Auraglow colour-changing LED

I’ve been intrigued by colour-changing LED bulbs for years, and have kept an eye on the market while they gradually improved.  Auraglow were kind enough to send me their 10w colour changing bulb free of charge for me to review.  For some reason it took them three tries to get one sent to me, no one knows what happened to the first two that were sent out, but it finally arrived and I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks.

As the photo shows, they are really rather pretty!  You get sixteen colours plus warm white, and the warm white is a separate LED, rather than a mix of the red, green and blue LEDs.  The white is 10W and my guess would be that the other colours are substantially less, although they’re still pretty impressive.  They’re pleasant colours, well-balanced in hue, and the combination colours are brighter than the pure red, blue or green ones.

The idea behind using this bulb was that I could use the warm white in the daytime and the yellow through red shades in the evening. I had a spot for it lined up in the bookcase opposite my bed.  The trouble is, these bulbs are huge.  They only come in BC or E27 fitting, and like most table lamps today, the lamp I had was an E14.  I have an E14 to BC convertor in there already which works fine with the white LED bulb I usually keep in there, but the Auraglow bulb was a bit too big to fit in with that as well.  You could cram it in, but all the light ended up at the top of the lamp, and since it’s in a bookcase, it was getting cut off by the shelf above it.  In addition, the white was both weaker and more yellowy than the LED bulb I had in there already, so it wasn’t really an improvement.  (I have no idea where I got that bulb that’s in there already, I don’t think it’s more than 7W but it’s the best I’ve ever found.)

So I dug out a lamp that wasn’t really being used and put it on my bedroom desk, by the curtains.  Then I had to move it along the desk, away from the curtains.  It turns out that the bulb isn’t just huge, it’s really heavy.  I’d already tried it in a desk lamp in my partner’s flat, and it was so heavy it had pulled the lamp over.  This table lamp is medium height and slim, and it kept on falling over whenever someone drew the curtains and brushed against it.  The lamp is now tucked away where the curtain can’t brush it and hopefully it’s safe.  The great thing about this bulb being remote controlled is that I don’t have to go anywhere near the lamp to turn it on, I just keep the remote in my bedside chest, so I could put it in the most inaccessible spot I could think of, provided the remote can get line of sight to the bulb.

Now we’d found a home for it, how did it fare?  Pretty well.  As I said, the warm white is on the yellowy side, more so under a standard cream lampshade.  Warm white is a really hard colour to get right with LEDs, and I have found that the same LED bulb or string of fairy lights will look good in some places, against some paint colours, and awful in others.  Every time I’ve tried an LED bulb in my living room (painted off-white) it looks weirdly greenish, for instance, but in my bedroom (painted cream) they’re generally fine.  This one is a perfectly pleasant colour, although not one I’d want to use for colour work, and it looked odd when I tried it for my bedside lamp.  Even kept on my desk, you notice that it’s a very different colour from the other LED bulb and the halogen bulb in the room, but only if you glance between them to compare.  It’s not the strongest LED bulb I’ve seen, which is surprising for 10W, but I do like a lot of light for reading by.  If it’s more of a general lamp, it’s fine.  I wouldn’t use it for lighting an entire room, though.  You’d need quite a few of them, and they’ve expensive.  If the white were brighter and the colour were better, it’d be tempting.  Let’s see how the technology improves in that department.

Now for the really fun part, the colour-changing aspect.  You can set it to move between the colours in a few ways, which some people will enjoy for parties.  We admired how pretty that was briefly, then hunted for a good colour to put it on in the evening.  You can have a yellow, two shades of orange, or a red.  The yellow is a bit on the greenish side.  The two oranges are both very pleasant amber colours, and the red is a good one, on the more orangey side for a red LED.  The yellow and oranges are made from a mixture of green and red light, and opinion is split on whether or not green light affects your melatonin production and circadian rhythms.  I’ve decided to stick to the red light, which lights up a surprising amount of the room.  I don’t know whether or not green light affects me, but I stick to lights which look the same whether or not I am looking at them through my orange-tinted blue-blocking glasses, and the orange hues on this bulb looked different through the orange specs, suggesting that there’s something I’d want to block in there.  If you’re not using orange specs, and you don’t mind changing the light a few times, you could try gradually moving from white through yellow and orange to red over the course of the evening.  It’d probably feel very relaxing.

Would I buy this myself?  At the moment, no.  I’m not using it to its full potential, I’m only using the white and the red, and it’s cheaper to buy a second lamp and put a coloured bulb in that one.  If it were cheaper and heavier it’d be a different matter, but I’m guessing there are manufacturing reasons why that’s an issue.  But it’s very pretty, a fun gadget to have, and I do love being able to use it with a remote control. This is the first red bulb I’ve tried, if you don’t count the red fairy lights, and I was very impressed with the colour.  Watch out for another post soon about the various colours of light bulbs I’ve amassed by now.

Beam n Read hands free lamp with blue-blocking filters

If you are a quilter or crafter, you’ll know the importance of having good light to work by.  I have two spotlights over my sewing desk, which is fine when I’m working there, but when I get to the stage that involves curling up in bed or on the sofa with the quilting frame, I have a lighting issue.  Recently I discovered that some quilters wear head torches for this.  You look a bit daft, and anyone you lift your head to talk to won’t appreciate the sudden beam of light in their face, which I can manage.  What was bothering me was that the cold white LED shining right above my eyes wasn’t a great option if I wanted to sew in the evenings, in terms of avoiding blue light, and sometimes it would give me a headache.

After some hunting around, I discovered the Beam n Read.  It’s a lamp you hang around your neck, so that it points down onto your crafting or your book and not into the face of your startled partner.  You can get a version with 3 LEDs or a version with 6 LEDs, with a switch that allows you to turn on just 3 of them if you choose.  More relevant to this website, it comes with two snap-on filters that block blue light. One is amber, one is red.  The folks at Beam n Read very kindly sent me one for review.  It’s the 6 LED model.  There’s also a model with a magnifying glass, but I don’t get on with those so I didn’t request it.  Here’s their picture showing what they look like with the filters on.

