戴橙色眼鏡有助睡眠

Most evenings, before watching late-night comedy or reading emails on his phone, Matt Nicoletti puts on a pair of orange-colored glasses that he bought for $8 off the Internet.

大多數晚上，馬特·尼科萊蒂(Matt Nicoletti)會在看深夜喜劇或用手機閱讀電子郵件之前戴上他花8美元在網上買的橙色眼鏡。

“My girlfriend thinks I look ridiculous in them,” he said. But Mr. Nicoletti, a 30-year-old hospitality consultant in Denver, insists that the glasses, which can block certain wavelengths of light emitted by electronic screens, make it easier to sleep.

30歲的尼科萊蒂是丹佛市的一名酒店預訂專員。“女朋友覺得我戴着這眼鏡的樣子很可笑，”他說。但他堅持認爲，它可以阻擋從電子屏幕發出的特定波長的光線，使人更容易入睡。

Studies have shown that such light, especially from the blue part of the spectrum, inhibits the body’s production of melatonin, a hormone that helps people fall asleep. Options are growing for blocking blue light, though experts caution that few have been adequately tested for effectiveness and the best solution remains avoiding brightly lit electronics at night.

研究表明，此類光線（尤其是光譜的藍色部分）可抑制人體制造褪黑素——一種可幫助人們入睡的激素。衆多阻擋藍光的產品應運而生，但專家警告說，幾乎沒幾種產品的有效性經過了充分的測試驗證，目前的最佳解決方案仍是避免在晚上接受來自電子屏幕的亮光。

A Swiss study of 13 teenage boys, published in August in The Journal of Adolescent Health, showed that when the boys donned orange-tinted glasses, also known as blue blockers and shown to prevent melatonin suppression, in the evening for a week, they felt “significantly more sleepy” than when they wore clear glasses. The boys looked at their screens, as teenagers tend to do, for at least a few hours on average before going to bed, and were monitored in the lab.

8月，《青少年健康期刊》(The Journal of Adolescent Health)上發表了一項來自瑞士的研究。這項涉及13名十幾歲男孩的研究顯示，受試者們在一週期間每晚佩戴橙色眼鏡（又稱爲藍光阻隔眼鏡），可防止褪黑素抑制效應，他們比佩戴透明眼鏡時“明顯更有睡意”。這些男孩在實驗室內接受了監測，他們像普通青少年一樣，每晚睡覺前平均會看上幾個小時的電子屏幕。

Older adults may be less affected by blue light, experts say, since the yellowing of the lens and other changes in the aging eye filter out increasing amounts of blue light. But blue light remains a problem for most people, and an earlier study of 20 adults ages 18 to 68 found that those who wore amber-tinted glasses for three hours before bed improved their sleep quality considerably relative to a control group that wore yellow-tinted lenses, which blocked only ultraviolet light.

專家還說，由於衰老而產生的晶狀體泛黃和其他變化會過濾過量的藍光，老年人或許不那麼受藍光的影響。但對於大多數人來說，藍光依然是個麻煩。此前的一項涉及20名18至68歲成年人的研究發現，睡前三小時佩戴琥珀色眼鏡者的睡眠質量大大優於佩戴只阻隔紫外線的黃色隱形眼鏡的對照組。

Devices such as smartphones and tablets are often illuminated by light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, that tend to emit more blue light than incandescent products. Televisions with LED backlighting are another source of blue light, though because they are typically viewed from much farther away than small screens like phones, they may have less of an effect, said Debra Skene, a professor of neuroendocrinology at the University of Surrey in England.

智能手機和平板電腦等設備通常使用發光二極管，即LED照明，它們發出的藍光往往多於白熾產品。英國南安普頓大學的神經內分泌學教授德布拉·斯基恩(Debra Skene)指出，帶LED背光的電視機是藍光的另一個來源，但它們的觀看距離一般比手機之類的小屏幕遠得多，對人體的影響應該比較小。

LEDs are also increasingly popular as room lights, but “warm white” bulbs, with less blue, tend to be a better choice than “cool white” for nighttime use. The lighting company Philips also makes a bulb, called Hue, that can change the intensity of its component colors via an app, and GE last month announced a reduced-blue LED bulb, meant to be used before bedtime.“Conceptually, anything that will decrease that blue light exposure at night will be helpful,” said Christopher Colwell, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “I know some gamers who swear by those orange-tinted goggles.”

