In October we were interviewed at the occasion of mental health day. This interview is now online! For mental health it’s important to have significant light levels indoors since we nowadays spend most of our time indoors at work or at home. We have to compensate the lack of daylight indoors by mimicking daylight with artificial lighting or by working or staying close to a window. The intensity should by at least five times higher than we usually get indoors.
Daylight is the best light. During the time humankind evolved we lived most of that time outdoors. Even our ancestors, only a couple of 100 years ago did! Light can be an enormous help to prevent getting mental issues and seasonal effected diseases. A way to prevent this is by getting enough Good Light each day.
Light triggers your biological clock which makes you feel energetic or sleepy, if you don’t get daylight your biological clock starts running free. After a couple of days without getting sufficient daylight you start having kind of a jet lag feeling which means your quality of sleep is going down and you’re not energetic during the day.
The rods and cones in your eyes take care of the vision. There are also spheres as well, which need blueish white light with a higher intensity (melanopic intensity). The more blue the light contains the more the percentage of the melanopic lux increases.
If you go outdoors you easily get 50.000 to 100.000 lux in your eyes. Research has proven a minimum of 1000 lux is enough, so make sure you get those 1000 lux in your eyes when you are inside during the day and of course at night it should be dark!