How does Light Pollution affect our health?

What is Light Pollution ?

Light pollution is when artificial light is excessive, unnecessary, or obtrusive. Lights at homes and businesses, street lamps, neon signs, and billboards are among the things that cause it. While artificial light helps people stay productive after dark, light pollution can have harmful effects on humans, wildlife, the environment, and the economy.

 What are the different forms of Light Pollution?

Sky Glow

This is the bright halo you see above a city at night. This happens when water droplets and other particles in the air scatter the light around.

Light Trespass

This happens when light from a floodlight or streetlamp spills over into another area where it's not wanted or needed.

Glare

This is light that gets into your eyes and causes discomfort.

Over-Illumination

This is the use of light where it's not needed, such as lights left on overnight in an empty office building.

How Does Light Pollution Affect Your Health?

You need darkness to live a healthy life. Before the invention of artificial light, humans were adjusted to a natural 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness.

This cycle is part of your circadian rhythm, your body’s internal "clock" that helps you fall asleep at night and wake up in the morning. Manmade light at night disrupts it. Circadian rhythm disruptions may lead to problems like:

- Sleep disorders, such as insomnia and delayed sleep-phase syndrome 

- Depression

- High blood pressure

- ADHD

- Obesity

- Diabetes

- Heart disease

Too much light at night can also hinder your body’s production of melatonin. Melatonin is a hormone that helps regulate sleep patterns. Too little melatonin has been linked to:

- Sleep disorders

- Headaches

- Fatigue

- Stress

- Anxiety

One study found a link between lower levels of melatonin in the developed world and rising rates of breast cancer.

Another showed that women living in communities that are brightly lit at night had a 73% higher chance of getting breast cancer than those from areas with little outdoor lighting. 

Tips for Helping with Light Pollution

The best way to fix light pollution is to turn on lights only when you truly need them and avoid overly bright lighting. Use shields on outdoor fixtures to keep light out of the sky and direct it where it's needed. Use dimmers, motion sensors, and timers to turn off lights at night, particularly in sleeping areas for children, since lack of sleep can affect child development. Also, avoid using lights with blue tones at night. This worsens glare and sky glow, which may harm your vision, and could make driving unsafe.

Seamlessly monitor unwanted light with the Butterfly

The Butterfly has a light sensor that is always listening, even when not asked to take a reading. The light level that triggers the sensor to wake up, start taking readings, and automatically notify you are pre-programmed based on the application selected, i.e. <50 Lux for food storage or <10 Lux for baby monitoring at night. These defaults are very easily changed using the Conscious app. Once triggered, light levels are measured every minute (again, time can be changed) and notifications are generated if the light is not abated. Additionally, for historical light data, the Butterfly also records light levels every 10 minutes (again, timing can be changed).