LED在室內照明上也越來越受歡迎，但是如果單以夜間使用而論，藍光較少的“暖白色”燈泡其實是比“冷白色”光源更好的選擇。照明公司飛利浦生產了一種叫做Hue的燈泡，可以通過應用程序改變其發光譜中各種顏色的強度。通用電氣上個月也發佈了一款低藍光LED燈泡，以供睡前使用。“從概念上講，任何可降低夜間藍光暴露的東西都會有所助益，”加州大學洛杉磯分校的神經科學家克里斯托弗·科爾韋爾(Christopher Colwell)說。“我知道有些遊戲玩家對橙色護目鏡推崇備至。”

But orange glasses are not a panacea, Dr. Skene said. “It isn’t just get rid of the blue and everything’s fine,” she said. The intensity of light, in addition to color, can affect sleep, she said, and not all brands of orange-tinted glasses have undergone enough independent testing for their ability to aid sleep.

但橙色眼鏡也不是萬能的，斯基恩博士說。“屏蔽藍光並不能解決所有問題。”除了顏色，光的強度也會影響睡眠，她說，而且，也不是所有品牌的橙色眼鏡都接受過足夠的獨立測試來證實其確實有能力輔助睡眠。

Screens that are not backlit, such as some e-book readers, are preferable to typical brightly lit screens, Dr. Skene said.

斯基恩博士表示，非背光的屏幕——如某些電子書閱讀器——要比常見的明亮屏幕更可取。

Mr. Nicoletti says that the orange glasses he wears, an industrial-safety brand called Uvex, do make some colors, notably blues and greens, harder to distinguish. He also uses applications designed to alter the blue light impact of his devices depending on the time of day: an app called for his computer and Twilight for his mobile phone.

尼科萊蒂說，他的橙色眼鏡出自工業安全品牌優唯斯(Uvex)，在佩戴該眼鏡後，他確實感到難以分辨某些顏色，其中又以藍色和綠色最爲明顯。他還使用了可根據一天中的不同時間改變設備藍光影響的應用：名爲的app用於電腦，名爲Twilight的app用於智能手機。

Other ideas are proliferating. An Ohio company called , for example, offers filters said to block blue light by covering the screens of electronic devices like the iPhone or iPad. Other company products include “low blue” LED lights and orange eyewear.

其他主意也在不斷涌現。例如，俄亥俄州的一家名爲的公司提供了可覆蓋在iPhone或iPad電子設備屏幕上的濾膜來阻擋藍光。其他公司的產品有“低藍光”LED燈和橙色眼鏡等。

During the daytime, experts say, exposure to blue light is good. Best of all is sunlight, which contains many different wavelengths of light. “That’s what our brain knows,” said Kenneth P. Wright Jr., director of the sleep and chronobiology lab at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

專家稱，在白天，藍光暴露還是很不錯的。最好的光源就是陽光，它包含許多不同波長的光。科羅拉多大學波爾得分校睡眠與生物鐘實驗室的主任小肯尼思·P·賴特(Kenneth P. Wright Jr.)博士說：“我們的大腦很清楚這一點。”

A 2013 study he led, published in the journal Current Biology, showed just how different things can be without nighttime lights: After participants had camped in the mountains for a week, their bodies began to prepare for sleep about two hours earlier than normal.

他在2013年領導的一項研究發表在《當代生物學》雜誌(Current Biology)上，該研究顯示了沒有夜間燈光可以造成多大的改變：在山中露營一週後，參與者的身體比平常提前了兩個小時開始準備進入睡眠狀態。

Short of cutting out all evening electronics, experts say, it’s advisable to use a small screen rather than a large one; dim the screen and keep it as far away from the eyes as possible; and reduce the amount of time spent reading the device.

專家建議，如果不能完全避免在晚上使用電子產品，那麼最好使用小屏幕而不是大的；請降低屏幕的亮度，並讓它離眼睛越遠越好；減少從電子設備上閱讀信息的時間。

“If you can look at the iPhone for 10 minutes rather than three hours, that makes a lot of difference,” Dr. Skene said.

“如果你能把看iPhone的時間從三小時減少到10分鐘，可是能帶來很大改變的，”斯基恩博士說。