y agoGo out. Remember there’s no bad weather, only bad clothing.
- goda90 3y ago> If i work sat/sun during a push period i might not see sun for weeks. Regardless of weather and sunlight, you should avoid this as much as possible. Due dates are almost always arbitrary, especially in software.
- swader999 3y agoI've said this a few times forcefully (as in pound sand) in my career, "nobody remembers a missed release date but they never forget broken features that cost them time".
- sandworm101 3y agoIf only I worked in software. I am in a job (military) that doesn't enjoy such casual flexibility.
- jackschultz 3y agoI live in the upper midwest and, like many other places, don't get much light in the winter. I don't get much light in the summer turns out since I'm inside most of the day anyway, but winter feels worse. A couple years ago I was suggested a SAD lamp, and man did it make a difference. What I've learned this year though, is it isn't enough. It's a small square light that sits in the same place and only comes into your eye at a small angle. Article[0] came up across a feed which was saying the same thing, and I said screw it, and got two 100W LED corn bulbs[1] that the article suggested, and boy did it make a difference. Literally came mid last week, and for the last 4 days, I've had more energy, better sleep, and felt better than I have in months, years even. Incredible difference for $60. The corn bulbs are just like light bulbs so they fit into the same sockets (some are bigger, but get the ones that say E26). You can also get specific lamps to put them around. I also got some construction string lights[2] and hanging those on my wall. Makes it almost seem like I'm in a museum which is cool too. My goal is to get some more lights and make my living / office area legit feel like I'm outside on a summer day. I have a lux meter coming today to be able to see and judge intensity. If it's too intense, I can turn them off like I'm going into the shade. The importance of letting your body know when it's daytime and nighttime, which is talked about in the article, makes all parts of life better. Eat better, more energy to do things, less angry. Part of me disappointed I didn't know this before, but another part glad that I'm catching on now. [0] https://meaningness.com/sad-light-lumens https://meaningness.com/sad-light-lumens [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09ZHMD5ZL https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09ZHMD5ZL [2] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C5X7XLRQ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C5X7XLRQ
- goda90 3y agoI don't have SAD(at least to a degree I notice), but I do occasionally daydream of having something like this artificial sunlight in my windowless office at work. If only I had more space. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6bqBsHSwPgw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6bqBsHSwPgw
- dukeyukey 3y ago> I live in the upper midwest and, like many other places, don't get much light in the winter. Not to one-up here, but the UK gets around 60 hours on sunshine across the whole of November, compared to Minnesota at about 115. Europe north of the Mediterranean is gloomy beyond basically anywhere populated in North America.
- theodric 3y agoBetter get rid of daylight saving time, then, so we can spend more waking hours in the dark
- iteratethis 3y agoHonestly, human work conditions continue to be primitive, even for "privileged" office jobs. You sit all day. You have poor lighting. You breath crappy air. The screen stare is damaging to your eyes. You're exposed to lots of stress and few real cognitive breaks. You're just supposed to ignore every basic human need and best practice and grind through it. And even be thankful for the opportunity too. Whatever you can do to improve things, is all on you. The expectations remain the same. It's more like a personal hobby, your bodies' basic needs. Same with "mental health" that employers supposedly care about. They would never take away any root causes, instead...here's a link to an e-course.