Why I Replaced All the Lightbulbs in My House with Red Ones

Sean Knight
3 min readMar 2, 2023

And you should too

Photo by Varvara Grabova on Unsplash

It all started one weekend where we lost power midway through the day.

As the evening crept on I noticed myself feeling sleepier than usual. Heck, I was downright tired. It had been years since I had felt that sleepy without taking Melatonin or some other exogenous supplement or sitting in front of some Netflix show until I can no longer follow the plot.

It made me think of what it’s like when camping. After the sun goes down, sure you have flashlights and phones, but you really can’t escape the fullness of it being nighttime.

So the next thing to do was obvious. After a great night of sleep I went down the research rabbit hole to figure out why artificial lighting seemed to keep me from getting tired.

That’s when I discovered that it’s not actually about the light but instead about the blue and green parts of the light spectrum. And that red light may help promote sleep.

Through this frenzy of research, I found out that red light has less of an impact on your sleep cycles than other types of light because it has a longer wavelength and lower frequency. This means that it produces less energy and is less likely to stimulate the cells in your eyes that regulate your circadian rhythm.

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Sean Knight
Sean Knight

Written by Sean Knight

Physicist doing non-physics things

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