Flatiron Blog

Happy scrolling everyone, I hope that if you are seeing this late at night your dark-mode/nightshift is active.
Blue light... why is it so particularly singled out for eye strain and what are the some effects of long term exposure?
Thankfully Blue light is everywhere so it's not something that needs to be thought of as normally damaging. The reason there has been a stink made over one's nightly exposure is due a couple reasons. One argument deals with the harmful effects of the intensity of the screens light compared to the environmental light around us. A car's headlights do not seem bright during the day but once there is major decrease in the environmental light exposure at night the headlights now seem bright. You may be thinking okay great now I know that I should be careful to monitor my brightness at night, big deal... and yeah that is definitely a big part of it but its goes beyond that. The biggest detriment to you that blue light (or more specifically short wavelength light) will cause is a major shift in your circadian rhythm. Blue light exposure activates a compound in your brain call melanopsin. This sounds very similar to something that we all have probably heard of "melatonin", melanopsin inhibits melatonin. So not only does bright light add to eye strain, blue light can actually actively inhibit the sleepy pill you just took, but not in just one way. The melanopsin activation is an 'upstream' event, once it is active it will act in a comparable fashion as caffeine to inhibit not only the sleepy compound melatonin but it continues to positively affect your 'day-time' cycle and does not let your 'night-time' cycle efficiently start. This change causes people to take high amounts of melatonin to sleep. Taking high doses will in the short term, get you to sleep, because you take enough to rapidly kick start your night cycle and force it to the peak phases because it does not need to produce endogenous melatonin. A habit of doing this will effectively and permanently ruin your internal capabilities to regulate your night cycle. The companies that sell melatonin are no better allowing jush high concentrated pills on the market. A proper dose of melatonin is .5 mg... while its sold in 5mg tablets. The reason for taking a small amount is that it will allow you to healthy finish your day cycle while starting the rise to max sleepiness encouraging the production of endogenous melatonin. Pairing this with shutting your screens off before bed will produce major benefits to your sleep health.