It’s an ingenious little device, especially with the filters.  Some people want to be able to see more and can use the amber filter, some want the light to be dimmer and use the red filter, and some simply have a colour preference.  They don’t make any medical claims, of course, but it gives you the option to use task lighting that filters out blue light and thus shouldn’t disrupt your melatonin production.  Having a personal, focused light can be particularly useful if you are, say, reading in bed and don’t want to disturb your partner, or if you’re getting up to feed a baby and want to minimise everyone’s sleep disruption.  The elastic strap which goes around your neck is adjustable, and the lamp itself is sturdily built.  If you find that the 6 LED version is a bit bright on its own, you have the option of reducing it to 3 LEDs when it’s on white, and then putting it on 6 LEDs when it has the colour filter on, so that you don’t end up with a light that’s suitably coloured but too dim to see by.  The colour filters are great, they give a strong light in two useful and pleasant colours, and you don’t get any light bleeding around the edge.  The light seems to be about as strong as my Petzl Tikkina head torch, which is about right for me, neither too dim to work by, nor so bright that you get glare problems.  Being bigger (and heavier), it takes bigger batteries, so it’ll last a lot longer before requiring fresh ones.

Unfortunately, it just didn’t work for me.  As a child, I remember reading a book which said something along the lines of, “Owen’s parents realised he needed spectacles when they saw him reading with the book six inches away from the end of his nose.”  (I have no idea what the book was, but it definitely featured an Owen.  I think he was Welsh, and there may have been magic involved.)  I thought this was rather odd, as I have always held books that close or closer even with my glasses on!  It’s the same when I’m sewing.  From what my optometrist says, people who are very short-sighted like me tend to do this, and you end up finding positions for reading and sewing that work nicely for you without much trouble.  However, it means that having the light shining from the top of your chest, rather than from somewhere near your eyes, is absolutely useless.  I shortened the strap as far as it would go, and moved the quilting frame around, and wriggled.  Unless I sat at a really uncomfortable angle which I couldn’t sustain for long, I couldn’t get the light to do more than illuminate the bottom part of the quilting frame.  I found the strap rather scratchy as well.  Beam n Read mentioned that some quilters make their own strap, which may mean that there are a few other people having this problem, although it could just be a case of quilters wanting to make their own version of any textile in sight.

So then I tried putting it on my forehead.  The strap is too long for that, so I grabbed my trusty eye mask and put that on top of it to keep it in place.  That worked, but then it felt uncomfortable having that big straight block of plastic against my forehead.  A spare fleece wrist warmer worked for padding, and I managed to keep it on my head for long enough to work with.  I now had light coming from the angle I wanted, and I could change it to amber light in the evening so that it wouldn’t creep around the edges of my orange-tinted specs!  But the set up was quite ridiculous, it’s really not meant to be used that way, and before long it fell off.  I don’t have babies who need to be fed in the middle of the night with minimal light, or go camping, or any other uses that I can think of that would work for me.  Reluctantly, I gave up on it.  I think I’ll have to buy a second head torch and put an orange vinyl filter over it instead.

By this point I was eyeing it wistfully, as it’s a nifty device and I had really wanted it to work.  I brought it out to show my friends when they were around for board games, as they are crafters too.  The cross stitcher said it wasn’t for her.  The spinner is interested, and since they hold their spindle quite low down, it may end up working for them.  The knitter wasn’t there and hasn’t been knitting much for a while anyway.  My partner, who doesn’t do any of these things (though he does play a variety of musical instruments), is wondering whether he will be able to attach it to a bedpost so that he can read in the evening without having his rather large bedside lamp on and shining white light everywhere.  I suspect it won’t really work for that, but we will play around and see what can be done.  I’m sure there is someone I know who will find that it’s just the thing for them.

I can’t really give this one a rating, since whether it works for you will depend on whether you like having light coming from your chest rather than near your eyes, and what sort of tasks you will use it for.  If you reckon it will suit you, then it’s great.  The only thing I’d criticise is the strap, which I hope they improve in the future.  Apart from that, it’s the only device of this nature I know of which has orange and red filters, and it’s sturdily built, with a good battery life.  You can get head torches with an additional red light built in, but as far as I can tell, the red light on those is too dim for sewing or reading by.  I may give one of them a try just to see.

My experience with Restless Leg Syndrome

Believe it or not, the cat is the one who made me realise that I have Restless Leg Syndrome.  It had built up gradually over the years, I suspect, and I was used to the fact that I would have an irresistible urge to move my legs around while I was in bed at night.  It wasn’t until we were curled up watching TV one evening, with my legs up on the sofa and the cat sitting on them, that I realised that I really, really wanted to move my legs, but I couldn’t without disturbing the cat.  (It is amazing how much humans will do in order to avoid disturbing the cat.)  Then I thought, it’s the evening, I’ve got my legs up, I have that horrible urge to move them, hang on a minute, I know what this is!

RLS is a tricky disorder to treat.  All of the medication options are the sort of drugs that are not to be taken lightly, with a high rate of side-effects and/or tolerance/withdrawal problems.  The doctor tried me on ropinirole, which affects dopamine levels, but oddly enough it just made it worse.  Anti-epileptics such as gabapentin (Neurontin) or pregabalin (Lyrica) are popular, but I hadn’t done well when I was tried on gabapentin for nerve pain, and the horrendous withdrawal I experienced from it is actually when the RLS started.  Opiates and opioids are also commonly used.  I haven’t been able to tolerate opiates such as codeine since I had my gallbladder out in 2012, and while I do take the synthetic opioid tramadol for pain, I can’t use it at night.  Benzodiazepines are another option.  Those work for me, and I often use diazepam as a muscle relaxant in combination with tramadol for pain as well as very occasionally using temazepam for insomnia.  However, I wouldn’t want to take them every night due to the very high risk of tolerance, which is where they stop working unless you keep raising the dose, so that eventually you end up on a sky-high dose of a drug that’s no longer working and have a hellish withdrawal to go through.

