If you like your sense of sight, then you should give a fuck about blue light and a blue light filter.
We live in a visual world. There are ocular feasts for our eyes to take in all around us.
From video games, movies, and sports, to the ability to drive, our loved ones’ smiling faces, and a beautiful sunset...some of the absolute best things in life can only be enjoyed with your eyes.
However, the blue light from your phone, tablet, TV, and computer screens could snatch that all away from you.
We now have loads of evidence that blue light causes tremendous damage to your eyes, sleep, mental health, and can even accelerate age-related macular degeneration (blindness).
Imagine never being able to watch your favorite movies. Imagine not being able to drive. Imagine never seeing your childrens’, siblings’, or parents’ faces anymore.
In this article, I’m going to tell you what blue light is, how it damages your eyes, and why you should consider a blue light filter.
At the end, I’ll also share with you the blue light filter that I use every single day.
What is Blue Light?
All of the visible light that you see during the day is made up of a combination, or spectrum, of different colors.
The colors include, from warmer to cold: red, orange, yellow, green, cyan (teal), blue, and violet.
Usually, you don’t see the individual colors of light. Sometimes, you can. After it rains you may see a rainbow in the sky. A rainbow occurs because the water droplets in the air scatter the light and separate out the different colors. This is the same effect that a prism has on light.
Blue light is simply part of the spectrum of visible light.
Why Blue Light is Dangerous
So what makes blue light different and more dangerous?
Well, light is comprised of particles moving in waves. These waves can be longer or shorter.
Think back to when you were a kid holding a garden hose. If you waved your arm in big arcs back and forth you created long waves in the stream of water. But if you just flicked your hand back and forth quickly, you could create smaller, shorter, and faster waves in the stream.
With light, the longer the wave is, the warmer the color will be and the less powerful its energy. The shorter the wave is, the cooler the color will be, and its energy will be much higher.
For example, red light has a wavelength of around 700 nanometers. Blue light, on the other hand, has a wavelength of around 460.
So blue light is much shorter and, therefore, it moves faster and has more energy.
How Blue Light Hurts Your Body and Brain
All that energy that blue light has interacts with your body in unique and powerful ways.
Blue Light and Your Eyeballs
When I was growing up we didn’t give a fuck about blue light. I wasn’t ever big into video games or TV back when I was a kid.
But I remember my friends would play Gameboy and Nintendo for hours and hours. Their eyes almost never left the screen.
Well, now we know that spending all that time staring into a computer screen can cause serious damage to your eyeballs.
Specifically, the blue light from your screen shoot straight into your retina tissues and damages them.
Your retina is the part of your eye that detects light, so it’s pretty fuckin important to your ability to see.
The blue light doesn’t just damage them. We now know that blue light creates so much stress on the retina that the cells die.
This is how blue light accelerates age-related blindness, which is known as macular degeneration.
Blue Light and Sleep
Sleep is perhaps the easiest place that most people can improve and experience the biggest jump in performance in their life.
If you haven’t read my post on overtraining and the importance of sleep for recovering and building muscle, I suggest you check that out.
But sleep isn’t just critical for building new muscle. It’s also the foundation of our mental health.
And one of the most powerful ways you can disrupt your sleep is to expose yourself to blue light.
See, inside every single person is a set of genes that controls when your body gets tired and when you start to wake up.
These genes looks for “signals” on when they should start to make you tired or when they should wake you up.
Guess what one of those signals is?
Light. And because blue light is so energetic, it has the effect on making you extremely alert and attentive.
So if you find yourself not feeling tired, if it’s taking you longer to get to sleep, and if you notice you aren’t feeling rested in the mornings, it could be because you’re bombarding your eyes with blue light well into the evening hours.
How to Combat Blue Light with a Blue Light Filter
So what can you do.
Well, obviously you can limit your screen time before bed. Reducing the amount of blue light you see before bed will prevent those “sleepiness genes’ from activating and keeping you awake.
You could wear some of those blue light blocking glasses. These glasses filter out a large amount of blue light that gets absorbed by your eye.
However, there is another way.
We now know about certain nutrients that actually shield your retinas and protect them from the damage caused by blue light.
Lutemax2020
Lutemax2020 is one of the best blue light filters we know about. It is a marigold extract that contains certain antioxidants that are ONLY found in the retina.
They’re called lutein and zeaxanthin and they protect your eye from macular degeneration.
Your body can’t make these antioxidants so you have to get them from foods like orange bell peppers, fatty fish, and also leafy greens. But even in these healthy foods, the amounts of lutein and zeaxanthin that you’ll get is not enough.
But research has shown that supplementation can help boost levels of these nutrients to be effective.
Theanine and Magnesium
Theanine and magnesium are two other nutrients that help protect your eye and retina from stress and can help you sleep.
But the problem with most theanine and magnesium supplements out there is that they suffer from terrible bioavailability.
Night Owl is a Powerful Blue Light Filter
Night Owl contains clinical doses of LuteMax2020 and a specially developed form of magnesium called Magtein and a unique formulation of theanine called Suntheanine.
All of these ingredients offer better bioavailability so your body can actually get access to these nutrients and use them in your eye where you need them most.
I’m always working late, which is why I use Night Owl every single day. It helps me sleep at night so that my body and brain can recover. I truly believe that Night Owl is crucial to my success because of the incredible benefits I get from it.
Click here to check out Night Owl and learn more about it.
