There is a dark side to blue light!
Even though it is environmentally friendly, exposure to blue light can end up affecting your sleep and wake cycles and potentially cause disease. Until we started using artificial lighting, the sun was a vital light source, and people often spent their evenings in relative darkness.
Nevertheless, now most of the planet stays illuminated throughout the evenings, and we take easy access to light pretty much for granted. But the chances are that we already may be paying the price for exposing ourselves to all that light. The blue light emitted from bulbs and smart devices can throw our body’s biological clock (circadian rhythm) out of order at night.
Research also suggests that this may contribute to diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and even cancer.
What do you mean by blue light?
Not all colors have the same type of effect. The blue wavelength, which is proven to be beneficial for us during the day, helps increase our attention, mood, and reaction time. Nevertheless, it seems like exposure to the same blue light after dark can be disruptive.
Our dependency on smart screens and energy-efficient lights has increased our total exposure to blue light wavelength, especially after sunset.
All of us have a slightly different circadian rhythm; the average is 24 and one-quarter hours. The circadian rhythm of individuals who tend to stay up at night is slightly longer. Daylight keeps our internal clock aligned with nature, but blue light can shift the natural flow of this clock, keeping you up at night.
Is blue light exposure bad during nighttime?
Multiple studies suggest a link between exposure to blue light at night and heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. However, we do not have any proof that nighttime exposure to blue light causes these conditions, neither is it clear why the exposure is harmful. There is a strong connection between blue light to sleep, so you must start thinking more about the topic.
Effects of blue light exposure on sleep
Even though all kinds of lights can suppress the secretion of melatonin, blue light tends to do it the best. Professional researchers and their colleagues experimented with comparing the effects of exposure to blue to the green light at the same brightness.
In this excrement, they noticed that blue light was twice as fast at suppressing melatonin as green. Moreover, blue light was better at shifting circadian rhythms as well (3 hours for green light VS 1.5 hours for blue light)
In another study done by researchers from the University of Toronto, experts compared the level of melatonin of individuals exposed to bright indoor light with blue light glasses to people exposed to normal dim light without any glasses.
They noticed that the hormone levels were almost the same in both groups, strengthening the original hypothesis that blue light is a suppressor of melatonin.
This experiment also proves that night owls could protect themselves from exposure to blue light by wearing blue-light-blocking glasses.