Thankfully I was in a good RLS group on Facebook where people discussed iron.  (Well, mostly a good group.  It was prone to people barging in trying to sell quack products such as copper bracelets, but they were eventually dealt with.)  It turns out that RLS can be a symptom of anaemia, and iron supplementation will relieve symptoms for a substantial number of people.  One of the irritating things about having ME/CFS is that so many of its symptoms overlap with those of other conditions, such as anaemia, and another irritating problem is that this makes doctors far less likely to go through the diagnostic procedures for other conditions.  They just wave you away with “it’ll probably be the ME”.  I had the symptoms of anaemia written all over me, but fatigue hardly looks unusual when you have ME, and I was getting doctors telling me that it was perfectly normal that my lips kept turning blue!  Interestingly, my new dentist has been spotting various signs that I’ve had anaemia, so I’m glad someone can notice it.

The next problem is that doctors are willing to run blood tests, but the NHS reference ranges for anaemia are on the wimpish side.  In most countries, they will take action if your ferritin (iron stores) is below 25 or 50mcg/L, even 75 in some countries.  In the UK it’s a mere 12.  Mine was 21.  We were stalled until a kind person from the RLS Facebook group sent me an article about how your ferritin should be over 75 if you have RLS.  I printed it off, sent it to the GP, and she prescribed iron tablets at last.  For some reason she initially put me on one 65mg tablet of ferrous sulphate a day, and when I checked with the pharmacist, she said that this was the maintenance dose, the therapeutic dose was three tablets a day.  I raised this with a GP, who muttered something about how they hadn’t wanted me to get constipated. I assured him that I was capable of working with that particular side effect (which never happened anyway) and really did need to have this treated, and he put me on the correct dose.

Finally, I had something that worked.  Looking back, it’s not surprising that I was anaemic.  I am on two medications, ranitidine and omeprazole, that wipe out my stomach acid, so I don’t absorb nutrients as well.  I had no idea this was the case until I had tried a low dose iron supplement, experienced absolutely epic farting on it, posted on a health forum to see if anyone had ideas, and someone there who’s a nurse explained to me about the low stomach acid problem.  Once I started taking digestive enzymes, which also have a bit of betaine hydrochloride in them, that sorted out the farting issue, and I am extremely glad I had that under control before I started on the prescription level of iron, which is nine times as much!

This, by the way, is why you shouldn’t attempt DIY iron supplementation.  The amount you can buy in multivitamins and such is too low to have any effect on a serious problem, and the prescription level is not something you’d want to be taking unless you really need it, as too much iron is bad for you as well.  So go and get your ferritin tested if you think you may have low iron stores, make sure they tell you the exact result, and argue you it if you have to.  (I can’t find that article about preferred ferritin levels in RLS just now, but this website discusses it to some extent.)  If you do end up on iron, it’s commonly agreed that you should be supplementing with Vitamin C as well, partly to increase iron absorption and partly because it can help counteract the constipation that iron pills may cause.  The NHS doesn’t supply that part, just as they don’t help out if you have low stomach acid, so you’ll have to find it yourself, but Vitamin C is cheap and easy to sort out.

Once my ferritin levels were testing as being above 75, the GP suggested that I go down to one tablet a day as a maintenance dose.  The RLS promptly returned, but it went away again when I changed to two tablets.  Presumably I need a higher maintenance dose because of the low stomach acid issue.

As for the cat, she was eventually persuaded that someone who changes position at night as much as I do will never be a good nighttime cat mattress, whereas my partner sleeps like a log and is thrilled to have her roosting on his ankles.  I get plenty of kitty snuggles in the daytime, never fear.

Eye masks

Here’s how not to use eye masks: get one that’s too tight.  Yes, it stays on better, but then you end up at the optician’s complaining that you have hours of blurry vision every morning, due to the pressure on your eyes.  At least, I did, and I felt like a right noodle once I realised what was most likely causing it.  The offending eye mask was one by Muji which seems to have been withdrawn by now, and had strange double straps that were meant to go around your ears and didn’t.  Perhaps it was too small for everyone, since I’m a small woman and anything that’s tight on my head is unlikely to fit that many people.  Their current models look a lot more comfortable.

Eye masks are the sort of thing where there is a great deal on the market and you can usually find something to suit your taste.  In the past I’ve relied on blackout curtain linings instead, but I now have a partner who prefers to have some light coming through in order to wake him up in the morning, so this was the easiest solution.  My own preference is for cotton, soft and flexible, and I wanted something more substantial than the standard cheapie ones.

 

After reading Amazon reviews and noting many complaints that dark coloured eye masks would bleed colour onto the bedding, I bought the Lewis Clark eye mask, which comes in a variety of colours.  It’s currently £13.99.  Years of early exposure to “girls must like pink” have caused my attitude towards pink to be ARGGH GET IT OFF ME, so I plumped for the turquoise, which is more of a soft sea green.  The bedding remains unharmed, and it’s a colour which I can spot when it’s fallen off and hidden in the covers somewhere.  The drawback with a lighter colour is that it isn’t a complete blackout mask.  They should look into a layer of dark fabric in the middle, as the inside is a lightish grey.  You don’t really notice unless the room is quite brightly lit, though.

After the business with the eye mask that was too tight, one of the most alluring features of this mask was that it has an adjustable strap.  It’s a good wide piece of elastic, too, unlike the narrow stringy things on cheaper eye masks that stretch out before long.  The mask still falls off my head every now and again, but I suppose nothing is perfect, and I’ve always managed to hunt it down again in the morning.  The cover is a soft plush, the inside is comfortable even for my ultra-fussy skin, it feels breathable rather than sweaty, and the sort of flap at the bottom does a reasonably good job of blocking out light that might seep in around your nose.

