I usually eschew labels, preferring simply "sleep weirdo", but I fit the pattern of "Non-24 Sleep-Wake Disorder", with my sleep and waking times drifting progressively later at semi-regular intervals. The result is that I'm often awake through the night. (This week I'm going to bed around 9:00 a.m.)
Even with that, I've noticed some pretty big productivity swings based on the season. Interestingly, this hit me very hard in moving from where I'm from (southern Texas) to Michigan (for college) and then to Berlin (for the last 14 years). Right now, in Berlin, which is approximately as far north as Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, North America's northernmost large city, the sun sets before 4:00 p.m.
I usually try to spend a month of winter closer to the equator to keep my productivity levels and spirits up.
Between the seasonal adjustment (where the sunset time swings by a full 7 hours in Berlin) and my sleep weirdo-ness, I've also come to love me some artificial-sun-level lighting.
I tend towards 400-500 watt halogen bulbs. I have an up-firing light of approximately that wattage in every room of my home.
A question for other folks that compensate sunlight with artificial lighting:
Do LEDs really work for you? I'm a wanna-be hippie, and I'd love to use energy efficient bulbs and have tried every generation of them, but the light just doesn't do it for me. I keep going back to halogen as the sweet-spot between black-body radiation and energy efficiency. I can immediately spot the difference between an LED or CFL and incandescent bulb. I've had some success in mixing them in about 50/50 ratios. They've already been banned for sale in the EU, but I have a stockpile that will last me a decade in a pinch. Does anyone else struggle with the light quality from modern lighting?
Have you tried buying higher CRI LEDs? Halogens have very good color rendering compared to typical LEDs (100 vs ~80 for typical LEDs), but you can buy specialty bulbs with closer-to-natural spectra. I haven't dug much into off the shelf options, but one of my coworkers did and got excited about these lights: https://store.yujiintl.com/collections/high-cri-led-lights/p...
Hmm, that's sounds interesting and is at least an avenue to chase down. Sadly, next to my stockpile of halogen bulbs, I also basically have a lifetime supply of LEDs and CFLs that didn't pass muster. Maybe someday I'll have a really big garage that needs lighting. ;-)
The specific bulbs you linked to have a crazy high lumen rating, which appeals to me despite their high price.
I have noticed that name brand (and pricier) LEDs tend to do better for me. Some of the ones from e.g. Phillips and Osram put out a different quality of light (though it's still not up there with incandescents for me).
Their standard socket bulb prices aren't bad (about $15 if you get a 6-pack), and they do produce bulbs for the slightly different European sockets, but shipping to Europe is about $40 (plus I'd then have to deal with picking them up at the customs office, which is always a multi-hour ordeal). But assuming I haven't found something decent before I'm next in the US in March, I'll pick some up then.
Thanks, that's interesting -- I'll have to buy one of their bulbs to compare to my other LED bulbs.
Looks like the lowest cost might be the 100W COB LED ... It would need a bunch of supporting equipment but it might be possible to do it for around $2 per watt.
Edit: I guess the normal bulbs and the led tubes could also come in around $2/watt and they can take mains power so that might be an easier but physically larger route.
I kept seeing the following problem with several different LED lights we were installing until I found one that was better:
Take your phone and take a video of the lights when on (normal framerate should be enough, try slow-motion for further investing). Most lights I got from the local hardware store were flickering quite visibly. And I'm pretty sure it's a design insufficiency of the adaptor electronics attached to it, not the LEDs themselves. If I were to guess I'd say most of them probably go the simple path of cutting off the negative half of the AC cycle and feeding the rest directly, without a decent low-pass filter to the LEDs.
What worked reasonably well for me, was getting a normal DC power supply and a few LED strips (with fairly dense and higher power LEDs) and installed that in a room. That light feels pretty satisfying to me.
All that being said, I don't like anything even remotely close to daylight level ambience when I am working on a computer screen; the custom lighting I set up is for other living areas.
