The Dark Side of Blue Light

My fascination with red and blue light and the effects it has on our health has been something I’ve really been diving into for the last few months, but now more than ever, I have gotten really serious about managing it.

Yes I wear those sexy red glasses after dark, you may have seen me wearing them on my stories. Let me explain why!

I began researching and reading months ago when I came across Dr Jack Kruss on a podcast and instantly was wow-ed by what he was saying, I couldn’t believe I had never herd of this science, it sounded out there but it made sense… he spoke all about rising with the sun and resting with the moonrise, blocking blue light from the home as the sun set at dusk, re-setting your circadian rhythm & sleeping deeper to wake up with more energy.

Its called circadian entrainment.

The physiology of circadian entrainment effects body temperature, hormone fluctuations, immune health and the timing and length of sleep and wakefulness. Its the synchronization or alignment of the internal biological clock we all have embedded within our cells & it goes much further and deeper than this too.

In simple terms, it is the way that our internal clocks are reset to reflect the natural periods of day and night that occur in our environment.

So after hearing about it for months but not really doing anything about it, I started to take it seriously after something VERY interesting happening to us.

When my hubby and I got back from Bali last month, we came home & we noticed a light switch had tripped so we couldn’t turn the lights on at all. On top of that, the electrician couldn’t come out for about 5 days, so we were literally living in darkness! 

For the first few days it was really frustrating, we were living by candlelight and it just makes everything harder to do. Our electrician couldn’t come out for about 4 days so we lived in the dark for what seemed like a lifetime. But then I remembered I had heard some really cool information about how living in darkness and going to sleep when the sun goes down is actually really good for us - so in the dark I jumped on google and I started doing some deeper research about this.

That’s where I started learning all about blue light and how messed up our circadian rhythms have become from living with so much artificial light!

In the end I was actually happy the electrician didn’t come sooner, because I noticed a huge difference in my body clock in just that short amount of time - I was waking up before my alarm went off, and I just felt better during that week! Eventually I learned this was because I was following the natural cycle of light that we are meant to live by.

It’s truly fascinating how much light impacts our health and our hormones, so if this is something you’ve wondered about (or even if you had no idea!) you’re going to love this article.

In our holistic online program, The Healthstyle Emporium, we have thousands of members worldwide and they’re all online. So I feel a huge responsibility to share this message. Because not only do we have over 10,000 people from around the world doing our online program, but we also have a team of about 3000 who work online remotely - so we really need to get this message out there to people who not only work online, but those of us who are spending an increasingly larger amount of time online now because we are stuck at home and indoors.

You’ll see why this is so important in a moment, so let’s get into it.

How can blue light influence our health?

As humans, we have a mechanism in our bodies which allows us to tell the time and secrete specific hormones at the correct time of day - this is called our circadian rhythm, or our body clock.

These hormones and our body clock are all governed by light signals.

To understand why this is how we work, let’s think back to what our ancestors would have done before all this technology took over…

They would have woken up in the morning with the sunrise, when specific hormones would have been released to help them feel alert and awake during the day.

As the day went on, they would have received different messages to the brain according to where the sun was in the sky, guiding their body clock until it got dark. Darkness would then signal a cue to the brain that it’s night time, when sleep hormones would have been released so they could go to sleep. The sun emits red light frequencies and then fire at night, too emits red light frequencies.

There was no blue light other than what. came from the moon, and it was very minimal. Other than that - no iPhones, computers, tv’s and lightbulbs disrupting the light frequencies naturally emitted by the Earth.

Then in the 1800s Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, which released incandescent light. This light was high in red, orange and yellow light which are light frequencies that have minimal disruption to our hormones.

However, in the 1900s these light bulbs were deemed as inefficient and expensive to run, so we solved this problem by creating LED lights.

LED lights stripped out all the red light (the light that didn’t impact our circadian rhythm) and they replaced it with blue light. Unfortunately, blue light negatively impacts our circadian rhythm and our hormones if we are exposed to it at the wrong time of day.

So basically these lights we’re exposed to through the day and night are telling our body it’s midday all the time - blue light!

This means our stress hormones (like cortisol, that keeps us awake and alert) are constantly elevated, and after dark when we come home and watch TV or look at our smartphones, we have these light signals sending messages to our brain that it’s daytime, so we don’t need to produce melatonin and we don’t need to get a good night sleep…

Then this lack of quality sleep makes us feel sluggish the next day, it makes us crave fatty and sugary foods, and it may also contributes to weight gain.

And when you look at the research, poor sleep also increases all-cause mortality rate. So things like heart disease risk increases, risk of illnesses like dementia and alzheimers can increase, weight gain becomes easier, and mental illness like depression, anxiety and general stress become more widespread.

