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Comment by yamtaddle | Hacker News Reader

BINGO.

There are probably some genetic night-owls or something, but I bet 95+% of night owls would be "cured" in a week flat if they were allowed no glowing screens past sundown and their typical stupid-bright room lighting were replaced with warm-temp handheld lights at ~2-4 candle equivalent (actual, not "candle power")

Modern sleeplessness is an epidemic born of hyper-palatable on-tap nigh-infinite entertainment, and far-too-bright nighttime lighting, more than anything else. It's mainly due to how incredibly stimulating our home environments are now, unprecedented ever before. Even an emperor didn't have this kind of entertainment available 24/7 on a whim—the closest equivalent would be an emperor in the middle of hosting a huge, expensive festival, but we've got that at our fingertips every hour of every day. No fucking wonder we can't sleep!

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I get where you are going, but there are a few issues with this, the first being that no screens after sundown is a wildly unreasonable ask in 2023 (especially for the types of folks who frequent this board), at least in my opinion. A lot of the talk around screen time before bed also fails to factor the type of activity being done on the screen, and what type of screen is being used. Shopping on your laptop vs reading on a fully dimmed phone screen are entirely different ends of the spectrum in terms of stimulation and significantly different in terms of light emitted and screen motion

That said, I’ve found switching to warm dimming circadian lighting at night has been a huge help and is an easy enough solution

I usually sleep 9h from 3 to 12.

But, when I was on a conference last year, where I had to get up early for events for a whole week, my rythm changed and I slept from 12 to 9.

This kept going on for two weeks or so, then I was back to my old schedule.

A better question is: why is this something that needs to be cured? Why cater society's schedule to people who wake up at "too fucking early" O'clock, instead of either A) having flexible hours for jobs that support it (There's no reason why my office needs to have everyone work the same 8 hours), or B) a middle ground that doesn't involve grating against the preferred sleep schedule of a significant portion of the population.

Somehow we let society moralize "the early risers are Gods chosen people" and the rest of us just need to put up with it.

> I bet 95+% of night owls would be "cured" in a week flat if they were allowed no glowing screens past sundown and their typical stupid-bright room lighting were replaced with warm-temp handheld lights at ~2-4 candle equivalent (actual, not "candle power")

It's an interesting theory. Problem is, without a biochemical pathway it means nothing.

Melatonin secretion & basal temperatures are both interesting avenues for research. Blue light seems to be a favorite as well.

It's not all biochemistry, much of it's psychology. Unless we're going with "psychology is just biochemistry".

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