It seems to be common knowledge that exposure to blue light lowers melatonin and reduces sleepiness, and that we can thus sleep better if we wear orange glasses or use programs like Redshift that reduce the amount of blue light emanating from the strange glowing rectangles that follow us around everywhere.
So an idea I had is that maybe wearing blue glasses might increase alertness. I’ve been weirdly fatigued during the day lately, even though I’ve been using melatonin and redshift. But does the /absolute/ magnitude of the blue light matter, or the amount of blue relative to other colours? Blue glasses would mostly have no effect on the absolute amount, but would increase the relative amount. Orange glasses decrease both so considering them isn’t much help.
I tried looking for studies but I have no experience doing that and I only came up with one that actually compares bright ambient light to dim blue light; it found that dim (1 lux) blue light was better for alertness than 2-lux ambient white light.
Thoughts? Anyone better-informed about these things have comments?
Edit: For a sense of a scale: lux measures luminous flux; 50 lux is living-room lights; a candle at 20cm is 10-15 lux; a full moon on a clear night is 0.3 to 1.0 lux. “White light” is actually only about 11% blue light (source), so the 2 lux of white light in the study is 0.2 lux of blue, which is bad because it means that the linked study’s result could be explained either by more absolute or more relative blue light.
So an idea I had is that maybe wearing blue glasses might increase alertness. I’ve been weirdly fatigued during the day lately, even though I’ve been using melatonin and redshift. But does the /absolute/ magnitude of the blue light matter, or the amount of blue relative to other colours? Blue glasses would mostly have no effect on the absolute amount, but would increase the relative amount.
Unless the mechanism which causes our pupils to constrict is itself sensitive exclusively to blue light those blue glasses will increase the absolute amount of blue light that make it into your eyes.
There is light therapy for people who get depressed in the winter. If I don’t misunderstand they are nowadays using “full spectrum” (=white) light, not blue light. That might have something to do with what you are talking about, and in that case it is evidence that it is not just the proportion of blue light that matters.
It seems to be common knowledge that exposure to blue light lowers melatonin and reduces sleepiness, and that we can thus sleep better if we wear orange glasses or use programs like Redshift that reduce the amount of blue light emanating from the strange glowing rectangles that follow us around everywhere.
So an idea I had is that maybe wearing blue glasses might increase alertness. I’ve been weirdly fatigued during the day lately, even though I’ve been using melatonin and redshift. But does the /absolute/ magnitude of the blue light matter, or the amount of blue relative to other colours? Blue glasses would mostly have no effect on the absolute amount, but would increase the relative amount. Orange glasses decrease both so considering them isn’t much help.
I tried looking for studies but I have no experience doing that and I only came up with one that actually compares bright ambient light to dim blue light; it found that dim (1 lux) blue light was better for alertness than 2-lux ambient white light.
Thoughts? Anyone better-informed about these things have comments?
Edit: For a sense of a scale: lux measures luminous flux; 50 lux is living-room lights; a candle at 20cm is 10-15 lux; a full moon on a clear night is 0.3 to 1.0 lux. “White light” is actually only about 11% blue light (source), so the 2 lux of white light in the study is 0.2 lux of blue, which is bad because it means that the linked study’s result could be explained either by more absolute or more relative blue light.
Unless the mechanism which causes our pupils to constrict is itself sensitive exclusively to blue light those blue glasses will increase the absolute amount of blue light that make it into your eyes.
There is light therapy for people who get depressed in the winter. If I don’t misunderstand they are nowadays using “full spectrum” (=white) light, not blue light. That might have something to do with what you are talking about, and in that case it is evidence that it is not just the proportion of blue light that matters.