Creating my own red light district

MountainHigh wrote:I'll add my suggestion to the list - it is a free app called Twilight, available on Android for sure. Very user-friendly, allows you to configure the intensity of the "orange" effect.

Good advice. I just downloaded this to my tablet a couple of days ago (after I started this thread) and really like it so far.

Regarding the whole concept of red light not inhibiting melatonin production as much as other colors, I have found a number of articles describing an upcoming experiment NASA will be doing. It turns out that astronauts have serious problems with insomnia and NASA is hoping that better control of the color and timing of the lighting will reduce their reliance on sleeping meds. (Exactly the same outcome I'm hoping for down here on Terra firma.)

That said, it still appears that this concept hasn't yet been proven to work in any definitive studies. The NASA experiment begins in a year or so.

If you put humans in a controlled environment with the same amount of light 24/7 they gravitate to a 25-hour circadian rhythm, and the whole light/dark thing in normal environment "reclocks" them to a 24-hour rhythm.

Being a SAD sufferer (but not for about 15 years) I have really looked into this pretty deeply, as it is thought that the fact that sunrise/sunset swings the further you are from the equator are what knock this out of kilter (and why the percentage of sufferers increases 2-3% as you go up for each major latitude division). Depression and Scandanavia are related for a good reason (high latitude).

Also, you do not have to have your eyes open to receive the benefit of light in the morning. It can be absorbed by a mechanism at the "third-eye" location, and is there as part of that reclocking mechanism, which is melatonin related, and sensitive to bluer, cooler light such as sunlight. That is why light boxes for SAD use bluer,cooler, or all-spectrum light.

Warmer temp light is associated with firelight, which is what our ancestors saw, at night, for millions of years of evolution, so maybe there is something to having only warm color temperature (red qualifies) light at night. There certainly is something to having the cooler, bluer light in the morning, at least for SAD sufferers.

TS wrote:
"Also, you do not have to have your eyes open to receive the benefit of light in the morning. It can be absorbed by a mechanism at the "third-eye" location, and is there as part of that reclocking mechanism, which is melatonin related ..."

This is new to me. I've seen some of the gadgets that use increasingly bright light as a sort of alarm clock, but I haven't come across any studies along these lines. In fact if I recall correctly the definitive studies that I found regardimg light therapy used 10000 lux for 30 minutes early in the morning.

Have you tried LT with your eyes closed?

TS wrote: "If you put humans in a controlled environment with the same amount of light 24/7 they gravitate to a 25-hour circadian rhythm, and the whole light/dark thing in normal environment "reclocks" them to a 24-hour rhythm..."

Easy to see why astronauts have sleep issues. On the international space station they experience something like 15 sunrises and 15 sunsets each day.

to bring this one back, rather than starting a new thread on the same subject... somewhere maybe in this thread or in another, someone was saying they hadn't seen any clinical trials on the whole light disturbing sleep thing...

here's something: http://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discu ... id=youtube

hmm, just noticed that was from last year, though it showed up on lifehacker today.