So the main claim presented here is that reducing blue reduces total "light" (lumens? watts?) by 50% (totally believable), and that reduction in light is all that matters for sleep?
That seems reasonable. The pseudoscience wankery that the fad has brought bothers me a lot too.
... but I'm not sure that's much of an argument against blue light filters, aside from color complaints. That seems to support that it's Useful and Good and is Achieving Its Intended Goal. It's reducing total luminance, because people prefer it over reducing screen brightness overall. I sure as heck do anyway (as night shift modes, they're a more comprehensive option than dark mode), though I think I'll experiment with just reducing brightness a bit.
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For melatonin in particular, fully agreed. The recent trend of "can't even get <5mg in stores, and >10mg is appearing regularly" in the USA is mind-boggling to me. AFAICT it's exclusively because it's a "supplement" and therefore practically unregulated, and these companies don't give a shit about anyone they harm, just profit.
Start with something like https://a.co/d/0dISg7oa (0.3mg, this is what I personally use) and go up from there, slowly.
No, in the OP (after an unclear intro that confuseed many readers), there is a graph that shows blue wavelength intensity is important, but software light filters don't filter a lot of it, and the effect is cancelled by increasing overall brightness.
If software filters are reducing total light by 50% while only affecting blue-ish tones, and that's a total light level comparable to multiple brightness steps on a Mac... tbh I think it's reducing it quite a lot. Many I see using them (myself included) don't tweak brightness when enabling it, and many (all?) systems don't adjust their brightness to match the perceived change from a software filter (on my Linux machines in particular I have never seen this happen, don't know about Macs though).
Half is not a lot, sure, but their ultimate suggestion is to do the same ~half change:
>You can decrease the amount of light coming from your screen by more than half simply by dimming the screen by several notches.
which is definitely significantly more than I see people doing voluntarily in the hundreds of millions.
Do they have any evidence that people are raising system brightness to match the 50% loss from the filter? If not, it still seems like a rather significant mark in their favor. Perhaps not sufficient to meet the goals (they seem to be recommending a larger change, but aren't specific), but I see no claim that a lesser decrease in light is worse.
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Late edit: on second thought... let's go through this more rigorously. For both myself and any other readers, because I want to make sure I'm following it accurately too.
The main explicit points in this article are, in order:
- night shift does not help with sleep (the main claim)
- blue light is not special, in particular because the "[most] sensitive to blue" research is mis-quoted to mean "blue is bad", but it's actually sensitive to blue and green (seems very well supported)
- night shift reduces blue and green by about half (tested themselves)
- half of absolute is not a lot because vision and a lot of the related biology is logarithmic (100% agreed)
- halving light affects 25%-50% of melatonin levels (linked research)
- many people use Night Shift (100% agreed, and they have decent data to back it up)
- dark mode is better than night shift (>90% vs ~50%, implied leaning on the linked research earlier. agreed, seems straightforward)
- dimming your screen by several steps is the same or better than night shift (as it decreases brightness more, same reasoning as dark mode. agreed.)
That still sounds rather in favor of Night Shift. It's targeting the correct color range (NOT the pseudoscience blathering of just blue blue blue), it has a moderate affect on melatonin levels at the light level changes it creates, and it's used by a huge amount of the population.
Nowhere in there that I can see is anything to back up "Night Shift does not work". Only "it seems to be doing things right, it just isn't quite enough on its own" and "ARGH it's not just blue light STOP PROMOTING FAD PSEUDOSCIENCE". That seems... fine? Most things are not silver bullets.
So buy 5mg, and split the tablet in half.
that'd give you 2.5mg, which is still almost 10x more than what I linked.
it's possible to split and separate them enough of course, but beyond "roughly half" it gets rather difficult. I've considered getting the liquid ones and a micro-dropper for smaller doses (if they'd even be small enough, many combinations are not), but 0.3mg pills are rather convenient and worth the small amount of money for me.
Melatonin pills seem to have extremely bad quality control:
"Melatonin content varied from an egregious −83% to +478% of labeled melatonin and 70% had melatonin concentration ≤ 10% of what was claimed. Worse yet, the content of melatonin between lots of the same product varied by as much as 465%.
[...]
The last disturbing finding was more than a quarter of melatonin products contained serotonin, some at potentially significant doses."
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5263069/
"In products that contained melatonin, the actual quantity of melatonin ranged from 74% to 347% of the labeled quantity. Twenty-two of 25 products (88%) were inaccurately labeled, and only 3 products (12%) contained a quantity of melatonin that was within ±10% of the declared quantity. [...] Serotonin was not detected in any product."
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2804077
"Half of the products tested met the label’s claim for melatonin, which means they fell between 76 and 126 percent of the claimed amount. Of the products tested, 20 had between 0 and 76 percent of the labeled content, and 35 had between 126 and 667 percent."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2025/06/25/melatonin...
> Melatonin pills seem to have extremely bad quality control:
Melatonin is treated as a dietary supplement in the US rather than a drug, and this seems to be a widespread problem with supplements, given the incredibly lax regulatory regime.
One more relevant study, but on the health effects of long term melatonin use:
https://newsroom.heart.org/news/long-term-use-of-melatonin-s...
"The main analysis found:
* Among adults with insomnia, those whose electronic health records indicated long-term melatonin use (12 months or more) had about a 90% higher chance of incident heart failure over 5 years compared with matched non-users (4.6% vs. 2.7%, respectively). * There was a similar result (82% higher) when researchers analyzed people who had at least 2 melatonin prescriptions filled at least 90 days apart. (Melatonin is only available by prescription in the United Kingdom.)
A secondary analysis found:
* Participants taking melatonin were nearly 3.5 times as likely to be hospitalized for heart failure when compared to those not taking melatonin (19.0% vs. 6.6%, respectively). * Participants in the melatonin group were nearly twice as likely to die from any cause than those in the non-melatonin group (7.8% vs. 4.3%, respectively) over the 5-year period."
However they were not able to control for severity of the insomnia and used dosage, because that data weren't in the dataset.
Oops, missed the decimal position!
Some research indicates people over 50 (includes me) achieve best results at 0.3 microgram dosage, which is 1,000 lower(!). Higher dosages reduce the effect.
You might take a quick sec to look into the data. You can buy 5mcg on Amazon, although 5 mg is more common (and 10mg, and ...).
after an initial "... is that a misquote too? sounds super low" I decided to hunt around. I haven't seen anything on that low of a dose... but doing the math, it does seem to make some sense I suppose. a rough check of the total amount of melatonin in your blood at night implies something like 0.5mcg at peak (peak concentration at ~100pg/ml times 5L of blood). lots more is produced in a night because it has a short half-life, but yea, blood concentration is lower than I remembered.
what I also haven't seen though is anything covering how well it's absorbed through your digestive system. 0.3mcg intravenously I can certainly see being effective, but orally? sublingually? not sure. but you've definitely got me interested in looking more :)
(initial results: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melatonin_as_a_medication_and_... implies it varies quite a lot, but I'm seeing it centering around 15%-ish many places. so you might want like 3mcg to hit normal levels? and https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5405617/ is implying 1-5mg -> 10x-100x normal concentration peak, so that does hit the right ballpark reasonably well... I guess I'm going to start experimenting with even smaller doses!)
I'm not finding any 5mcg on amazon tbh. Likely in no small part because its search is trash nowadays. Mind sharing a link?