The Quick and Simple Guide to Blue Blockers
What you need to know, the gear you need to do the job
Summary
Blue blockers protect our circadian rhythms.
Artificial light at night that is heavily weighted toward the blue and green end of the electromagnetic spectrum, and blue blockers are your best protection against these circadian disruptors.
In my professional medical opinion, blue blockers protect us from everything from dementia to bad decisions to heart attacks.
My preferred brand is VivaRays. Code StillmanMD gets you a 15% discount on VivaRays.
The long version…
What you need to know about blue blockers is that if you want to live a long time, then my professional opinion is that you need a pair. This guide will walk you through what kind to buy and how to use them.
Why do we need blue blockers in our modern world?
In nature, the only significant source of blue and green light is the sun. The most conventional measurement of visible light is lux. Even in the dark of winter, the sun delivers about 50,000 lux of visible light to the earth. In summer, when the sun is most intense, most places in the northern hemisphere get hundreds of thousands of lux in the middle of the day. Forty percent (give or take a few) of this is infrared light. A substantial proportion of the visible light emitted by the sun is red light. Infrared and red light are powerful healing forces for all life on earth.
Blue and green light in sunlight are balanced by red and infrared light. Blue light in particular can cause lipid peroxidation (a kind of damage that contributes to aging and disease) in the skin. Blue light can also degrade vitamins like riboflavin, which could contribute to nutritional deficiencies of these vitamins. What else is blue light doing to us? I wonder. The literature is no where near complete on this topic. I suspect that we will see that excessive blue light, particularly at night, will cause nutritional deficiencies of practically every nutrient we rely upon to live long, happy lives. Infrared light and red light can mitigate the effects of lipid peroxidation, because they trigger the production of melatonin in the skin. My professional opinion is that red and infrared light are the antidotes to the damage caused by blue light.
Blue light isn't all bad. More on this later...
Modern screens from cell phones, televisions, computer monitors, and tablets emit enormous amounts of blue light, very little red light, and zero infrared light. This is a major problem. It means that the blue and green light from these screens is not balanced by the red and infrared that you need to compensate for the oxidative stress that they create.
This is an on-going public health catastrophe that no one in power cares to tell you about, because Big Tech pays for a lot of political campaigns and they exert inordinate control over our scientific research institutions. It's up to independent thinkers like me to tell you the truth about the effects of blue and green light.
Blue light in your eyes is particularly bad. It alters your melatonin production and release, which can wreak havoc on your sleep. Blue light at night is a major public health hazard. It is taking years off of people's lives by accelerating the onset of diseases like cancer, heart disease, dementia, and stroke. It's a tragedy that no one in public health seems to care about.
I am also convinced that artificial blue light is behind rising rates of diseases of the skin and eye. As we have moved indoors, out of natural light, we have seen diseases of the skin and eye increase in both prevalence and severity.
How do you protect your eyes from blue light?
Blue blockers is the short answer. These are glasses made with tinted lenses that block blue light. The tint blocks anywhere from 0-100% of blue light. The lower tints help to reduce eye strain, but they do not completely eliminate the blue light. They are meant for use during the day to reduce eye-strain from modern screens.
You may not need a pair of the lower-tint glasses, because if you use the right software you can modulate the light coming out of your screen to reduce your blue light exposure. If you can't control the light hitting your eyes during the day, then I recommend a pair of slightly tinted blue blockers at the least to protect your eyes.
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After dark, I recommend dark red blue blockers whenever you are around blue light. This includes televisions, tablets, cell phones, and any other screen or light that emits any significant amount of blue light. How do you know if it emits enough blue light to worry about? Look at it and put on your blue blockers (darkly tinted). If the blue light disappears, then those glasses block blue light. The dimmer the light gets, the more blue light the glasses block. Good blue blockers block 100% of the blue light, which means you shouldn't wear them while driving. Green lights will look red and the blue lights on a police vehicle will disappear. This is obviously dangerous.
That boils down to this simple rule - use blue blockers to block excessive blue light at night. The science continues to pile up and the clinical results in my practice are, as far as I am concerned, conclusive. Get an abundance of infrared and red light in your eyes and on your skin. You can use sunlight for this, but you have to be careful not to burn. More on what "prudent" sun exposure means is coming in future blogs... You can use infrared and red light therapy devices, which are the only solution for those of you in cold places (for much of the year, anyway) and for those of you who work indoors during peak daylight hours. More on that in the future... Many of you need herbs or supplements to fix nutritional deficiencies that have been created by years of excessive artificial (blue) light exposure. Another blog post is coming on that in the next several weeks.
Until then, be well.
Dr. Stillman
Great article validating blue light dangers and mitigations… Thx
Thank you for this much needed blog Dr Stillman. I just taught a 2 hour workshop on this subject and how its affecting our sleep in particular. In the process I learned more about about the dissociation of Vitamin A to melanopsin and how detrimental the new product retinal is to our biology and in particular the photoreceptors and the downstream effect of that. Thanks - you have just inspired me to write a blog too - we need to get this message out ASAP. Lastly, I think I found a pair of blue blockers that I can drive in - the day lenses from Viva Rays as they allow some balanced blue in. I will test them out now though - you make a good safety point on the police lights and the need to see those!