Do you prefer to sleep with some amount of light, or in complete darkness?
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I prefer to sleep in complete darkness.
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I prefer sleeping with little red light, but my father says I need to be sleeping in complete darkness to get all the benefits of a good sleeping.
I usually turn off all kind of lights to sleep.
But every night, just before I sleep, I love to use my laptop or phone, so I put it in f-lux, while I read a ebook or watch a video.
Edit: please f-lux team add more options of intensity to Android app. Thank you! -
Thank you for sharing the article, and I feel that I should let the light be enough to avoid glare and root to fall asleep,
and I usually play soft songs when I go to bed -
I like to sleep in the light and have some lullaby now https://kostenloseklingeltone.de
and you might be interested at -
Complete darkness.
It's healthier because it's the way nature intended the night to look and it's what our bodies are used to.
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I prefer to sleep in complete darkness.
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You should aim for complete darkness. Because our skin has photocell receptors, a simple nightlight in a room that is hitting any skin on your body is telling your body it is time to wake up and likely disruption your bodies natural melatonin production.
There was a study done with putting a light behind the knee of someone sleeping and that simple act alone showed measurable disruption to sleep patterns. IE. Not getting restful sleep. It is however, work tracking with tracker at night to see what changes you make are actually working or not. Not tracking anything though, and saying you get good sleep is not a good indicator of you actually getting good sleep. You have to track it if you want to hack it!
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No, this is not true - melatonin suppression in humans has its main pathway through the retina.
Light has been given behind the knee in millions of lux without any effect on melatonin suppression.
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@herf I did look at the study again and it did state there was another factor for the interrupted sleep so it was not due to the light on the skin. The skin has its own circadian response which is not well known yet it appears.
Best course of advice, no lights in the house on above eye level after sunset. Especially LED's that flicker. Technology has improved a lot and I replaced lights in my house with non-flicker LED's that can adjust to mimic the temperature of the sun at noon and sunset. But even very bright red lights can be disruptive so make sure you can dim them in some way. Most dimmer switches give off a lot of EMF though, so you have to find what your more sensitive too.
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This study is widely discredited - here is one followup so you can see the difference between ocular (eye) exposure and extraocular (behind the knee):
https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article-pdf/83/9/3369/9231826/jcem3369.pdf
There are indeed visual opsins in the skin, but many of them do not have access to a chromophore, so they don't activate to a neural pathway like those in the eye. There are some potential links with subcutaneous fat in recent experiments, but only in albino mice, and there is no consensus on it yet.
