With midterm season in full swing, we are all probably spending more time in front of our computer screens than normal. I don’t know about you, but as a liberal arts major, I spend a good 60 percent of my time reading PDFs on my computer, not to mention all of the writing and emails that take up the rest of my study time. This past year I have found myself squinting at my laptop screen at increasingly later and later hours of the night.
As someone who struggles with chronic headaches and has a hard time maintaining a reasonable sleep schedule, I decided to try out blue-light-blocking glasses and find out if they are worth the hype.
The first thing I did was a good old-fashioned Google search.
Ok, Google: “Do blue-light glasses prevent headaches?”
Making my way through the results the answers seemed to be subjective. Basically there isn’t much science to back up whether or not blue-light glasses are proven to prevent tension headaches or reduce eye-strain but most people who had used them seemed to think they work.
So what even is blue-light? Blue-light is the type of light that we get from the sun and encourages wakefulness in your body. As a result, blue-light glasses are less for preventing for eyestrain and more for preventing your screen-time from interfering with your body’s sleep cycle.
Based on what I learned, I felt pretty confident that dishing out $40 to EyeBuyDirect would in some way help the many problems I was experiencing as a result of required exposure to blue-light at all hours of the day.
Once my glasses finally arrived, I put them to the test. I started out only wearing them at night (about four hours before I planned on going to bed) as an article recommended. In the weeks following, I did seem to be able to fall asleep easier after using my laptop but honestly it might have just been that I was exhausted from doing so much homework.
I have had my blue-light glasses for about four months now. I wear them every time I use my laptop for more than an hour and have personally experienced that they have greatly reduced my headaches. Also, they’re cute, so that’s a plus.
While blue-light-blocking glasses might seem like a gimmick aimed at nervous computer-users, they just might help those reduce pesky headaches, tired eyes, and even become a fashionable part of your wardrobe.