> I fit the pattern of "Non-24 Sleep-Wake Disorder", with my sleep and waking times drifting progressively later at semi-regular intervals.
This is a disorder now? I thought that's just how humans worked. It's how I work, anyway - if nothing else (like work, or children waking up at 5:30am) forces me to get up at a set time, I'll slowly cycle through until I'm going to bed at sun-up and waking up at 3pm.
Once for a couple of weeks I worked and slept as I felt like it. I ended up doing ~30h days. It was the best I’ve ever felt while being quite productive.
Unfortunately it’s not an option to do that long term.
The most cited paper on this is "Stability, Precision, and Near-24-Hour Period of the Human Circadian Pacemaker" (Czeisler, et al., 1999), which found that their 24 subjects between ages 13 and 65 had a mean circadian rhythm of 24 hours 10 minutes with a standard deviation of 8 minutes. Earlier studies were affected by artificial light lengthening cycles. Non-24 sleep-wake disorder in sighted people is not researched well enough to have accurate rates: there are only about a hundred cases in the existing studies and the disorder is not well known and probably underdiagnosed.
I think there have been studies where people in sleep labs without any natural light, clocks or other cues mostly tended toward ~25-hour days. The "disorder" part is when you can't help but do this, despite having access to all those cues and despite all efforts to the contrary.
I identify with the parent, and I've always been fine with "jet lag" to the point where I often don't even notice it or it only lasts until I go to bed the first night.
(IE; Sweden->Los Angeles, the inverse is harder but not as hard as most people seem to have it, it knocks some colleagues out for an entire week)
A week? Yeah I'm scragged for a day if I'm losing hours on a flight (although this is exacerbated by the fact that if I'm flying east I'm usually going from my 'starts around 9ish' desk job to 'be on site by 6am' minesite commissioning, so I'm effectively waking up at 2am when I'm used to waking up at 8:30am) but after that I'm fine.
I have this disorder as well, it started when I was 11 or 12. I've tried every trick that sleep doctors recommend (literally, everything) but nothing works. The only way I was able to maintain a 24-hour sleep cycle though school was to drink coffee every morning and take sleep medication regularly (from the age of 12). That was enough to make my sleep cycle 24 hours, but it didn't improve my sleep quality, so I spent most of school in a significantly sleep deprived state (only getting 3-5 hours of sleep a night). That's a pretty miserable state to live in for an extended period of time.
When I started living on my own and I was free to choose my own schedule, I decided to stop "forcing" myself onto a schedule that my body didn't agree with and instead let my sleep schedule naturally align with my circadian rhythms. It took about a month to get adjusted, but I remember waking up one morning and feeling like I had got my first full night's sleep in my entire life - it was an amazing feeling!
Since then I've been living on a ~ 24h 50m sleep cycle and I sleep like a baby (8 - 9 hrs) every night. Interestingly enough, I've discovered that I'm actually a morning person, when I used to think I was a night owl. I'm very grateful that I have the freedom to choose my own schedule (I'm a remote-only contractor), I dread ever having to go back to a 24h sleep cycle.
I haven't noticed much change in how I feel with seasons (I live in southern Ontario, Canada), but there's a big difference in my energy level depending on how much light I get in the morning (my mornings, not Earth mornings). If I don't get a good amount of bright light in the morning I feel sluggish and tired all day, regardless of how much sleep I got. If the sun's up when I wake up, I go for a run or walk every morning; otherwise I have about five 10,000 lux LED lights around my apartment that I turn on all morning (I have two right next to my desk in my peripheral vision, just like the person in the article). The LEDs are pretty weak, but they're enough if they're a few feet away from me. I start turning off all the lights and closing all the blinds in my apartment about 4 hours before bed or else it'll keep me up.
I would be very interested in reading more research about the cause of Non-24 Hour Sleep-Wake Disorder in sighted people; as far as I'm aware there's very little research on the matter. I didn't even know it existed until last year, I expect some more research and awareness could be very helpful to people in the same boat.