So we are not giving our bodies darkness at the right times to produce the right hormones to function properly - so we can’t sleep well at night, OR feel awake and alert during the day. It’s a lose-lose situation… 

How can we minimise blue light exposure at the wrong times?

The way we can do this is by hacking our light environment.

After dark, blue light is telling our brain that it’s day time - it’s signalling that we don’t need to wind down, we can be alert and awake, and we don’t need to sleep.

To combat this, what we need to do is remove the colours of light that are telling our brain to stay awake after dark, which is mainly blue and green.

Hang with me and I’ll give you all the bio hacks you can start implementing today!!

Part of the problem is this blue light exposure increases dopamine, which activates the reward system in your brain. Dopamine is also released when you eat something that tastes really good, when you have sex, and when you take drugs or drink alcohol. So blue light does the same thing to our brain as these things do.

Most of us are living in perpetual daytime, but our body needs physiological darkness (which is the total absence of blue and green light) to actually grow, repair and restore.

How does the sun influence our health?

Cortisol is the hormone that is like a jump start to our day - we want it to be high in the morning because we want to wake up and be alert. The frequencies of light emitted by the sun, specifically when it’s rising for the first 20 minutes after it rises, actually gives this signal to our brain to release cortisol and start the day.

There are also two other hormones released with the light of the rising sun.  The first is dopamine, which is our reward system that makes us feel like getting up early isn’t so bad.  The second, which is very important, is serotonin - often called the happy neurotransmitter. 

Serotonin actually helps produce melatonin after sunset, which is your sleep hormone. So if you miss the morning sun, even if you wear blue light blocking glasses after dark, you might still not get the best night sleep because you’ve missed a piece of the hormone puzzle that’s necessary for the correct balance in our sleep cycle.

One of my fave Bali sunsets ever!

The artificial LED light that we are exposed to is anywhere where there is an artificial light source - your lights in your house, your car headlights, your TV, street lights, your phone - everything - is sending a message to your brain that it is midday, so you’re missing out on all those hormonal releases that should have happened early on in the day.

In an ideal world you would rise with the sun, sit in it for a minimum for 20 - 30 minutes to soak in that red light from the first rays of the day and then you’d be watching the sunset as well for the last 20 minutes of the day, because then our cortisol levels can be naturally lowered, melatonin can be produced, and we can start to relax as it gets darker and we prepare for sleep.

Then you’d pop your blue light blocking glasses after dark and try to minimise as much light as you can inside the home before bed. Sounds extreme, I know, but after being inside for 5 nights with no light its actually surprising how you adjust, and how much you can get done at night with minimal light from candles. I suprised myself hehe.

I also found that when the lights started to work once the electrician fixed it, I was sensitive to the brightness and found myself doing things in the dark because it felt better… weird I know.

All of this will combine to help sync your circadian rhythm and restore your hormonal balance.

Most of us live with circadian rhythms that are out of balance

It’s so normal for us to live around lights at all times of the day and night, that many people don’t even feel like they have an issue. Then when they actually try these hacks and they regulate their blue light exposure, they’re amazed at the difference in how they feel!

We can see these effects in action particularly in the younger generations who were given phones or exposed to a lot of light-emitting technology at a very young age - like 4 or 5 years old.

By the time they are 16, they have all sorts of problems like anxiety, depression,higher drug use & other conditions, etc. and these problems are occurring at a much higher rate than older generations who didn’t have as much blue light exposure.

Another one of the studies out there showing the negative effects of blue light and out of balance circadian rhythms looked at nurses who are shift workers, who worked at different times of the day and night (this was me - before I left my nursing career!). 

Night shift is the worst thing you can do for your circadian rhythm because you’re staying awake when you should be sleeping - everything is out of balance. I remember I would be so out of whack for ages when I did night shift. I didn’t want to exercise, I didn’t want to eat well, I craved Tim tams & I felt more lethargic than normal - almost like a jet lagged feeling and I just wasn’t a happy person.

I thought it was because I hated night shift. I think that had something to do with it (lol) but now that I have an understanding about what was happening to my hormones… it totally makes sense.

This study confirmed this by finding that the nurses who worked night shifts had around 48% higher all-cause mortality rate compared to those who didn’t work night shifts. Every single one of them had irregular menstrual cycles and many of them reported low mood, feeling anxious, and symptoms of depression.

Wow!

They then did a follow up test of these same nurses working 2-3 weeks of day shifts only, and noticed all of these negative effects disappeared because once they were being exposed to the correct light cycle, their circadian rhythm was restored and their hormones were able to balance again.

So is blue light always bad?

No! Blue light in and of itself isn’t bad. 

What is bad is being exposed to this type of light at the wrong times - that is what’s causing us to become sick.

