Free DIY blue light box!

[blimix]

So I had this awesome idea:

A usual trick for shifting to an earlier sleep cycle (or for treating seasonal affective disorder) is to spend some time looking at a light box shortly after waking up. If you have a light box. And if you have time. And if it doesn't bore you silly.

But a little bit (400 lux) of blue light is as effective as a lot (10,000 lux) of white light. And I spend hours staring at a light source -- my monitor -- most days. My monitor's brightness, 290 cd/m2, converts to 912 lux, which I assume means that it can give me 304 lux of blue. So how about this: Read all of my morning daily stuff (Livejournal, comics, news, FML, etc.) on a bright blue background! (And this is the perfect excuse to do things my mother told me not to: Sit too close to the screen, and have the lights off in the process! (Diluting the blue light with white reduces its effectiveness.))

It doesn't take any time out of my day at all, and requires no new equipment!

First off, don't take this idea as advice. It's just a concept I'm trying out, and my success or lack thereof won't mean much: I'm a sample size of one with no control group. That said, here's how to change to a blue background:

In Firefox:

In Preferences, choose the "Content" tab and click the "Colors" button. Uncheck "Allow pages to choose their own colors". Set the background to a bright, saturated blue.

In Opera:

1. Using a text editor, make a file called "blue.css" somewhere where you can find it. It should look something like this, but feel free to improve upon it or include it in a bigger style sheet:

body { background-color:#0000ff;
color: #000000; }
a:link { color: #000000; }
a:visited { color: #000000; }

2. Navigate Opera's menus through Tools/Preferences/Advanced/Content/Style Options/Display (or View/Style/Manage Modes/Display). Change "my style sheet" to refer to your blue.css file.

3. Read your morning dailies in User Mode. (Shift-g or View/Style/User Mode.)

4. Lots of web page layouts will be different in User Mode. Deal. (Hit "+" to increase the font size if you have to.)

In another browser:

Drop a comment in here, advising people how.

Note that I said "bright blue," not "light blue". If you change the background color to light blue (say, #8080ff), you'll only be diluting the blue. Turn your monitor brightness all the way up instead.

When you're sick of it, switch back to Author Mode or "Allow pages to choose their own colors" and turn your monitor's brightness back down to normal. Yay!

Comments

[litemyster.livejournal.com]

given monitors are emissive devices, & blue represents the primary additive color which we are least sensitive too, you may not be getting that much out of it in blue. I would expect a crt to be more sensitive to it than an LCD, but that is just speculation on my part.

[blimix.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, thanks for mentioning it. Last I heard, CRTs were built with twice as much red as either green or blue, and LCDs were not. But "last I heard" was quite a long time ago (when LCDs were newfangled contraptions).

In any case, yes, it did occur to me that I might not be getting a full third of the brightness in blue. I'm just not about to take the time to research it now.

Also, I haven't done any further research and calculations to figure out how close I should be sitting to the monitor. That'll make a huge difference. However, since the numbers I have, plus your concern, leave the luminance "in the ballpark but not quite enough," I think I can just compensate by sitting as close as I comfortably can, and call that "in the pickle barrel".

(Folks at home: Don't try that with a CRT, please.)

[light-in-motion.livejournal.com]

Might a) covering the big window and b)putting an aluminum foil- over-cardboard reflector around your monitor improve matters?

not sure...

[(Anonymous)]

I'm not convinced the blue light does what that single study says it does. I think it needs more research. In addition I would caution you on two points. First it doesn't sound like you know what lux you are getting at what distance; you don't know if you should be across the room or nose to the screen. Second, with white light therapy they caution against sitting too close and looking directly at the light for more than a few seconds. If it is your computer, you are probably looking directly at it most of the time. Then again, I don't know it the same advisory is true for blue light, I haven't read that study.
~Tracey

Re: not sure...

[blimix.livejournal.com]

Yeah, there's an awful lot of guesswork here. But at least I'm pretty sure I won't do any damage to my eyes by sitting close to a monitor that's giving me 300 lux at best.

When I lean in, I think I'm about three times closer than I was to a light box that I used briefly a few years ago. (They have comparable surface areas.) So that should compensate for a bunch of diminishing effects, such as the ambient light, the weakness of the monitor, and the non-blue parts (e.g., text, images) of the web sites I'm reading.

It would probably be a good idea for me to read that study, of course.