To be honest, if you want something that offers a complete black-out, you probably need the sort of rigid eye mask that looks like you’re wearing bulbous goggles.  I’ve had one of those and found it rather uncomfortable, although not as uncomfortable as my partner did when it collided with his face!  No one wants an eye mask that threatens to leave bruises if you happen to have a sleepy snuggle, after all.  So I reckon this is a good compromise between blacking out the light completely, comfort, and not leaving peculiar bluish stains on my bed linen.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

I’m still alive!

Well, it’s five years on, and I’m still using darkness therapy to keep to a 24 hour sleep pattern.  My sleep quality varies, as it always will for someone with ME/CFS, but being able to keep to a good bedtime is something I’m profoundly grateful for.  Chronic pain is a bigger part of my life these days, and for one reason or another I don’t have any pain medication I can use at night, so sometimes that’s a factor in my sleep problems.  I also turned out to be anaemic, something I only realised after developing Restless Leg Syndrome.  It’s always advisable for people with RLS to get their ferritin levels checked, and if their ferritin is below 75 (which is higher than the NHS reference range for preventing anaemia), to get it treated.  Thankfully the iron supplements cleared the RLS right up.

In other changes, I broke up with my former partner three years ago, and am about to celebrate my second anniversary with my lovely current partner.  He came with a ridiculous and adorable cat whom I am equally devoted to.  I could happily blether on about the pair of them for some time, but to stick to the subject of this site, this does affect my darkness therapy routine in a few ways.

First of all, he actually likes using coloured light in the evening, he finds it relaxing, so we have a variety of coloured bulbs scattered about our two flats.  I’ve been using incandescents so far, but have started to experiment with fluorescents and have a colour-changing LED bulb on the way.   That string of red LED lights  which I never knew what to do with has finally found a home, taped up under my kitchen cabinets with a timer on.  It’s easily enough light for coming into the kitchen at night to get a glass of water, and you could even wash up by it.  String lights seem to fare best when set out in a long row.  I had tried just bundling them together to give an impression of a single lamp, but it wasn’t much use, and having them out in a row as they’re meant to be somehow seems to give off far more light.  LED bulbs are so low-wattage that I don’t mind just leaving them on overnight every night, even when I’m not there.

Secondly, he’s quite fond of the dawn simulator for when he has to get up for work, and prefers to have a fair amount of light coming through the window to help him wake up.  So the blackout curtain linings are off, and I am using a sleep mask instead.  The curtains do look nicer with light shining through them, especially if you need to draw them in the daytime for privacy.

With regard to the cat, I need enough light around the place for when her ladyship decides that she wants to rush around as if her tail were on fire just when we’re settling into bed for the night.  She has dedicated spots where she likes to roll onto her back and knock seven bells out of a wrestling toy I wave around for her, but she can dash around anywhere, really.  The red lights in my kitchen aren’t quite enough, since she’s very fond of hiding under the dining table, and she’s a small black cat to boot.  I’m thinking about the options for lighting that part of the flat better at night without having to turn on the overhead white lights.  Also there’s a nightlight by the litter box in my partner’s flat now, as you really don’t want to step in that when blearily wobbling to the loo in the middle of the night.

LED lighting has come quite a long way since I was last blogging, and there are some amazing things I’m longing to try.  There’s more interest in ways of avoiding blue light in the evening too, although it rarely translates to popular products on the market.  I have various shiny new things to review, and a few more on the way.

Considering new lighting options

While my faithful GoLite is still going strong, the little white LED lightbox which I bought on eBay for £10 looks like it might be on its way out.  The timer function no longer works, and sometimes the light goes out and the cable has to be wiggled or unplugged and plugged in again in order to get the light back on.  I’ll keep going until it really is dead, but I’m starting to consider my options.

I do prefer having a spare lightbox for the sewing desk, since I hate crawling around on the floor to unplug cables every time I want to change which room I’m lightboxing in, and also because the blue of the GoLite doesn’t go well with sewing.  I’ve been interested in LED lighting for a while anyway because of the energy savings.  The snag is that while the wattage is very low, the price of the bulbs is high and apparently it’s difficult to get a comfortable shade of white.  Certainly the cool white of my current lightbox isn’t something I’d care to light my home with.

So one option is simply to buy another white LED lightbox.  The cheapest I can see is the Rio, which is £50.  It looks like a nice enough little lightbox, but this isn’t like getting a spare one for a tenner.

Option 2 is to get this all-singing all-dancing bulb.  There are various multi-coloured LED bulbs on the market, but the rest are less bright and don’t include a warm white.  This one boasts 8W of power, includes a warm white, and comes in both wide and narrow beam versions.  I could use the cool white or the blue for light therapy, the warm white for general use, and then in the evenings I would have a selection of colours from red to yellow for darkness therapy, which is something I could do with in this room.  At the moment, if I want to sew during darkness therapy time, I have a couple of lamps above head height at my desk and while the room doesn’t get that bright overall, I’m sure there’s some light creeping over the top of my orange glasses.  The total cost would approach that of buying a separate lightbox, especially if I ended up getting it a desk lamp of its own so that it could be right next to me.

Things to consider and/or ask about:

1. How good the warm white is, both in terms of colour and brightness, and whether it will mesh well with the halogen bulbs I currently use for my sewing desk.  I hear that some warm white LEDs these days are pretty decent.  It would presumably be different to those, however, as they’re creating the white light from white LEDs and this would be creating the white light from a mixture of red, blue and green.

2. I presume that even a warm white LED still has a lot of blue in it.  Would using this as a general lamp during the daytime overdo the light exposure, or would it be fine as long as I moved it a bit further away from me?  People can be outdoors for hours without messing up their sleep, after all.

