F.lux has ruined my life.
Because… it works. Really well. Like, better than I’d anticipated.
Almost.. too much better.
I totally doubted it too. Maybe that’s ‘cause I’m a pessimist. Or maybe it’s because my other bad habits that relate to technology use (like posture, general dependency, and self-diagnosed attention deficit disorder) are so well ingrained, they’re nearly impossible to change. I’ve driven myself so far from my base-level of crazy trying, that I’ve almost 360’d back to “normal”.
Almost.
Then came f.lux. And I have a new bodily brand of psychosis to suffer. When I downloaded the program to my laptop a week and a half ago, and had a couple decent sleeps, I thought “Ah, it’s just power of suggestion”. Even when I remained comparatively tranquil, typing away in the tangerine hued glow of a screen in the evening, I still thought in the back of my brain, “Ah… I just wanna believe it’s working. This will wear off in a couple days.”
Then, something interesting happened this past week.
First, I completely forgot I’d downloaded f.lux. by the time that weekend came because between daylight and darkness (when it does the drastic blue-to-orange screen modification), I’ve taken a break to do my second workout. So, by the time I come back to my work, I don’t notice the disparity. It just matches the light in my room. I’ve gotten used to that surprisingly quickly.
But then, there was the diet/exercise mod that happened. Without me green-lighting it.
Suddenly, I wasn’t running out of my fruit as quickly as I usually do. But I also wasn’t running – literally – as far, as I usually do. And the scale numbers were dropping a bit. I don’t eat a ton to begin with – but I do late-snack on fruit when I probably shouldn’t. So what was going on? Was I depressed? Why was my coveted solitary evening pastime that brought a new meaning to “date night” suddenly so unappealing? Even when I’m extra stressed (“Hi. My name is Ashley. And I eat fruit when I’m anxious”), I still haven’t felt the urge to pour produce into my gullet like shovels full of dirt burying a coffin of melancholy.
Real, jaw drop? I’ve been drinking half the usual amount of coffee in the mornings.
This.is.not.like.me.
I’m kind of starting to feel that thing “balance” I talk about a lot but lack the willpower to actually do myself (#hypocrite). Now, suddenly, I don’t have to try. It’s almost like I don’t have a choice. I hear the somatic signal, and boom. I’m a powerless puppet.
All this cuzza amber light after dark?
That connection didn’t even occur to me until I read a “YOU’LL GET FAT IF YOU MIDNIGHT SNACK!!!” article today. “I’ll bite”, I said (a wasted zing since no one was around to hear my wittiness). And when they got around to circadian rhythm’s involvement in ingestion, and how we evolved to eat past daylight once we had fire and artificial light, I had a “durrr” meets “aha!” moment. Of course I’m not dining way after dark anymore. I don’t have that “It’s DAY! Time to NOM!” blue light radiating out of my screen now like a bat signal telling me to haul ass to the fridge and fight the belly dwelling Joker who’s tricked me into dubbing him “hunger”.
(No wonder, either. Look at that poltergeist ass looking screen behind him…)
So, my update on f.lux is mixed. And I’ll just hafta go with the following as a formal suggestion to you all: if you like feeling balanced and not having to work so hard to achieve said balance, then get f.luxed. But if you’re comforted by your own habitual self-abusive vices and chronic insomnia, f.lux is not for you.
You’d think the answer’s obvious.
But as my identity deconstructs around me, I feel that familiar panic set in.
And I can’t even use food to mitigate it.
#conundrum