It’s been a number of years since I’ve heard of blue-light filtered glasses. If you don’t know what it is, check out Zeiss’ explanation. Though Zeiss is promotional about their own product, it does provide one of the best long-form explanations of the benefits of some spectrum of blue light and the more questionable ones.
To be exact, I’ve had a pair of glasses with a blue-lense coating on it for a few years now, and while I always knew that those were the pair that I had the blue-lense reflect on them (I didn’t think they would make such a difference). (I also have > 10 pairs of glasses at this point all with various degrees of prescription though.)
In the last few years, my sleep has gotten shorter and shorter. I can only get about 6 hours of sleep now at any given time and I wake up still feeling I need more. I’ve been to some sleep studies and their usual metrics to track sleep efficiency was within normal parameters for me. I’ve also tried melatonin and magnesium with very little noticeable effects on making stay in bed longer.
I recently also got an Oura for my birthday. If you don’t know what it is you should check it out. It’s probably my favourite wearable at this point. It’s entirely passive, has almost a week’s long battery life and helps me visualize the quality of the sleep in various ways. It was built by a startup based in Sweden and I think Apple should acquire them. I digress.
The Oura helps you know a bit better when to get to bed or at least nudges you anyway. It also tracks in great detail the quality of the sleep, the stages of sleep you experienced throughout the night (not sure how it tracks this) and also body temperature and number of breaths you take in the minute. All fine and good but after having used it religiously for 3 months, I don’t see how making these small adjustments helped me sleep for longer or made me aware of certain patterns that was helping me stay under. What I mean is that in-and-of-itself, it’s only a tracking tool and less about how one can get quality sleep.
For some reason, I started using my blue-light reflective glasses and lenses again. I would wear it the whole day, including in the evenings and night before bed. By using the Oura, I would notice that my sleep duration would be longer the next day. Seems obvious, but took me a while comply with just wearing the damn glasses when I’m in the front the computer a lot or using it in the evenings.
This is coming from a guy that has F.lux for over 8 years now or something like that and was pounding the table for Apple to get something that would reduce the blue light on the iPhone (some they did as of iOS 9 or something).
I only have a sample size of two days and nights so it’s not scientific at all even when I’m just looking at one specimen but since nothing else has worked and this seemed to work so well (all else being equal), I’ll continue to test this.
Now … I’ll get another pair of blue-light blocking lenses to add to my collection.