UVEX Blue Light Blocker Glasses

Improve your sleep and reduce the effects of artificial light on your brain. As seen on Nine News.

• The Product
• The Science
• What the gurus say
• Video

• A bestseller since our segment aired on Nine News :-)  The concentrated blue light from fluorescent and LED lights hurts your sleep! We've posted about this sleep performance issue before here and we've spent months looking for the right solution. Well now we've found the perfect product to eliminate the sleep performance drain from the fluorescent lighting in your house and from staying up late in front of your LED monitor/laptop/ipad. 

  UVEX have produced a set of eyewear designed for use by dental or medical practitioners while working under strong UV lamps. These are orange lensed glasses, but there is more to them than just the orange colour. These glasses use UVEX's patented "Spectrum Control Technology" to filter out specific colours of the light spectrum. From UVEX's technical literature:

  This technology incorporates unique dyes, designed to absorb select wavelengths of radiant energy into the lens.These dyes manipulate light to reduce a spectral hazard or to provide distinctive filtration for specific viewing tasks.

  We're not going to dance around it, these are some pretty stunning looking glasses ;-) but all you need to do is wear them in the comfort (and privacy!) of your own home in the hour or two before bed to get the benefits!
  
  Note regarding other brands of blue blocker glasses: There are blue light blocking glasses around with darker tints. Frankly, they are impractical as you won't be able to do much while wearing them apart from sit still or lay in bed. They are suitable only for day-time use as sunglasses. And the daytime is not the time to be blocking out natural light.

  
  

• So what does that mean for us? Well the light that is going to hurt your sleep performance is any blue light with a wavelength below 520nm  (however 440-480 is a particularly critical range). This eyewear will selectively block out any light less than 550nmwhile allowing 80%-90%  of all other light through! Have a look at the photometrics of the eyewear to see how well it works:
  
  And thats not all! Artificial light hurts your sleep by suppressing melatonin (sleep hormone) production in your brain. Recent studies have linked optimum melatonin production to protection against alzheimers and to strong anabolic effects.
  So thats about it. Wear these for a couple hours before bed and you will eliminate the impacts of blue light on your sleep.
   
  We have the regular version available. The fit over version has been discontinued.
  
  So you can check if they will fit properly, they measure: 7.4cm x 5.8cm x 17.5cm
  
  Yes we've thought of everything :-) While you wait for your new blue blocker glasses to arrive, do yourself a favour and download f.lux to your computer now. It makes you sleep better. 
  
  

  Good News: iPhone and iPad owners now have a blue light filtering solution built in to iOs 9.3 onwards.
  A lot of waking hours went into thinking about sleep. Many studies have shown that exposure to bright blue light in the evening can affect your circadian rhythms and make it harder to fall asleep. Night Shift uses your iOS device’s clock and geolocation to determine when it’s sunset in your location. Then it automatically shifts the colours in your display to the warmer end of the spectrum, making it easier on your eyes. In the morning, it returns the display to its regular settings.
  
  If you prefer, you can still sideload flux onto iPhones: https://justgetflux.com/sideload/ And for Android device users, I recommend downloading the Twilight app

   

  References:
  https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/blue-light-has-a-dark-side
  https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-athletes-way/201306/exposure-natural-light-improves-workplace-performance
  https://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-07-01/artificial-light-leading-to-increase-in-sleep-disorders/4790448
  https://www.optimoz.com.au/blogs/news/7464866-artificial-light-sleep
  https://www.businessinsider.com.au/smartphones-effect-on-vision-and-health-2014-9
  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2831986/ic
• Dave Asprey "Flourescent lights have always caused problems for me. Figuring this out was one of the major breakthroughs in my personal performance"
  
  
  Mark Sisson (Marks Daily Apple) "Of course, whether the room lights are on or off, that blue light from the screen is still there, beaming directly into the eyes of those present and affecting the secretion of their melatonin. And we wonder why we have so much trouble getting good sleep. It’s not just sleep that’s affected (although that’s enough reason to take heed). Disturbing our circadian rhythms with improper light exposure may have a range of other health effects"
  
  ConsumerReports.org "We tested three pairs of glasses in our labs for their ability to block blue light, measuring light intensity at all wavelengths to find out how much each lens absorbed. Of the three, only one—the Uvex (orange tinted),—cut out almost all blue light."
  
  
  Chris Kresser (chriskresser.com) "I’ve had many patients swear by these goggles, and if you can get over the dorkiness factor, you may find they make a big difference in your sleep quality, and perhaps even your general health and wellbeing as well!
  
  Robb Wolf "I don’t know ANYONE (myself included) that is going to bed when the sun goes down. So, we experience a compressed sleeping window and sleep that does not look like our ancestral/phenotypic norm."
  
  

  Choice magazine says these are the most popular and effective sleep aid they tested and probably worth a try given the low price. Choice.com.au