The eyes are probably one of the most complex structures that is found in the human body. Millions of years of evolution gave us a pair of organs rightly known as the windows to the soul. But just because they have been perfectly made, does not mean that they are perfect. If you are reading this article, the chances are you are reading through a screen. You could be in front of a laptop, your phone or a tablet. This has become the new norm for everyone in their day to day lives. In fact, studies show that, on average, a working person’s eyes is exposed to at least six different screens everyday on average. And it could be multiple times more than that if he or she works in IT. We all know that this cannot be healthy for our eyes and if you have stared at a computer screen long enough you would have experienced some of its symptoms. This is what we are going to talk about in this article. We are going to explain what blue light is and, more specifically, how blue light glasses can help you protect your eyes from its effects.
Be it a physics lecture or just the sheer mystery of it, but we all probably know that light is a bit complex. It travels so fast and does not seem to have any mass. Of course, we all know that some of these questions have long been answered. But one thing is for sure, we have not completely understood how it can affect our daily lives, especially our vision. For sure there are a lot of different kinds of light. There is light from natural sources like the sun, the moon and the stars. And more commonly, there are artificial lights coming from bulbs and screens. All of these lights can be perceived in some way but there are also those that are invisible. For example, ultraviolet light which is notorious for causing skin cancer and other diseases is one of them. And the other is x-ray which has a wide range of applications in both technology and medicine.
Learning About Blue Light Glasses Starts With Learning About Blue Light
If the colors red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet are familiar to you, that is because these are the colors of the rainbow and in that order. Color only exists on the atomic scale as a variance in energy levels. The colors listed above are what is called the spectrum of visible colors. This is a specific range of energy levels that the human eye is able to interpret. And perhaps, this is also the reason why they exist beyond the text books and are actually used in day-to-day conversations. Just below the last visible color, red, are called the infra-red lights. These lights are obviously not visible to human sight and they do serve other purposes such as x-rays. Normally, these lights are not harmful as they contain very low energy levels as long as it is just small doses. On the other end of the spectrum exists the ultra-violet lights. And as its name suggests, these lights have energy levels higher than violet light. As mentioned, people are often subject to this light from the sun and artificially such as in tanning beds. These are high energy lights and can be quite damaging, not just to the eyes, but to the skin as well.
Now that we understand that there are different lights, we will now talk about how these lights differ from each other. Basically, the answer to that question is energy level. The higher the energy level, the closer we are to ultraviolet light, and the father we are from it, the closer we get to infrared light. What we will focus more on is the visible light. After all, this is probably the type of light we are most exposed to everyday. Among the visible lights, the one with the highest energy level is blue light which is a range that includes blue, indigo and violet. Knowing that, health experts have come together to find out effects of blue light on the human body, and more particularly to the eyes. And the result is not very settling.
You Need Your Blue Light Glasses Everywhere
As you might expect, blue light is everywhere around us and is not really something that you will be able to avoid. But the good news is it is not really that harmful. In fact blue light is necessary. Blue light, after being absorbed by the eyes, tells the brain that you should now feel awake. This is an evolutionary trait from our ancestors that did most of their work in the light and thus used sunlight as a trigger. The next question is, where do we get the most doses of blue light. And the answer is the sun. The sun should be able to give us all the blue light we will ever need. However, after the turn of the century and the development of artificial lights, we are now subjected to more blue light than we should ever need. This makes us awake in times that we should be sleeping. And this makes it difficult for us to sleep. That is the reason why it is not advisable to have a television set in the bedroom. And why you should put down the cellphone before going to bed. All this excess blue light ruins our sleep cycle and could even cause other serious problems down the line.
Luckily, only a fraction of blue light is present in artificial light. But since we are subjected to it, almost 24/7, we need to put some sort of protection in front of our eyes so that our brains will not be getting the wrong idea. This is how blue light glasses are able to help you. It blocks harmful blue light from your sight so that you will only be taking in the right amount. It is recommended to start wearing blue light glasses as soon as it gets dark so as not to ruin your sleep cycle.