Blue light is not just in our digital devices and artificial lights, it’s also naturally present in the sun in certain amounts. What the sun has that our digital devices don’t is invisible infrared light, plus visible red light, which is what mitigates the damage blue light causes. Its like the antidote to blue light.

Side note, dont you just think its so amazing how the Earth always provides the natural antidote to its “poison”. I think thats cool!

Whether you’re out in the sun, or in front of artificial light, the blue light in both of these is always going to cause skin damage, and cellular damage to our eyes, but what nature does is the sun also emits infrared and red light frequencies that then restores and repairs that damage naturally.

We’ve artificially taken the blue light that causes damage, but we aren’t combining it with the infrared and red light that restores and repairs - so we are getting all the negative effects of blue light without the opportunity to repair it.

This means we are getting all sorts of issues like accelerated aging, eye strain, headaches, and disrupted sleep.

Want to get your body clock back? Here’s how to do it.

You don’t need to stay away from all screens and artificial light and go back to living like we did in ancient times… I mean even though Dr. Jack Kruss suggests this (yes… he is extreme but he also is so interesting!!).

This isn’t about scaring you or giving you another thing to worry about, trust me I get it, if its not the fluoride in your toothpaste its the poison in the paint on the walls of our homes, its the pesticides on our fruit and the ingredients in our washing detergent thats rubbing on our skin when we wear our clean clothes.

Trust me I get it - it feels like everything killing us. It can be overwhelming.

All I want you to be aware of is what’s happening and how you can actively manage it to improve your health. This is something I’ve only just started to implement and I’m already seeing amazing results and so I just wanted to share it with you incase its something you’re interested in implementing too.

Especially if you are too exposed to lots of blue light like myself.

Here are a few small things we can do to restore our circadian rhythm and balance our hormones without giving up our devices completely:

• Use night shift mode on your phone (so it’s tinted orange), you can also turn up the warmness of your phone in the settings section and even on your TV

• Even better, use the setting where you can actually turn the whole screen red (or download an app for this) google how to do this for your phone, its awesome, Andy & Katie from Blublox told me about this and I use it every day now

• Wear blue light blocking glasses (ones that specifically block 400-500nm light frequency - not all of them do). I have a discount code with BluBlox, its “BTB”, use it on checkout for a discount

• #RISEWITHTHESUN… Join the online tribe, its so cool. Spend at least 5-20 mins watching sun rise, 5-20 mins in the sun at midday, and 5 mins watching sunset at night (5 mins minimum per day but if you can do more is obviously best)

• Download the free app called FLUX on your laptop, it changes colour as the sun sets in your location and it helps to mitigate the blue light coming off your computer screen is you work at night

Now here’s a fun fact: did you know blue light can be absorbed through your skin too?

Something many people don’t realise is that those light receptors in our eyes detecting blue light are actually present in ALL our skin cells!

So you could be doing all these hacks, wearing your blue light blocking glasses, doing everything “right”, but if any of your skin is exposed to the wrong light frequencies after dark, that’s still going to impact your circadian rhythm.

Blue light blocking glasses is a good first start, but if you want to get extreme it’s about managing the light exposure for your entire body.

This is why it’s good to light hack your household! Here are a few ideas:

• You can get red light bulbs - install a few of these around your house for after dark

• Put more salt lamps around your home in particular around your technology and work station and your bed side table so you can soak in it before heading to bed

  Work near natural light during the day where possible

• Turn off digital devices at least an hour before bed

• Have a technology-free bedroom environment

• Cover most of your skin when watching TV (except your face, no need to wear a full balaclava...)
  

The worst thing most people do is roll over in the morning and look at their phone. This tells their body that it’s midday, so their body clock is out of whack from the moment they wake up!

If you must look at your phone, at least use a red filter on it! Thats what I do, its a simple click of a button and my phone turns red!

The first light your eyes need to see in the morning is the sunrise - ideally this would be when the sun is actually coming up, but it can also be half an hour or so after.

If you are someone who gets up before the sun rises while it’s still dark, you want to consider things like using red light bulbs or wearing blue light blocking glasses in the morning to keep your body clock in balance.

Do regular sunglasses play a role in this at all?

Yes - they’d actually be better after dark than many of the computer glasses we see!

But sunglasses are a double edged sword. Wearing them in the evenings would be better than not wearing anything, but wouldn’t be as good as wearing full blue blocking glasses that have a red filter. 

Sunglasses block pretty much every colour of light equally, so they still let in some blue, they still let in some green, and red - they just bring down the level of all the colours.

Andy and Katie from Blueblox mentioned to us in our podcast about how there was an interesting study that came out about 3 months ago that basically showed that by wearing sunglasses during the day, because they filter out a lot of the light from the sun, they’re actually tricking our brain again from a circadian rhythm point of view. 

