As you may recall, almost three months ago, I got myself a pair of glasses with red-tinted lenses. My purpose, other than being able to make jokes about literally looking at things through rose-coloured glasses, was to try to improve my sleep by applying the theory that limiting exposure to blue light shortly before bedtime improves one's ability to fall asleep. A couple of other tools I have to apply this theory are the "Redshift" program, which changes my monitor's colour balance; and a remote-controlled RGB light-bulb.
Unfortunately, my attempts at gathering useful quantitative data have been foiled by a confounding factor: my "non-24-hour sleep/wake phase disorder". (On the plus side, I've started collecting some decent data on said disorder, such as that I average out at a 25.5 hour circadian cycle, though with high variance.)
Today, however, I finally got in the mail a tool that lets me collect quantitative data of a different kind: a spectroscope. It's a passive optical tool, which cleverly applies refraction to let you see exactly what frequencies of light are being shone (plus or minus 5 nm). For example, in a dark room, I pointed my green laser pointer at a wall, and looking into the spectroscope, I saw a line right at the 535 nm mark, pretty darned close to the pointer's actual frequency of 532 nm. When I pointed it at my RGB bulb, then as I set the bulb to different colours, I saw up to three lines, one red, one green, and one blue; and when there wasn't any blue, there was /no/ blue. So setting that bulb to red, green, or anywhere between them (such as to 'yellow'), I can happily avoid blue light.
Pointing the spectroscope at my laptop screen, I got more RGB bands. However, even when setting the screen to a solid red, that blue band didn't disappear; and whether the Redshift program was running or not, I was still getting blue. And when I put my red-tinted lenses in front of the spectroscope - still blue.
So, now I know that even if the avoid-blue theory is true, neither the program nor the lenses will help. So I get to keep using my RGB bulb... and I get to consider whether to try buying more heavily-tinted lenses. The ones I got were "10% tint"; also on offer are "50%" and "80%". At something like USD $15 apiece, plus $10 shipping, they're just expensive enough that I don't want to waste the money if they don't work. And with my coming move, I need to save my pennies. ... But at least now I'm saving my pennies by using Data! :)
"non-24-hour sleep/wake phase disorder"... really? is that a thing? because if it is, it may explain my own erratic circadian cycle. thanks for the update! --GF
"non-24-hour sleep/wake phase disorder"... really? is that a thing? because if it is, it may explai
Without knowing a thing about you, it's literally one million times more likely that you have Delayed Phase Sleep Disorder, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_disorder , than N24. If you're not sight-impaired, than honest-to-goodness N24 is much rarer than DPSD: up to 15% of adolescents have DPSD, vs 0.0000015% general prevalence for sighted-N24. That said, for all I know, you just might have won (lost?) the same lottery I have, so if possible, you should try to talk to your family physician about a referral to a sleep specialist. (I'm going to need a new G.P. after my move, so I'm going to have a bit of fun finding one willing to accept that I really am a zebra, not just a horse with stripes painted on...)
> is that a thing? Yep, N24 is a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-24-hour_sleep%E2%80%93wak