3. Whether the light therapy usage time would need to be ridiculously long.  I know that one LED lightbox I researched ran on 10W, but I can’t remember if that was a white or a blue one.  At 8w, hopefully this would be close, and I could position it in the effection spot just above my eyes, although I’d need to make sure it wasn’t too close in order to avoid glare discomfort.

4. On the other hand, perhaps it wouldn’t matter if the usage time was longer since even the warm white would presumably have a reasonable effect.  This could turn out to be the lamp which you just use as your general desk lamp instead of a shorter burst of more concentrated light therapy.  If I end up simply putting it in the floor lamp which leans over my desk from the left, I’d need to make sure that the light was strong enough to more or less compensate for a 60W equivalent bulb.

5. Wide beam (88 degrees) or narrow angle beam (31 degrees)?  Does anyone know what your average R63 spotlight bulb is?  I’d be happy with an equivalent to that.  Judging from this page, the narrow angle bulb would work well.  You can also read more about the bulb in question here, where it claims that it’s equivalent to a 50W halogen.  That should be sufficient.

Colour tolerance and myopia

I’ve mentioned before that my partner really hates coloured light.  I haven’t tried that many colours on him, just the blue lightbox and a range of yellow and amber bulbs, but he has strongly disliked all of them.  My eye specialist has finally given a reason for why this might be the case. Colour, she says, is very important to myopes (short-sighted folks), and the more myopic you are, the more colour will matter to you.  I’m fairly fussy about colour myself, I can’t stand fluorescent light (though that’s probably a case of colour and flicker) and I’m very picky about colours when it comes to reading and tinted lenses, though I don’t know how far that is caused by having Meares-Irlen Syndrome.  I’d be curious to test my partner some time and see how much colour he can tolerate, if there are any colours he finds easier than others, or if he’s only really happy when the light is white or close to it.  I mentioned to the eye specialist that I find yellow and orange light mercifully comfortable, and she said, “Oh yes, yellow light is very soothing for the eyes.”  For reference, here is how myopia is usually categorised:

0 to -3: mild myopia
-3 to -6: moderate myopia
-6 to -10: severe myopia
over -10: extreme myopia (not usually listed as it’s so rare)

Including astigmatism, I’m about -7, so my eyesight’s worse than that of most people but I still know a fair few people who are at a similar level to me.  My partner, on the other hand, is about -19.  Before I met him, the worst myopia I’d encountered was one guy at -12 and a woman at -10.  Several opticians he’s been to have never seen myopia as bad as his, although it’s by no means the worst around.

So his reaction is unlikely to be the norm, and even my degree of fussiness about light colour seems fairly unusual.  To people who have tried different coloured light or lenses, are you myopic, and have you found difficulty in tolerating the colour?

Sleep improving again

At last I seem to be out of the patch of mediocre sleep I was having for a while there.  We’re still not sure, but it looks like it was caused by the high-dose multivitamins my specialist has me on, probably the B vitamins in particular.  I’ve halved the dose and am taking them in the mornings only, plus using coloured light bulbs and herbal sleep aids in the evenings again, and my sleep is back to being bang on time and good quality.  I was up and quilting at 7.30 am yesterday!

I’ll probably continue the herbal sleep aids for a few months, just to get the message through, as advised by a local herbalist.  That said, I haven’t taken any supplements at all for the last few days, and I’m still sleeping well.  The current dose is either one Valerian Formula with one capsule of valerian alone, or three capsules total of any combination of valerian and passiflora (my next bottle of Valerian Formula is late in the post).  This is slightly higher than what I was taking before, but the herbalist said it’s still absolutely fine to use for a few months.  Dr Myhill recommends anything up to four 400mg capsules of valerian where I’m taking two, for context.

Using the coloured light bulbs every night is something that didn’t seem necessary when I was having very good sleep for five months, but does make a difference now, although I don’t know if that was just while I was on those multivitamins.  My coloured-light-hating partner is away on holiday for twelve days, so I’ve taken the opportunity to spend this time under low coloured light in the evenings.  I’m still fiddling with how I set up the coloured lightso that it is as pleasant as possible, gives the right amount of light for pottering about my bedroom, and doesn’t allow (much) blue light to creep in around the edges of my orange glasses.  Previously I had the salt lamp by my bed with a pink bulb in it, which produced a sort of salmon-coloured light.

I still haven’t got around to constructing a DIY spectroscope with a DVD and cereal box, as advised by my kind readers here, but I’ve taken the tip to put a DVD by the light source to see if any blue reflects off it.  As expected, the salt lamp produces a little blue light with an ordinary bulb inside it, but no blue light with a coloured bulb.  The yellow bulbs in the hall which I use to light the bathroom are fine too.

I wasn’t mad on the salt lamp by the bed, it was rather dim and too pinkish for my taste.  So I’ve bought a small opal glass pebble lamp and put a 15W pygmy amber bulb inside for by the bed, and put the salt lamp back in the bookcase opposite the bed with its original 15W uncoloured bulb.  The salt lamp produces a pleasant peachy-golden glow which I actually put on about an hour before the orange glasses go on, and I am careful to make sure that I don’t get so close to it that the stray light will get around the edges of my orange glasses.  It looks much nicer with an uncoloured bulb in there, as you can see the variations in colour produced by the salt which was most of the point of getting that lamp in the first place, whereas the coloured bulbs masked that.  The pebble lamp by the bed is perfectly safe even without the orange glasses, and provides substantially more light than the salt lamp did when it had the pink bulb in.  It’s enough that I can pootle around the bedroom and just about see the laptop keyboard well enough to type, but dim enough to be thoroughly relaxing.  I never really used to like those amber bulbs, I always preferred the yellow ones, but it seems that my tastes have changed as I now find it quite a pleasant colour.  We’ll see what my partner thinks when he gets home.

