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- Welcome back friends to the Bob and Brad podcast
produced by Bob and Brad,
the two most famous physical therapists on the internet.
I am Bob and exactly one half of the Bob and Brad team.
And my guest today is Dr. Joseph Allen an optometrist
from Minnesota, by the way,
and he has a great YouTube channel called Doctor Eye Health.
We'll talk about that,
we'll talk about his background,
but he's got a lot of great advice for you.
If you have one or two eyes, I would check it out.
Thanks for watching.
If you have trouble sleeping,
do you need blue light glasses?
We actually had someone on our program
who talked about light.
So actually my daughter got some blue light glasses,
and it helped her sleep immensely.
- Yeah. - It's amazing.
- In the blue light world,
there's a lot of blue light glasses.
And maybe you've seen advertisements on this either online
or maybe you've heard your doctor talk about it.
There are three major discussions about blue light
in the eye care world.
And one that has the most scientific validity to it,
is the effect of sleep cycles.
The retina has a certain cell in it.
I wanna say,
it's a very fancy term,
but it's an intrinsically, like activated photoreceptor,
a ganglion cell.
This is more
sensitive to light
in the blue light zone,
but this receptor doesn't necessarily give you eyesight.
It speaks to other parts of the brain
primarily on your sleep-wake cycle.
So if you are somebody
who is constantly being exposed to blue light,
whether it be natural from the sunlight
or artificial from your computer screen,
from the bright LED lights in your home or your office.
Especially after the sun goes down,
cause for how many years our species
was used to seeing sunlight,
and then the sun went down,
and that tells your brain to say,
"hey, sun's light is not out,
you need to make melatonin,
you need to get ready for bed,
you need to sleep."
And now you're just staring
at these screens all night. (laughing)
You're telling your brain, "no, the sun is still out.
The sun is still out."
And so your brain's not getting that trigger
to start producing melatonin the right way.
And they have studies on that.
They have been able to show that artificial blue light
has the ability to reduce and delay
melatonin production into the evening.
I personally always try to advocate
you know, the impossible,
which is try to shut off the screens in the evening,
you know, put away your phone, maybe not stare at it.
- And that includes TV, right?
- Especially the newer screens, you know,
our computer screens, TV screens,
they're all made of the same thing now.
They're all LED plasma screens.
So that's the challenge is that, you know,
we're still getting that dose of some blue light exposure,
and most people's indoor lighting
is now switching to high efficient LED bulbs
which do have even more blue light exposure than emittance,
than a lot of standard older kind of incandescent lights.
So, the big thing is number one is prevention,
is always trying to be mindful, reduce screen time,
maybe dim the lights,
switch your indoor lightings
to more of the yellow filter lights in the evening.
And there's some lights that do that.
That you can able to switch it from being more of a blue,
vibrant, indoor lighting during the day.
And then the evening,
they kind of dim to kind of the romantic mode.
If you've ever been in a restaurant
where it's kind of yellow and a little bit dimer.
But then there's blue light glasses,
and blue light filter glasses,
blue light blocking glasses.
There's all these different terms for them.
These lenses can filter out blue light to some extent.
Most are not a hundred percent blue light
because there is a beneficial aspect to blue light,
it wakes you up in the morning and it makes you more alert.
So, there isn't
a strong consensus
in the medical community yet on the proper amount
of blue light exposure you want
in the morning versus the evening.
But whether it be a strong placebo effect or not,
a lot of people do claim
that the blue light glasses help them,
especially for their sleep
and even eye strain to some degree.
- So my daughter also uses red bulbs, yeah.
She's got the glasses and some red bulbs that
- I've heard about that.
Yeah, there's some different research
in just switching out the light bulbs
and being better for their sleep
and their sleep quality and sleep is such a big role.
- Yeah, just in the evening.
And maybe it is again a placebo, like you said,
but it's working right now, (Joseph laughing)
so we're happy. - Yeah.
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