Turn Flux on during the day
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Do you all have displays that dim well? Our measurements say that a Mac dimmed at 1900K is way way below threshold for most non-visual effects of light.
Someone post a schedule so we can talk details, like "I go to bed at 3AM some days and 7AM on other days, and at 6AM this thing doesn't work...."
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@herf said in Turn Flux on during the day:
Do you all have displays that dim well? Our measurements say that a Mac dimmed at 1900K is way way below threshold for most non-visual effects of light.
Someone post a schedule so we can talk details, like "I go to bed at 3AM some days and 7AM on other days, and at 6AM this thing doesn't work...."
When you say "dimmed at 1900K", do you mean manually dimming the monitor in addition to changing the color temperature?
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@TwoCables Yes or using good automatic brightness (which Apple is doing well).
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With my science hat on, one thing I'm trying to uncover if we're talking about "dark adaptation" or "using computers in dark rooms late at night" and not "alerting/circadian effects of light".
There are almost certainly circadian rhythms in the retina that may be driving these things, and very late at night, we may be talking about a different system entirely. But these rhythms also entrain, so there should be consistent times day to day when you're sensitive to light, and times when you're not.
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@herf said in Turn Flux on during the day:
@TwoCables Yes or using good automatic brightness (which Apple is doing well).
See, I worry that most people just leave their monitor's brightness up way too high, or even up all the way. I also worry that people treat f.lix as a magic bullet and don't consider other things like their indoor lighting, or their TV, etc.
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@TwoCables Yes, and also dimming the lights in the room (while not turning them off). There's a point where you get diminishing returns with reducing color temperature - it's extremely easy at these settings to have more light coming from your regular lighting.
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@herf said in Turn Flux on during the day:
@TwoCables Yes, and also dimming the lights in the room (while not turning them off). There's a point where you get diminishing returns with reducing color temperature - it's extremely easy at these settings to have more light coming from your regular lighting.
Yeah, I have seen a few too many posts on this entire forum that clearly indicate that the user is just expecting f.lux to work like a magic bullet. They don't consider their monitor's brightness, they don't consider the lighting in their room, they don't consider the lighting in the rest of the house, they don't consider the TV or any other devices that aren't compatible with f.lux, and they also don't consider other alerting/stimulating things that have nothing to do with light such as sound or physical activities. It's like, "Oh, as long as I use f.lux, I'm ok."
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On most Macs, you should be dimming beyond halfway at night, and hopefully a lot more.
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@herf I have a concrete example.
- Working late with a nap in the afternoon. I would have a bedtime of 4am and a wake up time of, say, 10am, which I can make work with the current flux configuration by adjusting wake up time settings. Then at 2pm I might choose to take a nap. It's at that point that I would want to go down to 1200k, rather than be stuck at 1900k. What I end up doing for that case now is changing my time zone (but I could probably also achieve the same result by changing my wake up time again). Of course, the work schedule is not great for circadian rhythms, but it would be nice for flux to be flexible enough to accommodate it.
It is possible to work around the constraints of the current version of flux with wake up time and timezone offsets, but a much simpler workflow (which would allow me to keep the other settings consistent) would be to just move the daytime slider down to 1200 for those odd cases.
@TwoCables At night, my monitor is dimmed to the lowest possible setting and there is no other light in the room.
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I think Michael and Lorna might say the same thing here, so I'll just say it now instead.
F.lux isn't needed for afternoon naps. The whole point of avoiding alerting light is so you don't suppress (prevent), delay, or interrupt melatonin production. I think it can take 2-3 hours before the body is in full production of melatonin. If you don't interrupt it once it starts, then it can last long enough for a full good night's sleep. For a nap though, well, you're just napping. At the absolute most, a nap should never be any longer than about 20 minutes. If you sleep any longer than that, then you will wake up feeling worse, and you will also hurt your sleep at night in various ways.
So, it is actually not beneficial to avoid blue light for a nap. Nothing is gained by doing so. If anything, you might be confusing your body's circadian timing system by making it think it's nighttime even though it's not.
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@TwoCables Take a more extreme variation of a nap, then, as the example: biphasic sleep cycles.
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@Charles-XII said in Turn Flux on during the day:
@TwoCables Take a more extreme variation of a nap, then, as the example: biphasic sleep cycles.
I'd better let Michael or Lorna answer that then. Even so, with how long it takes to begin producing melatonin, you may as well just black out your windows, turn the lights off and go to sleep unless you want to spend a couple of hours making your body produce melatonin so that you can get some good quality sleep. It doesn't happen immediately, especially if it's only 4 hours after you wake up.
I think Michael and Lorna can really answer this very well though because they've done the research.
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We are really interested in the different ways that people sleep, and we are very aware that everyone is different. f.lux doesn't tell people when to go to bed, only when to begin dimming the lights.
Based on the literature, even biphasic sleepers are likely to need a strong light dark rhythm, because melatonin release and uptake happens over a ~24 hour rhythm, regardless of how many hours you sleep or when you nap. So splitting the light exposure into segments means potentially reducing melatonin by a lot. So far, no one has bifurcated the melatonin rhythm in human beings (despite a lot of really smart people trying).
Most of the great thinkers referenced in an earlier post would not have had access to electric light and LED backlit screens, they were awake at night but they were still living under a solar rhythm, doing their work late at night in circadian darkness.
The idea behind f.lux is to provide healthy darkness at night even when exposed to artificial light and that happens on a ~24 hour schedule. f.lux is designed to meet different needs and schedules, and as the science becomes more clear, f.lux will be updated accordingly. Even if what you are looking for is different from the way the f.lux software is designed to function, we still appreciate hearing about your needs and thoughts.
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Hello,
How can I get 800K please, I can not do it....
Thanks in advance ;)
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@lorna I would respectfully ask this stance be reconsidered. Working at night and trying to sleep with sunlight means a dynamic and chronically corrupted sleep cycle -- and since there is no consistent schedule, having full manual control is the only alternative.
