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?
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!
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.
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).
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.
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.
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 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 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? Seems like that means it does work, it's just for the wrong reason (they don't like the pseudoscience wankery, understandably) and they don't like that it screws with color.
That seems reasonable.
... But I'm not sure that's an argument against Night Shift itself, 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, though I think I'll experiment with just reducing brightness a bit.
Is this your article OP?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
This thread reads like anti-vaxers and homeopathy advocates
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 pushing software 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).
>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).
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.
If you wait long enough cataracts will give you that for free.