The light coming through is minimal so they’re signalling to our brain that it’s evening, and ultraviolet light is not present in the evening. So our brain is telling our body that there shouldn’t be any UV light present, even though we are most likely wearing sunglasses while outside under UV light. 

Eeeeeep, so what do I do with these sunnies now 😎?

Then our skin can’t absorb it correctly, and it can’t synthesise it into vitamin D correctly, so we are essentially increasing our risk of melanoma and skin cancer by wearing sunglasses while our skin is exposed to the sun.

Yep!!!???



Of course, I’m not saying throw your sunglasses in the bin and go sunbake for 7 hours a day…

When you have correctly functioning circadian rhythm, you can properly absorb things from the environment a lot more effectively. One of the things that can help you create a correctly functioning circadian rhythm is being out in the morning sun for long periods of time. UV light is also not present at sunrise in the mornings. Try to expose as much of your skin you can too… after all our cells see too!

In the mornings we create something in our body called melanin. People with very low levels of melanin are often very pale because they also have low levels of sun exposure. If people with low melanin are outside for a long time, they will burn and be at high risk of skin cancer. So the sunrise and sunset is a great time for you if you have sensitive skin.

On the other hand, someone who has much darker skin has high levels of melanin. This means they can be outside during the day for long periods of time and handle a larger amount of UV light much better.

The good thing is, if you have a properly functioning circadian rhythm, no matter what latitude you live at, you can build more melanin which protects you against UV light by filtering it.

So if you go outside in the morning for an hour or two and sit in the sun while there’s hardly any UV light, you’ll eventually develop what we call a “base tan” which can help protect your skin from burning when you’re in the sun when the UV is much higher.

If you don’t sit outside in the morning sun and you don’t develop that melanin, then you go straight out into strong UV light later in the day, you’re going to burn much easier.

Buy the right type of blue blocking glasses

At the moment there are many companies jumping on the latest trend and selling blue light blocking glasses that are clear. These aren’t necessarily the best type to buy!

In one way it’s great that many companies are jumping on the wagon and getting the message out there, but often the message is a little bit wrong and it’s missing many aspects of the science behind how blue light really works and how we can actually improve our health.

These are mine from BlueBlox - they work!! They make me sleepy at night and im going to bed earlier & my body is automatically waking up just before the sun pops over the horizon without an alarm clock. Its so weird!!! Use the code BTB on checkout for your discount! x

There is such a lack of correct information out there about blue light at the moment. For example, many people think clear glasses are blue blockers because they are advertised that way…

Clear computer glasses or yellow glasses are not going to completely block the blue light, even though many people think they will.

99% of the glasses on the market don’t even block blue light at all, they actually focus on blocking violet light, which isn’t even emitted by LED backlight or digital devices! Obviously these type of glasses are a complete waste of money, so you do need to be careful which ones you buy.

If you can see the colour blue when you put the glasses on, how could they be blocking blue light?

The reality is, if you actually want to impact your health, you need to wear yellow tinted glasses during the day and red tinted at night - red tinted is the only way to completely block blue light when you need to block it (which is at night).

Clear lenses are computer glasses, so they are targeted to filter the blue light present in computers and digital devices, but it doesn’t block it completely. Clear glasses filter it down so it’s less harsh because you don’t actually need to completely block blue light during the day because you do want to be awake at this time!

This type of blue light filtering helps people who are suffering from headaches, sore eyes, blurred vision, or other digital eye strain. So these glasses are helpful for daytime computer work.

The yellow lens is a step up from this, which is the most optimal blue light blocker because it completely blocks the frequency of light that is needed to be blocked during the day. It targets more than just the digital eye strain - it also helps with anxiety and depression as well.

Then you have the red lens to wear after dark which completely blocks the blue light - after dark you really don’t want any exposure to blue light at all, so wearing the clear glasses after dark, or even the yellow ones, wouldn’t be very helpful.

It’s so important to make sure you’re buying the correct blue blocking glasses and using them at the right times.So make sure you head over to BluBlox, these guys know their stuff and have used science based evidence to manufacture their glasses. They’re the world’s most advanced blue light glasses and they donate a pair of prescription glasses to a NFP with every purchase made!


Now thats cool :)

I hope now you can understand just how much blue light exposure can change our circadian rhythm and mess with our hormones! Again, this is not to scare you but to help you feel empowered to take control of your health where you can.


When I learned all of this I was absolutely mind blown, and it’s definitely changed the way I live my life around digital devices and lights!

Comment below how you plan to put all of this into practice, or if you were already doing something specific to manage your blue light exposure - I’m so interested to hear how others are approaching this!

I hope this has served you today,

Chani x