Saving Your Eyes

It’s dark.

This picture? Was taken at 2:30 in the afternoon.

That’s just one of those things, in winter. Darkness. And here’s your little Public Service Announcement about mental health: one in four people try to hibernate this time of year, and that same number feel absolutely traumatized by the overwhelming giddiness of high summer. Seasonal Affective Disorder, in spite of the stultifyingly lame acronym, is real. Pay attention.

The dark this week is is getting ridiculous, as there’s a thirty mile an hour scouring wind rattling the doors in their frames, and low-crouching clouds glowering down to go with it. The clouds, once they get a good crouch going, just do. not. let. up.

It’s dark in the morning, and we sit stupidly on the bed, blinking after the alarm — which we only have to use this time of year — pulls us from heavy sleep. It’s dark in the evening, and like the little moth-brains we are, we huddle close to our electronics, our cold fires, irises expanded to the limit to soak in all available light, and let the flickering screens keep our brains jumping.

It’s true. The amount of light emitted from electronics can fool your brain into thinking it’s not sleepy — why else are you up after midnight playing online Solitaire, or watching Law & Order reruns with your irises wide open like a drug addict’s? You’re sleepy, yet your brain hasn’t yet gotten the clue to go to bed.

T. has begun her usual just-before-we-go-home-I-don’t-sleep routine, and is becoming more weirdly light sensitive than usual as a result. Going to bed at 3 a.m. and still lying sleepless is definitely a problem, and while limiting the full-spectrum bulbs is the evening is a partial solution, we very fortuitously stumbled onto something that might help.

It’s called f.lux. It’s free software to change the color lighting of your computer monitor. Every monitor has something to change the brightness — but this is the first thing we’ve ever seen that changes color from warm to cool shades, depending on the time of day. As the site says, “During the day, computer screens look good—they’re designed to look like the sun. But, at 9PM, 10PM, or 3AM, you probably shouldn’t be looking at the sun.”

For people who work with a monitor more than four hours a day, who work late, or who work in low wattage environments, this can be really helpful for the amount of light the eyes have to deal with. T’s optic migraines — the little floaty black imprints she “sees” when she closes her eyes — have already lessened just from working with a sort of pinkish screen for an hour. As the sun moves over the horizon, the monitor light continually shifts and adjusts, so it’s going to be an ongoing little test to see how well we like this, and what we think of it. It’s …interesting so far. Check it out for yourself.

And get some sleep.