I’m not bothering to put in alternative bulbs in the living room, I’m not in there much in the late evening and I can just turn the overhead lights down low with a dimmer switch.  I’m hoping to move flat this year and I’ll set up a better arrangement then.  I’ve got my eye on those LED bulbs which offer sixteen colours and have a remote control, but right now they’re not very bright, mostly don’t have a warm white, and very expensive, so I’ll wait until I’m settled in the new flat and hopefully by then LED lighting will have improved.

I’m also not bothering to put the orange filter back on the laptop screen, as the orange specs and amber lighting seem to be enough.  I think that the amount of stray blue light that gets to my eyes round the edges of the glasses from the laptop screen is too minimal for me to need to worry about it, especially since I’m generally watching films on the laptop by that point in the evening and it’s thus a good six feet away from me.

Siestas continue to be odd.  I’m still not sure whether I really need them or not.  I’m taking them perhaps half the time, when I really can’t keep my eyes open in the afternoons.  It’s easier when I know I’ll be using coloured bulbs that evening, otherwise I’ve had a few nights where it was difficult to get to sleep the night after a siesta, which by now is something unusual for me.  Occasionally the siesta ends up rather longer than planned, say four hours, which again seems to be OK if I use coloured lights that evening and could go either way if I don’t.

As I don’t think I’ve got around to discussing yet, I alter the time when I begin the darkness therapy by twenty minutes each month in a rough reflection of seasonal variation.  For April, the darkness therapy starts at 9.40.  It seems to be suiting me.  The latest it will start is 10.20 in June, and I’m curious to see whether that will be too short a length of time for the darkness therapy, or whether I’ll just adjust.  Certainly this method makes me feel more in synch with when it gets dark outside, even if I’m not following the local sunset hours that closely (I live too far north for that to be wise).

What my sleep’s up to these days

The yellow bulbs in the hall are continuing to work well to light the bathroom, and the salt lamp is now confirmed for staying by the bed with a pink 15W pygmy bulb in it.  I should probably mention that there’s no reason why anyone should get a salt lamp, I just find them pretty myself, and they already filter out a certain amount of blue light (though not all) through being orangey.  It’s odd, the light looks deep pink if you put it on when the room is already lit, and more orange if you put it on when the room is dark.  It’s useful for when I want to sneak out of bed and get dressed when my partner’s still asleep, as it’s not bright or blue enough to wake him up, or as soft background lighting in the late evening.  Most useful of all, the cable has ended up positioned so that the switch is down the side of the bedside cabinet, about as easy to get to from the bed as is humanly possible, which saves fumbling around in the drawer to find the red bike light or similar. By the way, if you do decide that salt lamps are nice and go looking for one, ignore all the nonsensical health claims.  They’re just pretty lamps.

For some reason my sleep’s been a little odd over the last couple of weeks.  It may be because when my partner had a week off, our routines changed slightly.  I set the clock on the dawn simulator so that it would come on an hour later, as he said he wanted a bit of a lie-in but not to end up losing the whole morning.  I was often up and lightboxing before the dawn simulation as my wake-up time seems to be well-programmed, but it seemed to work well for him.  Then we went to bed an hour or so later than usual, which for me is strange as by now you generally can’t keep me up much past midnight however you try.  I’ve also been a lot more tired than usual during the afternoons and evenings, which I am now putting down to the ME/CFIDS having a minor flare.

Now that he’s back at work, I have been wrestling with the problem of my body’s sudden ardent desire to have siestas.  I’ve snapped back into my usual wake-up time with no trouble whatsoever, but I keep getting irresistibly sleepy later in the day.  I’ve tried fighting it for a few days, using the lightbox on a double stint in the morning and/or an extra session after lunch or early afternoon, and putting the little blue LED bulb into a clip-on light (which leaves it fully visible; at 1W it’s not so bright that you can’t look at it comfortably) and putting it by the bed or laptop from 9.30 am to 3 pm.  I’ve known that LED bulb to keep me quite wired at night if used up to 4.30 pm, but it didn’t do a thing for keeping me awake in the afternoons this time.  I wondered about adding a bit of 470nm blue light to my dawn simulation in the hope that it would get the message across to my circadian clock more effectively, and tried setting it for 15 min before and after the start of the dawn simulation.  When it actually came on, it turned out to be much brighter in a dark room than I’d expected, so I immediately turned it off.  I’d still be curious to try a blue or white LED dawn simulator one day.  The only blue one I know of was put together by this guy, and the only white one that’s meant to be any good (there are some cheap ‘n’ nasty things around) is the SRS320 by Morning Sunrise (Sunrise System), which not everyone likes as an overall unit.

I have now given in and realised that my body probably just wants more sleep by now, which can happen from time to time with ME.  I slept 16-20 hours a day the first year I was ill, not that I anticipate going back to that.  But someone on an ME forum did recently tell me that she feels best when she makes herself get about 11 hours’ sleep a day, which she guesses is due to her body’s increased need to do repair work during sleep, so I think trying some extra sleep is worthwhile.  I’m still aiming for my usual bedtime but am not too worried if we end up going to bed an hour later, though I’m occasionally lying awake for a little or waking up an hour before my alarm, something that’s less common for me these days.  The siestas are going OK, they range from 1-3 hours, though I suspect today may have been more like 4.  I originally tried sleeping with the curtains open and then went for closing them so that the room is pretty dark, in the spirit of having a proper sleep.  I think I’ll go back to leaving them open, I don’t want to end up messing up my sleeping pattern by getting my body to think that mid-afternoon is bedtime.  I’ve also gone back to herbal sleep aids at bedtime, since they never do me any harm, I just stopped them because at that point they were redundant.  I may as well get all the sleep I can if my body’s clamouring for it.

