Light Pollution's Impact on Mental Health

A recent study showed that 9 out of 10 teenagers are chronically sleep deprived. Sleep Foundation reckoned 87% percent of teenagers got less than minimum sleep time. Recent data reveals that continuously being surrounded by lights might actually lead to less nap time. The modern teenager is in a unique pickle then. They're facing the storm of messy biological problems, chaotic social circles and stressful academics all while their brain is barely functional. 

How lightbulbs become a culprit 

DNA is dynamic, and controls everything about you from funky fingerprints, making cilantro taste like soap, determining how dense your bones are and if your hair is curly or not. It also controls the fact that your body is not designed to take the five hours of social media in artificially lit environments teenagers throw at it, which is why light pollution causes you to be wide awake. This is due to the circadian rhythm - simplifying a lot, it is a weird twenty-hour clock in your cell's section called the SCN which affects various things including alertness all determined by the light around you. 

All animals have a circadian rhythm - it's an evolutionary gimmick and research on fish, birds, reptiles and insects shows that breeding, foraging and cognitive cycles were deeply affected due to light pollution. It's an obvious conclusion that teen patterns are negatively affected and this was confirmed once blood samples were studied. People exposed to light in some form had blood checked revealing dramatically lower melatonin (the sleep chemical!) as per NIH, USA. It's like an invisible stimulant that disrupts your body's natural sleep signals. Even a simple table lamp can suppress your sleep times dramatically. Exposure for more than one hour reduces melatonin levels by more than 51%. Modern phones and infrastructure primarily emit blue light that is of a shorter wave length - simply put it is more harmful to the brain tricking its complex engineering into thinking during the daytime.

The Health Cascade 

For millions of years, humans evolved with natural light cycles, but modern artificial lighting disrupts this ancient biological programming. Stone age people knew this which is likely why they kept their lightbulbs off. So much for modern science. 

What the stone age people also knew was that the reason you might be sleeping after 11 everyday is that your hormones are made haywire by light pollution, keeping you physiologically yearning to stay awake. A messed up circadian rhythm leads to obesity, migraines, depression and suicidal thoughts. Reportedly, those with a messed up circadian rhythm also exercised less and were to participate in substance abuse. Cancer is another problem that might have a direct connection with sleeping less according to Frontiers. This is fact checked with many sources like NCBI and PubMed - it's true. 

The environment around you may also be becoming duller. Birds, mammals and aquatic wildlife stay awake when there are lights around. If you hear dogs barking, birds raving or bikers going crazy at night, the street lights might be to blame. Animals like these simply cannot sleep due to stress and reproductive hormones being actively produced. Factors like pollination might be affected which leads to food chain disruptions and a less colorful world to look at. 

This is a big issue and it's shocking why WHO has not classified it as a crisis yet despite the fact that 4 in 5 people are critically affected. You're doing 5 hours on social media surrounded by tube lights, something your body is strictly against. But surprisingly, my close friends might be resistant to this crisis. In a survey I conducted out of curiosity of ten people simply asking them how much light pollution impacted them, they seemed to not notice the effects of light pollution to a very high degree. While this is just a small informal survey, it suggests many teens may not realize how light pollution affects them. 

This might be because light pollution affecting sleep is a relatively new subject. In fact for most of human history, light bulbs have not even existed and data has been properly documented about the same only in the past thirty years or so. It's too early to make concrete predictions about just how relevant the impacts are. But why wait for the research to tell you that you're going to die sooner than you thought? You could nip the flower at its bud.

All you might have to do is turn on blue light filters on your devices, participate in a few dark sky initiatives and turn off very bright light sources like tube lights. While this isn't a foolproof solution, it might just help you put off most of the negative side-effects in a reasonable manner to modern contexts. Many teenagers fall aside due to depression, anxiety or even substances in some cases. We've got one life, let's not let light pollution be the reason we're tossed aside. And hey, controlling how much light pollution impacts you is probably useful when next time a statistic claims 9 out of 10 people are being dangerously affected by it!