Are you familiar with Piotr Wozniak's writings on sleep? I think you might find them interesting https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Science_of_sleep. DSPS is pretty common and fairly natural considering how we've diverged in habits from our ancestors.
What does it mean to be on a "24h 50m" sleep cycle? Does your sleep time progressively become later until you're nocturnal, then continue looping round until it returns to a "normal" night's sleep?
Exactly. 24h 50m is the average I calculated after tracking my sleep for over a year. On average, the time that I wake up and go to sleep gets later by 50 minutes each day relative to a 24 hour day.
I'm currently waking up around 2am local time. In two weeks, I'll be waking up around noon.
If I lived on Mars, where the day length is 24h 37m, I would feel right at home (aside from the lack of breathable air).
Could you please briefly explain the way you cam calculate your cycle based on average time sleeping? I have to get up using alarms at times that are not related to how my body is feeling about waking up, so I don't see how tracking that would help.
I tend to start sleep later and later until I reach some dynamic equilibrium between sleep deprivation due to fixed wake up times and the tendency to delay sleep onset.
I almost never use an alarm anymore - there's no need to, my body knows exactly when to wake up because of my circadian rhythms (that's the way humans were supposed to work after all - we didn't evolve to use alarm clocks). Of course, the time my body "knows" to wake up is almost an hour later than it should, and that's the whole problem.
The way I calculated the length of my circadian rhythm cycle wasn't by tracking the duration of my sleep, it was by tracking the exact time I naturally woke up every day. I then calculated the difference in the time I woke up each day (the daily "drift" in my sleep cycle). The median of those "drift" values turned out to be around 50 minutes, which means my sleep cycle is 24h 50m on average.
It might seem like not using an alarm clock would bias those measurements, but that's actually not the case. Even assuming the fact that I don't use an alarm clock makes me sleep in (it doesn't, but for the sake of argument), that would only effect the average time that I wake up every day, not the average drift in my sleep cycle. There are a number of other biases that would have to be accounted for if this was an actual study, but for my purposes that's accurate enough.
In reality, everybody has a different natural circadian rhythm cycle. If that cycle is close enough to 24h, then you'll have a "normal" sleep cycle. If it's long enough to cause insomnia / delayed sleep onset but your body can still "compensate" (that "compensation" mechanism is called entrainment in chronobiology), then that's called Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome (I'm not a doctor, but that sounds like what you're describing). If your natural circadian rhythm cycle is so long that your body isn't capable of "compensating" to a 24h cycle, then that's called Non-24-Hour Sleep-Wake Disorder. Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome is far more common than Non-24.
As for this point:
> I have to get up using alarms at times that are not related to how my body is feeling about waking up, so I don't see how tracking that would help.
I'm afraid tracking it didn't really help me at all - I simply tracked it because I was curious. My "solution" was simply to let my body do it's thing, but that's not an option for most people who have fixed work schedules or other commitments every day.
I absolutely hate LEDs. I don't know why, but I just hate them. Especially the white ones.
The yellower are similar to a mid summer day and I can cope with them, but there's always this feeling of something being off. I guess it's connected to us humans being used to non-sun light being (similar to) a fire - mainly consisting of yellow/orange tones.
Also, I don't exactly remember from where I read this, but when a (town) changed the street lights to LED's, a lot of people started having sleep problems, and it supposedly was connected to the blue light emmiting properties of (lower quality?) LEDs.
> I absolutely hate LEDs. I don't know why, but...
I'm really interested in the why. Most people don't seem to care. My in-laws have CFLs in their living room that just feel horrible to me, but they're none the wiser. I'm very curious as to what it is in the light spectrum that seems to matter to some (small) class of people, myself, and it sounds like you, included.
The word for "fire-like" light, used in my original comment, is "black-body radiation". Stars, fire and incandescent bulbs put out a similarly shaped spectrum.