So far, my sleep at night is a little more broken as described above, but I no longer have the problem of having to torture myself to stay awake earlier in the day.  My overall energy levels are relatively low at the moment, so I think I made the right call on getting more sleep.  The only snag is that when I don’t remember to turn the phones off for my siesta I get woken several times (this is bringing back how awkward it is to sleep during the day), and when I do turn them off, I forget to turn them back on again!

Update

I’m definitely feeling better with more sleep, at least over the last few days.  I’m taking a fair bit of herbal stuff to knock myself out at night, last night it was one valerian formula, one 400mg valerian, and two 300mg passiflora/100mg chamomile capsules, but I’ve taken that sort of dose before and know that I’m absolutely fine with it, though I probably wouldn’t want to be relying on it long-term.  It’s far safer than temazepam in the short-term, though.  Last night it was mainly because I was concerned that my accidentally long siesta would mess up my treasured new sleep pattern and didn’t want to undo months of work. It took a little longer than my new norm to get to sleep (possibly – it’s really hard to tell), though far less than my old norm, and while I woke up at 7 am, I got back to sleep again.  Having a siesta has meant that I skip the stage of spending the afternoon trying to keep my eyes open, and while I’m still tired and ME-relapsy, I haven’t felt like a dead cat for a few days now.  It seems that I do indeed need this much sleep right now, even if my body has to be cajoled into getting it at the right times.

Dawn simulation: review of the Sunrise System SRS100

The Sunrise System SRS100 is the second dawn simulator that I tried, after I found the Lumie Bodyclock to be too limited.  I like being able to choose exactly what sort of light I have by my bed and where it is positioned, and using a plug-in dawn simulator allowed me to do exactly that.  In fact, it even allowed me to take my partner’s light preferences into consideration.  If you use a multiway plug, you can hook up as many lamps as you like, provided that the total wattage does not exceed 300W (Europe model) or 200W (USA model).  You could light up the entire room on that, if you wished.  It needs to be straightforward lamp that does not include a dimmer function already (so touch lamps are out), and you have to use the right kind of bulb (standard incandescent and dimmable energy-saving halogen are fine; fluorescent, LED, or ordinary halogen won’t do), but apart from that, any lamp will do.  If you want to put in a “special daylight bulb”, which used to mean a “neodymium” incandescent bulb with a lavender coating but now means a dimmable halogen (both are meant to produce a whiter light, tbut he dimmable halogen does a better job and is a lot easier and cheaper to find, not to mention energy-saving), then you can.  I’d suggest using the energy-saving dimmable halogen, not just for those reasons but also because with the best will in the world, dawn simulators are prone to buzzing when standard incandescents are used, and they don’t do this at all with dimmable halogen.

From reading a large number of dawn simulator reviews, while a small number of people are choosy about the exact colour of the light they wake up to, far more are concerned with the brightness.  Reviewers of all-in-one models frequently complain that the light is not bright enough to wake them up (or read by), and very occasionally complain that it’s too bright for them.  The ability to select exactly how long the dawn simulation takes appears to be another key issue.  Nor does this type of dawn simulator ever cause problems with not liking the appearance of the lamp (several brands are frequently slated as producing ugly, cheap-looking lamps), or having to replace the entire unit when the built-in bulb dies (this problem appears to occur only with the Philips Wake-Up Light).  This unit is not going to win any art awards (I’ve yet to see any type of light therapy device which will), but it’s fairly standard-looking for this sort of gadget and is reasonably small and neat at 11.5 x 13 x 7.5 (base)/3 (top) cm.  The picture above is showing it next to a fairly small lamp.

Being able to choose exactly what sort of light you use, where you position it and how long it takes to come on, is a joy, especially if you have a partner and the two of you have slightly different tastes in this department.  I’m perfectly happy to be woken by a fairly strong light after half an hour, but my partner finds it much too bright when he’s still at that stage of waking up.  After some experimentation, we put a stronger bulb on my side of the bed than on his, and set the dawn simulation to take an hour so that we’re getting up while the light is still softer and don’t have to face bright light until we’re more awake.

Dawn simulation is originally intended to be used while asleep, but we’ve somehow ended up using it while we’re dozing and then getting up, as my partner prefers to have several sound alarms starting at the same time that the dawn simulation starts.  It still works: we wake up feeling more refreshed and we find it easier to wake up at the same time every day.  We both find that about fifteen or so minutes into it, we’re not at all keen on this whole morning idea and may even try to hide under the quilt if we’re awake enough, but by the time the light is fully on, we’re up and doing.  I’ve also used dawn simulation in the conventional fashion in the past, when it would feel as if I simply blinked and was peacefully awake, rather than being dragged painfully into consciousness by an alarm clock.

In the new model (more on this below), Morning Sunrise have put in a couple of features which I wasn’t sure about at first but now rather like.  The first is that when you simply turn the lamp on or off, it fades up/down over two seconds instead of coming on instantly.  This took me a while to get used to, but it can be soothing, and it’s mostly useful for when you want to turn the lamp off and then get out of the bedroom without tripping over in the dark.  The other feature is that if you let the dawn simulator come on and don’t do anything to it (I think this only applies when the sound alarm is off, otherwise you have to press a button), the light will stay on for an additional hour, turn off, and the dawn simulator will automatically come on the next day.  This is handy for people who may forget to turn their dawn simulator on every day, and also people who dash out of the house in the morning and can’t remember whether they turned the light off or not.  I presume the hour is to give you time to shower, dress, breakfast and so forth.  I’m often still in my bedroom after that hour, so I just turn the lamp on again using the snooze button.  I’ve also just been reminded that the extra hour is useful as a back-up if you’re not properly woken by the dawn simulation, for example if you snooze for a while after awakening.

