A couple weeks ago, I mentioned that I was looking at getting myself a pair of amber glasses for wearing at night, to avoid the incursion of blue light into my eyes and shutting off my melatonin production.
Well, I found a pair. I figured that they’d be easy to find at a place like Lowe’s, but I was surprised that they didn’t have any that could be worn with reading glasses. They had a number of pairs that looked like sunglasses and such, but not just plain yellow glasses.
I didn’t want to order a pair online because I 1) wanted to make sure that they would fit over my reading glasses, as reading is my primary activity at night, and 2) I hate returning things, especially via the mail. I wanted to try a pair on and really see just how functional they were going to be!
Luckily, I live in a pretty hippy neighborhood in Columbus, with lots of alternative health stores and the like. And I was walking with my family in our retail area of the ‘hood last weekend and came across Momentum98, a store that I’ve visited before…and realized that I’d seen what they call “Color Therapy glasses” in there in the past.
Click! The light (an amber light, mind you) clicked on in my head.
I told my family that I’d catch up with them in a minute and headed into the store. And I found the glasses! They had them in all sorts of colors, and I picked a pair that seemed pretty amber to me. They may be slightly more orange than yellow, but not horribly so (and though you’ll see yellow ones in the pictures on the link, they didn’t have that color in stock when I was in there).
So I tried them on. And since I keep my reading glasses with me as part of my everyday carry items, I pulled them out and tried them out with the glasses. Not perfect… but pretty darned good. Totally workable until I find something else that may be more elegantly designed.
So here’s my Periscope (note: converted to a YouTube video after the Periscope storage service I used went belly-up) with them from Sunday night, to demonstrate them and to talk about them a bit. Bear with it as I repeat some of the information you read on the Get Back to Sleep post… 🙂
I’ve worn them every night since I got them, and they seem to be working pretty well thus far. As they aren’t wrap-arounds, like shooting glasses or something similar might be, I wonder if too much blue light is getting in via my peripheral vision. I don’ t know how much of a concern that is, as I’m still in the experimental stage.
I seem to be sleeping much more completely and not waking as much in the middle of the night as I had previously. Sunday night was a bit rough – with a 2:00 brief wake-up, but I think that was at the very least partially due to the sprints workout I did Saturday morning with my son and the soreness involved with getting back into that particular workout habit. Other than that, I’ve had uninterrupted sleep and woken up pretty well (given that we’re getting into the time-change time of year).
Now, this is after only a few days, so we’re very much in the experimental phases of this. So I will keep you posted. But so far, it seems to be working pretty well.
And my family isn’t making too much fun of me for wearing the things around the house yet. I’m sure that’s coming soon.
Have you tried amber glasses yet? What other natural sleep aids are you using? Share with us in the comments, and please share this article on Facebook, Twitter, or wherever you can!