A few years ago there were scientists working on a black-body (i.e. incandescent) light bulb that reflected infrared emission back to heat the filament and re-emit as visible light making for a theoretically efficient incandescent bulb. I check every year or so to see if the research has been commercialized, but have always been disappointed:
Edit: Another point on the blueness of LEDs is that they seem to amplify macular degeneration, which has made my grandmother mostly blind, and I know based on gene sequencing that I have a more than 50% chance of developing. While most of my rejection of LEDs is based on them not looking nice to me, I am also worried about hurrying the onset of blindness in old age for persons like myself who carry the genes for macular degeneration:
Well, fire does not shine by black-body radiation. Lamps try to emulate a black-body because that's what color standards dictate and labs test against, but fire has a very bad color resolution. (By the way, daylight isn't also like black-body radiation, but it's much closer than fire.)
Personally, flickering makes me ill. I am used enough to 120Hz to survive it, but any other frequency is bad. Also, the 6400K LEDs look way too blue, much bluer than the Sun. That may be because I have a relatively rare kind of color blindness.
huh that's really interesting about fire's emission spectrum!
regarding 6400k - even assuming the sun's spectrum matched the black body spectrum of its surface temperature, its surface temperature is closer to 5770k. but even taking that into account, its spectrum doesn't quite match 5770k in space - and the atmosphere changes it even further. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Solar_spectrum_en.svg
I really don't know how much of that change us humans can perceive, but my thinking is that 5000k is probably closer to the center, at least. it might be more of a saturated color, though, since the spectrum is more pointed vs the very flat but spikey spectrum in that plot.
> I'm really interested in the why. Most people don't seem to care. My in-laws have CFLs in their living room that just feel horrible to me, but they're none the wiser.
My first suspicion would be the spectrum of light emitted, which is mostly reflected in the CRI [1].
CFLs in particular "cheat" by having a couple really strong peaks of very specific wavelengths that to your eyes (or reflecting off a white surface) look like the right color, but when reflecting off anything they have reproduce colors inaccurately -- it's beyond my ability to explain this in detail, but you can see this in some spectrum charts [2].
LEDs vary greatly in this respect, so if you're concerned, you should really be paying close attention to the CRI (and note, as CRI goes up, so does cost).
psa: you can get this thing, which isn't the most precise ever, but lets you see this spectral information about lights for cheap: https://www.amazon.com/EISCO-Premium-Quantitative-Spectrosco... - I got one and WHEW CFLs' band lines are really obvious. Also, I feel kind of tickled that I saw the band gap on LED lights before seeing a description of what it is in the source for the spectrum plots in this article (the source being https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:White_LED.png ).
I'm a bit miffed it seems so hard to find lights that don't have this problem, though. maybe we can improve it by getting the word out that these cheap little diffraction devices can give you a pretty good approximate reading of the smoothness of the spectrum of a light source. Hmm, I just realized I have yet to take this to home depot...
I'm really curious about those MIT incandescent bulbs. If they worked well and haven't been brought to market, it's possible that contacting the people involved in creating them could have good results in making them happen. Perhaps they could be convinced to prioritize it if a case can be made that it can have a significant positive impact on the world?
My experience is that daylight-blue (5000K–6500K) LEDs or fluorescents feel unnatural unless they are quite bright; something in the animal part of my brain worries that the sun is broken. Low CRI bulbs also feel off, which makes intuitive sense I suppose.
I've found that high CRI warm white (2700K) bulbs are the way to go for me.
Same experience here. I film all the led bulbs I purchase in 240fps to see if they flicker at 60Hz. I discovered that Philips bulbs NEVER flicker. Occasionally I stumble upon other cheaper brands that don't flicker, but there is never any guarantee. I might buy 2 batches 6 months apart of bulbs from the same model from the same third party seller on Amazon, and they slightly changed the product (updated packaging and markings on the bulb) and one batch doesn't flicker whereas the other does... So I end up nowadays just buying Philips.
The Edison style are often like that. They use four led elements configured as a full wave bridge rectifier but because the diodes are themelves the load ther is no place to put the lowpass and so you get 120.
