Does Blue Light Affect Your Health?
Blue light before bed can make it difficult to sleep, and the screens of phones, computers, and TVs emit a lot of blue light. This is all true. But if you’re focusing on blue light as a major issue affecting your sleep or eye health, it’s time to take a step back and take a little look at the situation.
Optometry professor Philip Juhas wrote in The Conversation that blue light is not exclusively a technological evil. It is part of the sunlight, and your eyes are constantly exposed to it. Are you okay.
Studies in mice have shown that blue light can damage eyes, but mice are nocturnal creatures whose eyes are different from ours. The pigments and lenses in our eyes actually block blue light quite well – so in a sense, we already have built-in protection against blue.
However, adding extra protection is unlikely to help . You can buy glasses and screen filters that block blue light, but Juhas notes that this is probably a waste of money:
the products my patients ask about do not block a lot of blue light. For example, the leading blue-blocking anti-reflective coating only blocks about 15% of the blue light emitted from screens.
You can achieve the same reduction by simply holding the phone an inch from your face. Give it a try now and see if you can tell the difference. Not? It shouldn’t surprise you, then, that a recent meta-analysis concluded that blue-blocking lenses and coatings did not significantly affect sleep quality, computer comfort, or retinal health.
The American Academy of Ophthalmology also discourages blue-blocking products . Instead, if your eye health or your ability to fall asleep is concerned, you already know what to do:
- Remove screens before bed. Read a book or find something to do.
- While you are using the screens, take a 20-second break every 20 minutes to look at something 20 feet away (the “20-20-20” rule).
- If you have dry eyes when you look at screens for a long time, use eye drops labeled ” artificial tears” .