This lamp also has a number of other features which I don’t use but other people may find useful.  There’s an optional nightlight which is adjustable, so that you can set it to come on as brightly as you please.  Obviously I’m not keen on nightlights that have any blue light in them as they will suppress melatonin production, but incandescent and dimmable halogen bulbs produce very yellow light when they’re that dim and there won’t be much blue in there, so most people will be happy with this.  (It’s certainly better than some of the nightlights you can buy which produce bluish white light, the last thing they should do.)  There’s a “security” setting that will put the lamp on at random intervals as a burglar-deterrent if you’re away.

The majority of these are features that you’re not going to get with an all-in-one dawn simulator, where you’re lucky if you can change the length of time the sunrise/sunset takes, and the cost of the Sunrise Syste, SRS100 is equivalent to the cheapest end of the all-in-ones, at least the decent models.  (There are a few cheap and nasty things out there, which can generally be spotted because they cost a tenner new on eBay and get diabolical reviews on Amazon.)  To compare to Lumie’s all-in-one range, you have to spend £99.95 with Lumie before you can vary the length of the sunrise/sunset (though they don’t offer 45  or 75 min) and £149.95 before you get seven-day alarm settings, and even then you may find that the lamp is too dim to read by.  On the other hand, the SRS100 doesn’t include sleep sounds, a radio or anything else like that.  Morning Sunrise offers more expensive models with those features if you want them, and come to that they also offer several fully-featured all-in-one models as well.

As with all dawn simulators, there’s an optional back-up sound if light isn’t enough to wake you reliably every single morning.  The sound it makes is absolutely horrible.  It beeps once, then twice, then three times, and I don’t think I’ve ever been able to stand it for longer than that.  Some people prefer to have a good strong sound, even if it’s vile, so that they can guarantee that it will get them up, but personally I’d rather set the alarm on my phone.

The people at Morning Sunrise have gone to quite a lot of trouble to make this dawn simulator customisable.  I originally bought mine several years ago, and eventually it started showing a couple of minor faults.  Morning Sunrise suggested that I send it in for repair at the cost of £15, and that they’d either repair it and upgrade the software, or replace it if it was beyond repair.  They ended up replacing it, and told me that the damage had been caused by a power surge, so I bought a surge protector for my new model.  (I definitely recomend getting a surge protector, they’re cheap and it seems that dawn simulators may be particularly vulnerable to power surges.)  This does mean that I can compare the older and the newer software, and I know that they’ve changed things because of customer requests.  I’ve found their customer service to be excellent.

The snag is that they’re trying to pack a lot into a fairly small unit with only five buttons.  I feel that it’s time that they redesigned the unit slightly to add a couple more buttons and to make the display light up in a sleep-friendly colour (red or amber) rather than the melatonin-suppressing green.  To give an example of how things have changed:

Old model: backlight options were full, dim, or full for a few seconds after pressing a button and then dim afterwards.  This meant that there was an annoying light by your bed at night.  Customers complained about this, so it changed to:

New model: backlight options are the above three plus completely off or full for a few seconds and then off.  I went for the last option, so I no longer have to drape a cardigan over the display at night, but on the other hand I can’t see the display unless there’s a strong light on, and have trouble even then.  I’m looking at it now and I can just about see the time, but I can’t see the date or the little row of symbols at the top that show whether the dawn simulator is on and so forth.

What they should try next: programming it to illuminate the display during the daytime only, either on a timer or by following when the light was on.  I’ve mentioned this to them and they made interested noises.

That is, of course, a very minor quibble.  Complaints are more often about how long it takes to programme the device.  I find it straightforward and intuitive to programme, unlike the GoLite, as you simply cycle through a very long menu.  This does, however, mean that if you just want to change one thing that’s at the end of the menu, it’ll take a while to get there.  Being able to have an individual setting for each day of the week is great, but if you want to change your sunrise times then you will have to go through seven settings to do so, there’s no way to do them all at once.  Shift work would be a nightmare.  When my partner was on holiday this week we decided to have a bit of a lie-in but still get up at a reasonable hour, and instead of resetting all the sunrise times I actually ended up just moving the clock by an hour instead.  I’d really love to see a “holiday” feature where you could simply set all your sunrises to come on an hour later than usual.  This isn’t something that exists in other dawn simulators to the best of my knowledge, I’m just getting greedy because the device has such capabilities already.

The main thing that bothers me, since setting the device is something you only have to do occasionally, is that there aren’t enough buttons and they all mean different things at different times.  The ZZZ button is the main way to turn the lamp on and off, but when the sunrise is in action it’s the snooze button and will turn the light down to dim for seven minutes before turning it back onto full, as opposed to simply turning it off.  I often have to press the buttons twice to get a response, for some reason.  If you want to adjust the intensity of the lamp when it’s not mimicking a sunrise or sunset, you press the + and – buttons.  However, if you just leave the dawn simulation to come on every day automatically without turning it off (a little clock will show on the display), pressing the + button when the lamp is on will begin the sunset.  I also had to ring Morning Sunrise to find out how to get the dawn simulation to come on automatically every day without accidentally disabling it when I turned the light on or off, as it wasn’t in the manual.  The device really needs a couple of extra buttons so that the dawn simulation is controlled completely separately from the main lamp.  There have been quite a few occasions when I accidentally started the dusk simulation or disabled the next day’s dawn simulation.

While I did have to spend a while relearning how to use this dawn simulator after I’d had it replaced, and grumble about a few details, in general I am very happy with it and trust that Morning Sunrise will continue to improve the product so that the snags are ironed out.  They appear to have noticed that green isn’t the best colour for a display judging from their more recent dawn simulators, for example, so hopefully the rest will follow.  Judging from the reviews I’ve read, product quality seems to be consistently good with this company.  This is their most basic model but it’s still feature-packed, and I understand that it’s an extremely popular dawn simulator worldwide.

Morning Sunrise have both UK and EU models, and will ship internationally.  At the moment, it’s cheapest to buy from the manufacturers rather than a reseller.  The same dawn simulators are sold in the US under the brand name BlueMax, although I still haven’t worked out which is the parent company.