Based on my experience with circadian rhythm issues (delayed sleep phase syndrome etc.):
- Turning off the blue light in your devices in the evening is probably less impactful than lowering the brightness of your devices in the first place. Do both, but don’t expect a blue light filter to work if the device is still blasting your eyeballs.
- Many indoor environments are underilluminated. Your bedroom is probably 100x times darker than the sun. That’s not an exaggeration—we just don’t notice because we perceive light on a curve. Get much brighter lights. Going as bright as direct sunlight is too expensive, but you can easily get 10% of the way there, and it will stabilize your sleep (as long as you put the lights on a timer so they match the actual sun!) Get lights with a 90+ CRI, otherwise they will feel harsh.
- It should be a few degrees colder in your bedroom when you want to go to sleep, than the rest of the building is during the day.
- I never had success with melatonin: your body adapts too quickly when it’s used as a sedative, and the effects of using it in smaller doses as a circadian-rhythm shifter (a few hours before bedtime) were mild to nonexistent for me.
A thought: if you required large doses of melatonin for use as a sedative, maybe you simply needed to use a larger dose than you tried for circadian shifting as well, or longer before bedtime [I would suggest the latter first]. Melatonin definitely shouldn’t have no effect unless something is particularly wrong [perhaps a bad batch, anxiety, or a physical problem]. (It will change your circadian rhythm, but that is only one aspect of whether you actually sleep.) I have noticed no tolerance effects whatsoever when used as a circadian shifter, though there were some when used as a sedative.
I personally find melatonin extremely useful, taking a significant dose four to six hours before I plan to sleep. (My body otherwise thinks days are about 28-30 hours long.) By the time I actually try to sleep, it is trivial to do so, even though I had severe insomnia. It still works even if it is out of your system by then, and will not impact the quality of the sleep [I do not like the effects of it on my first few hours of sleep if I use it as a sedative], just its ease.
Your other points seem reasonable and important to keep in mind.
Unrelatedly, if you are overweight, that might be a cause of insomnia. I know my weight had a large effect in increasing my insomnia [due to lack of comfort and physical issues]. Losing it helped quite a bit, though I still need circadian shifting.
edit: Removed an extraneous word and fixed a spelling error.
I should note that my sleep issues are completely under control now, primarily due to the light therapy, as well as making sure I wake up at the same time every day, even on weekends. I now sleep like a normal, healthy person.
For a long time, especially when I was living in a dim basement, I had bouts of non-24 hour sleep-wake rhythm and I even had periods of irregular sleep-wake rhythm, which was a nightmare. So the light therapy etc. has taken me a long way. Fixing my sleep also played a large role in fixing my depression (and vice versa), since the comorbidity between depression and circadian rhythm disorders is very high (I think I remember >50%)
As for melatonin, I was never able to tell for sure if it was having an effect, but it definitely wasn’t solving my sleep issues as the other stuff did. Maybe there’s some biological variability in response to it or something. I did try different doses, up to the sedative level, and it never really helped. I’m glad some people find it helpful though.
There is, in fact, a sedative level, and higher doses aren’t less effective, they just induce more side effects, from what I understand. I tried every dose under the sun, including tiny ones. The effect was always weak at best.
Scott does write “A meta-analysis of dose-response relationships concurred, finding a plateau effect around 0.3 mg, with doses after that having no more efficacy, but worse side effects” but that doesn’t mean that higher doses keep their efficiency.
His article for example goes on to say “And Pires et al studying 22-24 year olds found that 0.3 mg worked better than 1.0.” Which is likely
Honestly, it’s a little strange that light therapy would help and melatonin not (since light therapy shifts circadian rhythms via [probably] lowering your melatonin levels in the morning). It’s good you have your sleep issues under control.
The effect size of melatonin use is usually pretty small. I think most studies say it shifts your cycle by 10-20 minutes. As I tended to go to bed an hour or two later every night, this was not enough.
As for light therapy, it’s not strange that it would have a different effect. Light stimulates a neural pathway going straight to your suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), which is the core circadian clock in your brain. (Melatonin is not involved in this, though melatonin is affected downstream.) Melatonin, on the other hand, is released by the pineal gland and is used to regulate the SCN (among other things), but it’s not involved directly in the core timing mechanisms of the SCN.
Melatonin actually causes a shift much larger than ten to twenty minutes -when taken early. Melatonin taken in the morning causes a large shift to delay the cycle (this can cause a shift of several hours). Melatonin taken after several hours hastens the cycle, also by hours. If this weren’t the case, it would be useless as I currently use it. The ten to twenty minutes is as a sedative, when taken twenty minutes before bedtime.
There are, of course, a number of pathways affecting sleep timing, including the uninformatively named System X that just tries to keep track of time by dead reckoning. I believe, perhaps wrongly, that the SCN’s sleep related functions are mostly directly by melatonin; melatonin reduces the firing rates of the parts of the SCN that increase in firing rate in the presence of light (according to Wikipedia). This is the core timing mechanism of how light affects the SCN, isn’t it?
Edit: Looking at it again, the relevant part of the SCN article ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suprachiasmatic_nucleus )(in the electrophysiology section) does not have direct citations, but I’ll assume it’s correct unless this activity of melatonin is directly disputed.
Edited again: An edit changed the structure of what I was saying, making for a strange sentence I don’t endorse.
