Is Excessive Blue Light Straining Your Eyes?
Posted on: 28 August 2017
If you've taken steps to protect your eyes from UV rays, it might concern you to know that there is another form of light that can hurt you. Unfortunately, UV protection doesn't do anything to shield your eyes from this form of light. Nonetheless, blue light can potentially strain your eyes and cause long-term damage in excessive quantities. Keep reading to learn more about this form of light and what you can do to protect yourself from it.
All About Blue Light
Blue light is part of the spectrum of visible light that the naked eye can see. While blue light serves a meaningful purpose in allowing you to see the world around you, too much of it can be a bad thing. Blue light has a very short wavelength, which allows it to penetrate deeply within the eye. This means that if you're exposed to too much blue light over a long period of time, it can potentially damage the sensitive parts of your eye responsible for sight, like your retina.
Sources of Blue Light
Blue light is nearly everywhere, as it's produced by the sun and most artificial lights. When you're outdoors, there is the danger of blue light damaging your sight from excessive exposure. However, one of the biggest threats you can face from blue light is that it's produced in large quantities by electronics.
Everything from TV screens to cellphones produce blue light, which constantly seeps into your eyes with use. To make matters worse, most people view smaller electronics very closely, so the light from a cellphone or tablet is effectively concentrated in comparison to simply being outdoors in the sunlight.
How to Filter Excessive Blue Light
There are a few ways that you can shield yourself from blue light. One of the best ways is to install a blue light filter on your phone, computer, and television. This reduces the output of blue light, which helps to protect your eyes from unnecessary vision damage. Blue light filters can be installed as a physical filter that you place over your screen, or in the form of an app that simply turns down the blue light emitted by your electronics.
In addition, you can talk to an optometrist about getting blue light filtering applied to your glasses. This helps to reduce the amount of blue light entering your eyes from all sources, not just your electronics.
Blue light is potentially hazardous to your eyes, but easily countered with technology. If you're concerned about the long-term effects of blue light, talk to an optometrist like Jeffrey C. Fogt, OD to learn more about this phenomenon.
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