Most of the time when you ask people which color they like most, they would answer Blue or light blue with out having any clue whatsoever why they like it.
After comparing the effects that caffeine and blue light have on the brain, researchers at Department of Health Sciences, Mid Sweden University, found similarities. During the study people who were exposed to blue spectrum light showed better results compared to coffee lovers in terms of concentration. Blue light can have a positive effect on cognition - the study authors noted.
Blue light is able to activate the biological functions of the body without causing harmful effects on living tissue. Therefore, it is widely used in medicine. Doctors from the clinic at the University of Heidelberg, for example, developed a medical patch that emits blue light.
Research also suggests that blue light can help improve memory, attention and human response. With it, you can also fight bad breath by killing harmful bacteria in saliva with a sufficient exposure of the blue spectrum lamp for two minutes.
Another study showed that the effect of blue light comes on after only 50 seconds of exposure.
This was just the tip of iceberg . Before i talk about how blue light effects us lets me tell you something about Circadian rhythms.Even when we're not at work, we're on the clock, our biological clock, that is Circadian rhythms.
Circadian rhythms may be referred to as biological clocks of the body. These are roughly 24-hour cycles of physical, mental and behavioral changes in human and other organisms too but here we would discuss human only. Circadian rhythms determine sleep patterns, contribute to jet lag specially in people who works in shifts with a very disturbed routines and are responsible for the wobbly feeling one may experience after waking up ahead of time for daylight saving. Research by the National Institutes of Health concluded that circadian rhythms also influence hormone production, hunger, cell regeneration and body temperature and are associated with obesity, depression and seasonal affective disorder.
This means if our circadian rhythms are disrupted we may be in a hell of a problem because Now researchers are finding increasingly that an out-of-phase circadian rhythm is a health hazard. “Maintaining synchronized circadian rhythms is important to health and well-being,” says Dieter Kunz, director of the Sleep Research and Clinical Chronobiology Research Group at Charité–Universitätsmedizin Berlin.
New evidence even concludes that a disruption in circadian rhythms may even lead to various cancers, diabetes, obesity, and depression.”
After the fact that Shift workers were known to experience increased morbidity and mortality for a number of diseases, including cardiovascular disorders and cancer, the World Health Organization in 2007 decreed that shift work is a risk factor for breast cancer, and on that basis, in 2009, the Danish government decided to compensate female shift workers with breast cancer.
At the same time, researchers have repeatedly shown that bright white light has the power to alleviate depression and other maladies of mood. An emergent recent literature suggests that blue light may be exceptionally potent for such applications. It could actually reset our circadian rhythms back to normal.
blue light doesn't work solely through ocular stimulation; the shorter wavelengths can penetrate skin—this is how blue light is used to treat neonatal jaundice, in which the infant’s liver is unable to clear bilirubin. Bilirubin builds up in the blood and enters body tissues, making the eyes and skin of the baby appear yellow. Blue light penetrates the skin and converts bilirubin into forms that can dissolve into the blood and be excreted in urine. This way the blue light saves the baby from brain damage, a condition called kernicterous.
Daniel Kripke, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, thinks bright light, particularly blue wavelengths, may also prove useful for treating premenstrual depression and bulimia, and he says there is preliminary evidence it might be useful for anxiety.
Having said all about the benefits of blue light now lets discuss its drawbacks.
Blue light is beneficial if exposure to it is limited during the daytime but it may not be so beneficial at night. In particular, research in recent years has suggested that blue wavelength light is especially harmful to circadian rhythm function. Studies have shown that blue wavelength light has uniquely harmful effects on humans and suppresses melatonin levels more vigorously than other light wavelengths. Unfortunately, many energy-efficient light sources produce high concentrations of blue light. Blue light is emitted by electronic devices, energy-efficient light bulbs, and other common light sources.
Many researchers believe that blue-light blocking - most often in the form of goggles that filter out this particular wavelength of light -- has shown promise, it may actually improve sleep quality.
But the detrimental effects are restricted only to night time exposure . Daytime exposure to blue light can stimulate alertness and help sleep later on. A study of 94 office workers found that daytime exposure to blue light during work hours resulted in improvements both to sleep and to daytime functioning, compared to exposure to white light. Subjects who were exposed to blue light experienced improvements to daytime alertness, mood, and concentration. These subjects also experienced decreases in daytime sleepiness and they slept better at night.
Conclusions
- Limit exposure to artificial light in the hours before bed. The last 1-2 hours before bed should be a time of winding down and preparing for sleep. Decreasing your exposure to light is an important part of this process. You don't have to sit in a pitch-black room, but you should think about beginning to limit your exposure to bright lights, whether from your computer screen or your television. Reading under moderate lamplight is fine. If you're using a tablet to read, bring the screen's brightness level down. Make the last 60 minutes of your bedtime ritual electronics-free -- and keep electronic gadgets and devices out of the bedroom altogether.
- Get light exposure during the day. Daytime exposure to light -- both sunlight and artificial light -- can help strengthen circadian rhythms and boost daytime alertness, leaving you better prepared to sleep when the time comes.
- If you need access to light in the middle of the night, use small nightlights. Rather than switching on hallway or bathroom lights -- and flooding your system with melatonin-suppressing light -- use low-illumination night lights to guide you when you need to get up in the dark.
Thats all , If you believe i might have missed something please don't hesitate to comment below.
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