Getting proper sleep for artists, programmers and VR developers

Since the last few months I am working a lot on VR development and my screen time per day has been extremely high these days. Also, I realized that gradually my sleep cycle was getting messed up. And I did find a solution to make sure my sleep cycle is at its best and that I get a minimum of 8 hours of sleep. If you are an 3d/2d artist, a programmer or a VR developer, I am sure you will all be working late and will also be using your mobile phones before going to bed.

Lets take an example, assume you read somewhere that 8 hours of sleep is a must, so one day you had to wake up at 6am and in order to wake up at 6am you decide to sleep at 10pm the previous night so that you could get the proper 8 hour sleep, but unfortunately the previous day you end up working until 9pm and from 9pm-10pm you are using your mobile phone , texting, Face booking , watching videos , reading a book and then turn off all things and go to bed at 10pm. You end up turning/tossing around until 11.30 pm and finally sleep with all the dreams that come up in between and finally your alarm rings at 6 am. You hardly slept for 6 hours and you can feel the lazy lethargic morning, you feel very un-productive. If you could have slept at 10:15 instead of 11.30 you could have gained more than an hour of sleep and that would have helped a lot .

I will go over how to optimize that 90 min period of time and make sure you can sleep quickly and be productive the next day. Let me first explain the biology of sleep in simple words, before technology/screens ever came to our life, we just had our sun as the source of light. What was happening back then was, we had sun, we were awake and as soon as darkness set in there were chemicals released from our eyes which gave proper signals to the brain and we were sleeping better back then.

Scientists after doing many trials and tests have found that in the modern day its the white light that we use in all our devices that is causing all the problems, because we are working with our bright monitors and cell phones screens, our eyes think the sun has still not set, it thinks that since the sun is not set let me not secrete those chemicals in your eyes. Because of this, only when you  sleep in complete darkness your eyes will start the process and delay your sleep time. The solution would be to not use your devices 3-4 hours prior to your sleep !

Well this seems like a sad news right ! We all want to be with our gadgets until we sleep right ! I know , I was just kidding , we have a better solution. Scientist have found that its not the whole white light from devices that causes this chemical secretion defect in our eyes but its just the blue color component in these rays , Blue wavelength comes under the higher energy segment of visible light and it is the main component of light when it hits will cause your eyes not to secret the sleep chemicals. I hope you got it !! Now for the solution.

The solution is simple , we have to filter out blue color after sunset , we should not expose our eyes to blue wavelength of light, then immediately after sunset our eyes will start secreting the chemicals that it needs to prepare for sleep and we can easily sleep whenever we want and it would be instantaneous than turning and tossing on the bed.

How do we filter blue light after sunlight ? Just do this . In all your monitors, install this software , https://justgetflux.com/ , this software will remove all the blue components from your screens as soon as the sun sets, and it does it gradually so you wont feel the difference at all. But then if you are doing color sensitive work you need to switch off this software. And then after your work , when you are on to your mobile phone and finishing up your day, use this app for Android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.urbandroid.lux&hl=en , it prevents the screen from emitting the blue wavelength and it works brilliant!! Even though your screens might not look bright and colorful like usual, this will help a lot !!

I hope this helped someone solve their sleep issues and get back to doing some kick-ass stuff !!  Good luck !