I Had Pounding Headaches Every Day For a Month — Then I Started Wearing These Blue Light Glasses

A few weeks before the holidays, I started getting daily headaches. At first they were small at a typical pain level — but they quickly built up to be extremely painful and, at times, even debilitating. I began taking a ton of aspirin, rubbing my temples like some sort of wellness guru, and I even resorted to googling (never do that) what the cause could possibly be. Although my search led me to think I may need a new pillow or a deep muscle massage to help better relax my neck and spine (which, according to WebMD, was definitely misaligned), a ton of people I talked to about the headaches in person pointed out that it could be due to my job as an editor, which requires me to stare at a computer for anywhere from eight to 10 hours a day.

Add those hours to the time spent scrolling through my phone during my commute to and from work, long nights of catching up with my favorite TV shows, and cuddling up with my phone again once I got into bed — and, let's be honest, you have yourself a pretty likely headache cause.

After suffering for over a month, I decided to try to figure out if too much screen time was, in fact, the cause of these headaches. However, considering the amount of time I was spending in front of screens hadn't increased at all, I waffled for a while on whether or not to accept the harshly lit rectangles as the source of my brain's demise. That is, until a coworker whose new glasses I complimented informed me they were actually prescription-less blue light glasses. It was then and there that I decided it was time to take better care of my strained brown eyes and invest in a pair of glasses myself.

I did consider a few pairs being sold by actual glasses retailers, but in the end, I gave into my impatient nature and turned to trusty ol' Amazon Prime so that I could start my experiment in just two days' time. Fast forward to 48 hours later, and there I was sporting my new LifeArt Blue Light Blocking Glasses ($26) in a tortoiseshell print. At such a low cost (they actually cost me a cool $20 even though they're now listed for $26 — sorry), I could still afford to go the new pillow and massage routes if the glasses didn't work, so I was pretty hopeful I'd arrive at a solution to my brain pain eventually.

LifeArt Blue Light Blocking Glasses

From

$20

$20 at Amazon

Y'all. Either I bought a pair of fake glasses laced with dark magic or these spectacles really are onto something special. After the second day wearing them, I realized while tucking myself into bed that I hadn't had a headache that day. Not wanting to get too excited, I went into day three trying not to think about that fact too hard, which wasn't difficult, as I was swamped at work. Sure enough, despite my high stress levels throughout the day and even staying late to finish an assignment — which meant staring at my computer for even longer than usual — I didn't get a headache.

Admittedly, I'm the type of person who attributes every little ache and pain to something exponentially more serious. A touch of heartburn is definitely the early stages of a heart attack, numbness in my back — despite sitting with my legs up on the back of the train seat, my body weight crushing my tailbone — is 100 percent from a pinched nerve due to a herniated disc in my spine, and of course, my headaches had to be a sign that I had an Amelia Shepherd-size tumor on my brain (Grey's Anatomy fans, where you at?). So it should come as no surprise (or maybe some surprise, if you're unlike me and totally normal) that the disappearance of these headaches meant more to me than I imagine winning an Oscar meant to Leonardo DiCaprio.

I'm no doctor, nor did I consult a doctor before, during, or after trying blue light glasses and writing this post — but person to person, if you're experiencing eye strain or headaches after a long day of staring at a computer, phone, or TV, these glasses could help you as much as they've helped me. I'm two weeks into wearing mine and aside from a headache last Saturday that was most certainly due to the amount of wine I'd drank the night before, I haven't gotten my daily throbbing headache between the hours of 2 and 4 p.m. since sliding the frames onto my face for the first time.

That's science, I'm pretty sure.