I think it's the lack of heat (AKA infrared light) also reaching your body, which, when receiving bright visible light, is evolutionarily wired to expect heat coming from that same light source (e.g. the sun). Feels off for you to be cold and for it to be super bright.
I'm currently experimenting with 'emulating outdoors' in my office environment for health and productivity, and so far I've started with an 8,000 lux fanless corn LED (bought off Amazon) hanging from the wall and it's brilliant. I immediately feel 'happier' when I turn it on in the morning, every single time, but after a while, I agree, something feels off. I feel 'cold', temperature-wise.
I have read (no source for now, just from memory) that having bright white light indoors (e.g. fluorescent) without the presence of other light spectrum (including possibly natural UV) can actually increase cortisol.
So I think that more than just visible light is needed to complete the picture. Careful, low enough levels of UV and infrared that doesn't point directly at you but more 'above' you like the sun itself, may be the optimum to get some benefits but not cause dangerous skin or eye problems.
Possibly due to the lights being driven from AC power making them pulse. You gotta find ones with big enough caps that they don't flicker, or buy some grow LEDs and a decent DC driver to emulate the sun.
A lot of the LED bulbs out there are poor quality, they have bad CRI and they flicker. I’d be interested to know if you find high CRI LEDs better, especially warmer ones.
I've recently got amber ones, at around 2000k and they are such a pleasure. Many of them look like classic incandescent bulb too, imitating wires in normal bulb.
Yeah, I get the impression there's a massive difference in quality between cheap and good LEDs, and it's not always easy to tell which is which. In theory, when done right, LEDs can have a perfect spectrum with no flicker. But many manufacturers cut corners.
"I keep going back to halogen as the sweet-spot between black-body radiation and energy efficiency."
Permies put out an article arguing for incandescent if your goal is light AND warmth: From https://richsoil.com/electric-heat.jsp - "This last one was the most important. A standard incandescent light bulb heats something to the point that it glows white hot. So I used this to heat myself and it doubled as a light source. And, I should point out that in a few months this light bulb will be banned by the US government. It is already banned in many countries. The comedy is that it is being banned to save energy. And yet, I think people can save far more energy by keeping it."
But incandescent light bulbs are a terrible heat source from an efficiency perspective. You're losing an incredible amount from the power plant, to the transmission, and pretty much everything else. Once it arrives, yes, the energy gets converted nearly 100% to heat eventually, mostly in your proximity. But a heat pump or even gas heating is far more efficient if the goal is to get heat.
If you read the article, the author is focusing on the scenario heating a person while sitting at their desk, not the entire room.
In those cases you could argue the methods he prescribes are more efficient, though not practical for times where you want to heat up a whole room or home.
Yeah, love that article. I'm slowly building a large foldaway 'kotatsu' coffee table using a mixture of ikea (ovraryd) and amazon/ebay parts (foldaway hairpin legs, centerpost, kotatsu heater).
All of them suck (objectively and subjectively) compared to full spectrum lamps.
> Does anyone else struggle with the light quality from modern lighting?
Besides poor light quality, another issue are dimmable LED lights which are often just PWM'd at a couple hundred Hz. This is a migraine trigger for me.
I'm going through this currently. It doesn't help that my inspiration for work can sometimes make me work through the night, which 'messes up' the following day. I'm my own boss, so can do this without repercussions, but I sometimes think I'd be more productive if I stuck to a more regimented sleep schedule.
I did have a normal-ish sleep schedule when I had my job in finance, but I remember feeling exhausted all the time, especially weekday mornings.
I certainly feel healthier now, just sleeping when I'm tired. On occasion this can mean missing a bunch of daylight. Not sure if that's actually all that healthy though...
It sounds like we're similar. My personal, entirely unscientific self-diagnosis is that I have a well-defined circadian rhythm like most people, but it's easier for me to override by obsessive interest than for most people. Even sans coffee (which I'm pretty careful about as I near 40), if I'm really interested in something, I can work on it in a block of time up to and over 24 hours. Naturally that futzes with my sleep. My "tired-impulse" is relatively weak compared to my "this is exciting" or "people are waiting on this" impulse.
