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daenerys comments on Open Thread, February 1-14, 2012 - Less Wrong
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I've lately been experimenting with taking different amounts of vitamin D. While I have found a definite improvement in mood and energy during the day when taking vitamin D first thing in the morning, I haven't found much impact on my excessive night-owlishness, such that I still don't get enough sleep and mood/energy are not yet optimal. It occurred to me that I might be subverting the effect by spending too much time at the computer in the evenings, since the monitor emits a lot of blue light.
And lo and behold, I've discovered that you can download a free program that regulates the color of the light your monitor emits based on your latitude and the time of day. This seemed cool enough to merit sharing here.
Thanks for the download link! I also have "night owl" issues I am currently experimenting to fix. I just installed the f.lux program and will report back on its usefulness by the end of the month. (Immediate reaction- It looked REALLY red for about 5 minutes. Now it just looks a little red.)
Another new hack I'm trying is to take a sleep aid when I think I should go to bed soon.
My impetus for doing this was a mix of seeing people post about melatonin here, and also realizing that when I was sick, I LIKED being able to take PM meds which would knock me out and force me to go to sleep when I thought I should. (but which I of course do NOT want to take when I am not sick!)
Is there a reason LWers recommend melatonin rather than other non-addictive sleep aids?
Also, I would like to thank the LessWrong community in general for giving me the idea to even try these types of self-improvement mods.
Update?
Here is a link to the update.
My general view was that it (f.lux) didn't make a noticeable change (I wasn't recording sleep data at the time though. I am now.), but that the cost was so low (about 2 minutes of time) that it was still worth it for people to try.
The sleep aid I had started out trying gave me headaches. I use melotonin now, and it is much better. Still don't manage to get to bed before 1a though.
I tried melatonin for several days and it really didn't seem to do anything for me.
Sometimes I'll take Benadryl (but only half the recommended dose for my weight, so it wears off before morning) which does help but seems like not a good thng to be taking long-term.
Tolerance to the sleep-inducing effects of Benadryl builds up fairly quickly. In this double-blind study, people given 50 mg of diphenhydramine (the active ingredient in Benadryl) got really sleepy the first few times, but after doing this for four days in a row, the effects were indistinguishable from a placebo. Benadryl usually comes in 25 mg tablets, so that's two pills per night.