>Production of melatonin by the pineal gland is inhibited by light to the retina and permitted by darkness. Its onset each evening is called the dim-light melatonin onset (DLMO).
It is principally blue light, around 460 to 480 nm, that suppresses melatonin, proportional to the light intensity and length of exposure. Until recent history, humans in temperate climates were exposed to few hours of (blue) daylight in the winter; their fires gave predominantly yellow light. The incandescent light bulb widely used in the twentieth century produced relatively little blue light. Wearing glasses that block blue light in the hours before bedtime may decrease melatonin loss. Kayumov et al. showed that light containing only wavelengths greater than 530 nm does not suppress melatonin in bright-light conditions. Use of blue-blocking goggles the last hours before bedtime has also been advised for people who need to adjust to an earlier bedtime, as melatonin promotes sleepiness.
When used several hours before sleep according to the phase response curve for melatonin in humans, small amounts (0.3 mg) of melatonin shift the circadian clock earlier, thus promoting earlier sleep onset and morning awakening.
So this might explain why I started sleeping better when I installed f.lux[1] which starts eliminating blue light from your screen as soon as the sun sets.
debian/ubuntu users can `apt-get install redshift`. you can add it to your ~/.xsession if you're a luddite like me, or find some other way to make sure it's always running when X is running.
Install dimmers! And use warm-dimming bulbs like incandescent/halogen (or some newer LEDs). The combination of lower brightness and a light that actually dims to 2000K will measurably wipe out the stimulus. Most other kinds of lighting will not.
All white lights produce "some" blue light. As the other comment mentioned, the white point/color temperature indicates how much. I'm a fan of lights with adjustable color temperature, such as the Philips Hue bulbs. I use ~5000K-6500K when working, then fade down to dimmer light at ~2500K in the evenings. I use a Kinect for this, rather than the Hue app.
Probably a matter of "light temperature". Low temperatures of 2500-2700 K (aka "warm white") are reddish, while high temperatures around 3000 K (aka "daylight" [ETA: in advertising parlance]) are bluish. Go to a well-stocked hardware store and they may have a display demonstrating the differences.
I have Gunnars that I wear at home. The advantage is you're not limited in use when compared to flux. You can get them in prescription as well, however they're already fairly expensive.
Gunnars do a great job at blocking UV and some kinds of glare, but they mostly don't block the light around 480nm, so they can't block all alerting light.
You want glasses that look orange (not pale yellow), like the $7 Uvex ones.
The cheapest option is to wear orange glasses like the $7 Uvex S1933X. Room light is a big stimulus (especially if you don't have dimmers), and they're a lot easier to use than screen films. We measured the spectral response here: https://twitter.com/JustGetFlux/status/398599984334909440
Look at above comment about f.lux. You don't even need hardware; you can do it with software. But a quick search for such filters already delivers a lot of results: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3D....
Just choosing one of those results randomly (http://www.amazon.com/Green-Onions-Supply-Anti-Fingerprint-P...) seems to address that light spectrum specifically: "They reduce blue light from your screen by 38% over the most harmful portions of the visible light spectrum (380 to 500 nm)"
>Production of melatonin by the pineal gland is inhibited by light to the retina and permitted by darkness. Its onset each evening is called the dim-light melatonin onset (DLMO).
It is principally blue light, around 460 to 480 nm, that suppresses melatonin, proportional to the light intensity and length of exposure. Until recent history, humans in temperate climates were exposed to few hours of (blue) daylight in the winter; their fires gave predominantly yellow light. The incandescent light bulb widely used in the twentieth century produced relatively little blue light. Wearing glasses that block blue light in the hours before bedtime may decrease melatonin loss. Kayumov et al. showed that light containing only wavelengths greater than 530 nm does not suppress melatonin in bright-light conditions. Use of blue-blocking goggles the last hours before bedtime has also been advised for people who need to adjust to an earlier bedtime, as melatonin promotes sleepiness.
When used several hours before sleep according to the phase response curve for melatonin in humans, small amounts (0.3 mg) of melatonin shift the circadian clock earlier, thus promoting earlier sleep onset and morning awakening.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melatonin#Light_dependence