🟢Green Light - Black Friday Picks & Free Resources!

Greetings, fellow Distillers! 🤓 

I've barely put out any content in the last month, because I have been doing such an unbelievably deep dive into all things green light and migraines. I was really trying to get a full YouTube video and long article out in time for Black Friday, but I encountered some snags. So instead of sharing it with my wider audience, I'm giving you guys some sneak previews.

If you don't want to read about any of the science or my process and just want some product recommendations that are currently having a big sale, this is my top pick for LED lighting (the cost is actually the best bang for the buck of the light strips that I tested when it comes to price per light intensity–these get super bright!). The smooth nature of the light is also less likely to trigger headaches than standard LEDs. These were a nice budget pick that still give great whites (ie they make colors look natural, as in sunlight, rather than distorted like many LEDs). And I really enjoy the look of this desk lamp. Set it to pure green and it's a good light level to sit and read by for Green Light Therapy.

I tested a whole bunch of products marketed as dedicated green light therapy devices, but none of them turned out to be better than just setting a multicolored light to pure green. And as expected, almost all of the lights set to green had the right wavelength range–because that's just the color that gets manufactured. There's nothing special about 520 nm.

I've been working on releasing an updated green light buying guide, but one of the big categories I've been measuring is the lighting flicker, which is when lights turn on and off too fast for the eye to see, but it's still been linked to things like headaches. If you want to learn more, here’s a sneak peak at the guide I’ve been working on.

The Problem

The best way to use green light to treat migraines is to have the light be dim enough that it doesn't trigger photosensitivity, but still bright enough that enough of the M-cones in your eyes, which process green light, get triggered. But you also want the least amount of triggering of the L and S cones that respond to blue and red light. To complicate things even more, cone sensitivity is highest in the very center of your focused vision. The farther you get out to your periphery, the less you actually see in color.

Meanwhile, it's also been shown that headaches can get triggered by very high visual contrast. Fun fact: it's been shown that when people are currently suffering from a migraine, they're actually better able to pick out contrast, so they perform better on certain types of visual tasks. But this means that if you are trying to use light to treat migraines, you want a very diffuse, steady light rather than anything that is too high contrast. Also, as I mentioned before, if the light flickers invisibly, that can also trigger headaches in some people. So you need to avoid this too.

So then I thought that I could just use the official standards about flicker-free lighting. But it turns out that in the last five years, there's been a lot more research into another type of temporal light artifact called the phased array effect, which is basically a type of flicker that can still negatively trigger the visual system even at frequencies that otherwise used to be thought as safe.

The researchers in the original studies that were looking at green light to treat migraines used a type of LEDs that, when I found the specs for them, it turns out that they used cheap electronic drivers that were highly likely to have the type of flicker that has absolutely been linked to headaches. And yet the treatment still worked. And the bare LED strips that they used definitely had high visual contrast.

Soo I have been working on not just testing more than 30 different types of lights, but also developing formulas for combining all these different metrics and pieces of information to try and figure out what the genuine optimal type of lighting would be for treating migraines, fibromyalgia, headaches and the like using green light therapy.

I thought I was almost there, but then I discovered the light meter I've been using has some weird idiosyncrasies that corrupted a bunch of my data. I'm now in talks with the CEO of the company that manufactures it to try and work things out, but this has stolen the last week away from me, so nothing I had planned for this weekend worked out… Including the release of some really cool merch that I'm excited to share with you guys, but didn't end up having time to fully set up the shop for. Stay tuned for an email next Monday!

As you may be able to tell, I'm in a bit of a frazzled mental state at the moment, hence the rambling. But I felt like sharing a status update with you guys before I go dark for the weekend. I hope you all had an amazing Thanksgiving and are having fun being properly decisive in your Black Friday shopping escapades!