What I post here is mostly thoughts, theory, and information I've come across myself, aimed at making you consider things yourself.
I'm going to use it to post possibly useful info.
I am not a doctor. Use at your own risk.
Melatonin and modern life.
Melatonin is a hormone produced in the pineal gland. It has a number of purposes in the body and brain, and I'd recommend looking these up. What I'm going to go into in this post is that most awesome of introvert escapisms, sleep.
The hormone Melatonin, not to be confused with the completely unrelated skin pigment melanin, is always produced. It's production is greatly reduced however in the event of retinal exposure to light, specifically light in the "blue" bandwidth (known and perceived by us as white light.) This light induced off switch is what earned Melatonin the name of Dark Hormone. This is what regulates our day-night cycle. The light levels go down, melanin increases, and we get sleepy. Or that's what's meant to happen.
Unfortunately modern lifestyles expose us to light right up till the moment we decide to sleep. Lightbulbs, LCD phone screens, backlit kindle devices, tvs, monitors, and more all bombard us with light past normal hours, and it doesn't take much to trigger a melanin production halt. Looking at your phone at 4am? Bad move.
Surely this isn't a problem though. We've been dealing with artificial light since fire was invented, right? Wrong. Our ancestors were mostly unaffected by fire-produced light as it doesn't emit the main melatonin reducing light frequency.. In fact the modern world is getting worse. LED lights - low energy lights which emit nice strong clean blue(white) light are rising in popularity. CLF lights are bad enough, but where CLFs are said to procude 3x the blue light of an old incandescent bulb, LEDs produce 5x.
It'd be madness to suggest not turning on the lights when it gets dark. It's be unpopular to suggest setting aside electrical gadgets - including the TV- after hours, and it's impractical and dangerous to simply turn to books using oil-lamps when the darkness closes in.
So what do we do?
For your computer monitor you could try FLUX, an application that'll change the brightness of your monitor based on the time of day. Don't be fooled though, the monitor backlight is still pumping out blue light. http://stereopsis.com/flux/
You could also go for something like blue light filters : https://www.lowbluelights.com/ but having not tested these I can't say if they work. They're also expensive and not easily available outside the US.
Perhaps you just turn out all the lights and listen to music, the radio, or an audio book when the sun goes down. Or spend some time with the other half
Or, if it's available in your country, maybe try melatonin supplements...though this may be inadvisable. Hormone supplementation isn't something to take lightly. Even the stuff I bought to try, reading the directions, says not to take it for more than 3 weeks
One thing is for certain however, before you go to sleep, and if you wake up, keep off your damn phone
I'm going to use it to post possibly useful info.
I am not a doctor. Use at your own risk.
Melatonin and modern life.
Melatonin is a hormone produced in the pineal gland. It has a number of purposes in the body and brain, and I'd recommend looking these up. What I'm going to go into in this post is that most awesome of introvert escapisms, sleep.
The hormone Melatonin, not to be confused with the completely unrelated skin pigment melanin, is always produced. It's production is greatly reduced however in the event of retinal exposure to light, specifically light in the "blue" bandwidth (known and perceived by us as white light.) This light induced off switch is what earned Melatonin the name of Dark Hormone. This is what regulates our day-night cycle. The light levels go down, melanin increases, and we get sleepy. Or that's what's meant to happen.
Unfortunately modern lifestyles expose us to light right up till the moment we decide to sleep. Lightbulbs, LCD phone screens, backlit kindle devices, tvs, monitors, and more all bombard us with light past normal hours, and it doesn't take much to trigger a melanin production halt. Looking at your phone at 4am? Bad move.
Surely this isn't a problem though. We've been dealing with artificial light since fire was invented, right? Wrong. Our ancestors were mostly unaffected by fire-produced light as it doesn't emit the main melatonin reducing light frequency.. In fact the modern world is getting worse. LED lights - low energy lights which emit nice strong clean blue(white) light are rising in popularity. CLF lights are bad enough, but where CLFs are said to procude 3x the blue light of an old incandescent bulb, LEDs produce 5x.
It'd be madness to suggest not turning on the lights when it gets dark. It's be unpopular to suggest setting aside electrical gadgets - including the TV- after hours, and it's impractical and dangerous to simply turn to books using oil-lamps when the darkness closes in.
So what do we do?
For your computer monitor you could try FLUX, an application that'll change the brightness of your monitor based on the time of day. Don't be fooled though, the monitor backlight is still pumping out blue light. http://stereopsis.com/flux/
You could also go for something like blue light filters : https://www.lowbluelights.com/ but having not tested these I can't say if they work. They're also expensive and not easily available outside the US.
Perhaps you just turn out all the lights and listen to music, the radio, or an audio book when the sun goes down. Or spend some time with the other half
Or, if it's available in your country, maybe try melatonin supplements...though this may be inadvisable. Hormone supplementation isn't something to take lightly. Even the stuff I bought to try, reading the directions, says not to take it for more than 3 weeks
One thing is for certain however, before you go to sleep, and if you wake up, keep off your damn phone