Before I ran a company (about 1/3 of my career), I mostly managed to hold things down on a "normal" schedule, but I was always tired and frequently had performance reviews where the only complaint was my tardiness.
There are some interesting data points: while camping (which I do a lot of -- several weeks per year), I do tend to sync up with the sun, even though in northern Europe that means waking up before 5:00 a.m. There's also limited screen time. (Though I did work from tent on a remote beach in Crete for a month this year.)
I picked up some melatonin tablets in my wife's home country (where it doesn't require a prescription), and will experiment with that in the near future for I-really-need-to-sleep-now times, but as much as my sleep is weird, it's so intertwined with my personality now that I'm hesitant to medicate it away even given the chance.
They work fine for me, while i'm considering myself sensitive to all sorts of flickering, or "strange" colors.
Don't be afraid of the "professional", they aren't much more expensive, 8 to 9€ per piece instead of something like 4 to 6€ for the others. They make a warm light but are too bright to directly look into, even the candlelike things at only 2 Watts. I bought the first ones out of frustrations with broken CFLs maybe three to four years ago (not a single CFL lasted over a year!), their warmup times, noise, and such, as a test. Now the only other light i have is some flexible/movable Halogen spot light, which i rarely use. Anything else is that stuff from the links. It just works for me, while even saving some energy. So far no defects. Instant on. No noise. No flickering for me. They are commonly available. I got mine at the Bauhaus. Test one or two and see for yourself. Though you won't get a single thing with 500 Watts. They max out at 75W equivalent while using 8Watts. So you'd need many of them.
> Berlin, which is approximately as far north as Alberta, Canada, North America's northernmost large city
Presumably you mean the city of Edmonton. Alberta is about twice the size of Germany. ;)
> Do LEDs really work for you?
Mostly, yes. It's easy to buy halogens that all have pretty much the same good quality of light. LEDs you need balance CRI, R9, dimming quality, flickering, etc., but I've found LEDs that work for most of my use cases.
You're probably never going to see this so I'll keep it short. I just want to say that your disorder might be due to a circadian rhythm disruption. Instead of just focusing on light, you should also focus on darkness. Try not to look at any unnatural light after sundown.
If you want to cheat for convenience, they make red glasses that block all blue and green light which can interrupt your melatonin. You want to find red glasses that have barriers on the side to prevent the light from coming through from the sides. They sell 2 different kinds on Amazon. I found the effect to be very profound. You get tired quickly and when you fall asleep, you feel like you're in a coma and wake up refreshed. Unnatural light after sundown really does interrupt your sleep cycle.
Even with that, I've noticed some pretty big productivity swings based on the season. Interestingly, this hit me very hard in moving from where I'm from (southern Texas) to Michigan (for college) and then to Berlin (for the last 14 years). Right now, in Berlin, which is approximately as far north as Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, North America's northernmost large city, the sun sets before 4:00 p.m.
I usually try to spend a month of winter closer to the equator to keep my productivity levels and spirits up.
Between the seasonal adjustment (where the sunset time swings by a full 7 hours in Berlin) and my sleep weirdo-ness, I've also come to love me some artificial-sun-level lighting.
I tend towards 400-500 watt halogen bulbs. I have an up-firing light of approximately that wattage in every room of my home.
A question for other folks that compensate sunlight with artificial lighting:
Do LEDs really work for you? I'm a wanna-be hippie, and I'd love to use energy efficient bulbs and have tried every generation of them, but the light just doesn't do it for me. I keep going back to halogen as the sweet-spot between black-body radiation and energy efficiency. I can immediately spot the difference between an LED or CFL and incandescent bulb. I've had some success in mixing them in about 50/50 ratios. They've already been banned for sale in the EU, but I have a stockpile that will last me a decade in a pinch. Does anyone else struggle with the light quality from modern lighting?