Based on my experience with circadian rhythm issues (delayed sleep phase syndrome etc.):
- Turning off the blue light in your devices in the evening is probably less impactful than lowering the brightness of your devices in the first place. Do both, but don’t expect a blue light filter to work if the device is still blasting your eyeballs.
- Many indoor environments are underilluminated. Your bedroom is probably 100x times darker than the sun. That’s not an exaggeration—we just don’t notice because we perceive light on a curve. Get much brighter lights. Going as bright as direct sunlight is too expensive, but you can easily get 10% of the way there, and it will stabilize your sleep (as long as you put the lights on a timer so they match the actual sun!) Get lights with a 90+ CRI, otherwise they will feel harsh.
- It should be a few degrees colder in your bedroom when you want to go to sleep, than the rest of the building is during the day.
- I never had success with melatonin: your body adapts too quickly when it’s used as a sedative, and the effects of using it in smaller doses as a circadian-rhythm shifter (a few hours before bedtime) were mild to nonexistent for me.
A thought: if you required large doses of melatonin for use as a sedative, maybe you simply needed to use a larger dose than you tried for circadian shifting as well, or longer before bedtime [I would suggest the latter first]. Melatonin definitely shouldn’t have no effect unless something is particularly wrong [perhaps a bad batch, anxiety, or a physical problem]. (It will change your circadian rhythm, but that is only one aspect of whether you actually sleep.) I have noticed no tolerance effects whatsoever when used as a circadian shifter, though there were some when used as a sedative.
I personally find melatonin extremely useful, taking a significant dose four to six hours before I plan to sleep. (My body otherwise thinks days are about 28-30 hours long.) By the time I actually try to sleep, it is trivial to do so, even though I had severe insomnia. It still works even if it is out of your system by then, and will not impact the quality of the sleep [I do not like the effects of it on my first few hours of sleep if I use it as a sedative], just its ease.
Your other points seem reasonable and important to keep in mind.
Unrelatedly, if you are overweight, that might be a cause of insomnia. I know my weight had a large effect in increasing my insomnia [due to lack of comfort and physical issues]. Losing it helped quite a bit, though I still need circadian shifting.
edit: Removed an extraneous word and fixed a spelling error.
I should note that my sleep issues are completely under control now, primarily due to the light therapy, as well as making sure I wake up at the same time every day, even on weekends. I now sleep like a normal, healthy person.
For a long time, especially when I was living in a dim basement, I had bouts of non-24 hour sleep-wake rhythm and I even had periods of irregular sleep-wake rhythm, which was a nightmare. So the light therapy etc. has taken me a long way. Fixing my sleep also played a large role in fixing my depression (and vice versa), since the comorbidity between depression and circadian rhythm disorders is very high (I think I remember >50%)
As for melatonin, I was never able to tell for sure if it was having an effect, but it definitely wasn’t solving my sleep issues as the other stuff did. Maybe there’s some biological variability in response to it or something. I did try different doses, up to the sedative level, and it never really helped. I’m glad some people find it helpful though.
There’s no sedative level and most melatonin products have doses that are too high to be clinically effective. What was the lowest dose you took?
There is, in fact, a sedative level, and higher doses aren’t less effective, they just induce more side effects, from what I understand. I tried every dose under the sun, including tiny ones. The effect was always weak at best.
Scott does write “A meta-analysis of dose-response relationships concurred, finding a plateau effect around 0.3 mg, with doses after that having no more efficacy, but worse side effects” but that doesn’t mean that higher doses keep their efficiency.
His article for example goes on to say “And Pires et al studying 22-24 year olds found that 0.3 mg worked better than 1.0.” Which is likely
Where did you get the idea that there’s a sedative level for melatonin?
Honestly, it’s a little strange that light therapy would help and melatonin not (since light therapy shifts circadian rhythms via [probably] lowering your melatonin levels in the morning). It’s good you have your sleep issues under control.
The effect size of melatonin use is usually pretty small. I think most studies say it shifts your cycle by 10-20 minutes. As I tended to go to bed an hour or two later every night, this was not enough.
As for light therapy, it’s not strange that it would have a different effect. Light stimulates a neural pathway going straight to your suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), which is the core circadian clock in your brain. (Melatonin is not involved in this, though melatonin is affected downstream.) Melatonin, on the other hand, is released by the pineal gland and is used to regulate the SCN (among other things), but it’s not involved directly in the core timing mechanisms of the SCN.
Melatonin actually causes a shift much larger than ten to twenty minutes -when taken early. Melatonin taken in the morning causes a large shift to delay the cycle (this can cause a shift of several hours). Melatonin taken after several hours hastens the cycle, also by hours. If this weren’t the case, it would be useless as I currently use it. The ten to twenty minutes is as a sedative, when taken twenty minutes before bedtime.
There are, of course, a number of pathways affecting sleep timing, including the uninformatively named System X that just tries to keep track of time by dead reckoning. I believe, perhaps wrongly, that the SCN’s sleep related functions are mostly directly by melatonin; melatonin reduces the firing rates of the parts of the SCN that increase in firing rate in the presence of light (according to Wikipedia). This is the core timing mechanism of how light affects the SCN, isn’t it?
Edit: Looking at it again, the relevant part of the SCN article ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suprachiasmatic_nucleus )(in the electrophysiology section) does not have direct citations, but I’ll assume it’s correct unless this activity of melatonin is directly disputed.
Edited again: An edit changed the structure of what I was saying, making for a strange sentence I don’t endorse.