How big of a deal is blue light?

By Zavier Campsey

Bluelight is one of the most underexposed “killers” of students and their overall health. While you can’t avoid light, you can avoid a spectrum of light in the range of 440-550 nanometers. This is the green to blue light spectrum which dictates the circadian rhymes of the body. Commonly this is produced by LED and fluorescent bulbs, which have only been in mass production since the early 1900s.

The reason these bulbs are especially problematic with students in the modern day is a majority of work is done on Chromebooks or cellular devices. These are made possible by LED or LCD bulbs that both produce blue light in excessively.

A leader in blue light filtering glasses, Matt Maruca, CEO of Ra Optics, said when he was in high school, “I was daily having headaches, gut issues, allergies, and all these sorts of things.” These problems led him down a rabbit hole of research that discovered the effects of sleep and mitochondria. Not only their effects on the human body but how the current lifestyle humans have created is incredibly destructive to mitochondria and the circadian rhythm.

The genetic reasoning behind it is “in the sun, blue is a large component of the light and it controls a number of our biologic processes, primarily the timing of our circadian rhythm.” This means that whenever you see the sun, due to evolution, your body will say it’s time to be awake, and when your body senses its night, it will tell you to sleep. What’s special about this cycle is that when you’re exposed to blue light, it activates this same circadian rhythm. Meaning, that when you open your phone after sunset, your body reacts thinking it’s daytime again, ruining your ability to efficiently fall asleep.

The reason this problem is so under-researched and unbeknownst to most highschoolers, is explained well in an analogy by Maruca as, “‘Okay, well, I’m putting in premium gas, why isn’t my engine working better?’ The issue of course is that the engine itself might have a worn-out spark plug. But if you’re looking only at the gas you wouldn’t notice or realize that you actually have to take the car to the mechanic and get the engine fixed.”

This means that if you had headaches, allergies, and other ailments, you’d think it was naturally occurring. But the reality could very well be that your mitochondria are breaking down. Or that your circadian rhythm is out of whack and your sleep quality is poor.

This even affects people who are colorblind because as Maruca explains, “all humans have this pigment in our eye called melanopsin, which is the blue light photosensitive pigment, which basically transmits those electrical signals specifically from blue light directly to that part of the brain.” The basic meaning of this is that this isn’t as much on a level of seeing the color blue, but it just reaches your eye at all as your brain processes the color no matter what, affecting the circadian rhythm throughout. In most instances you need to wear blue light blocking glasses, have blue light-free bulbs, or anything along those lines to truly protect yourself after the sun has set.

When it comes to blue blockers you traditionally have day and night blockers. Night blockers are used to block 440-550 nanometers of light which is all light that influences circadian rhythms. It needs to have an orange tint or it won’t be able to truly block out the light.

Blue light can ruin your body's natural functions and rhythms, destroy the powerhouse, or ‘engine’ of your cells. This causes all sorts of illness, as well as common maladies, choked up to a bad day, such as headaches.