© fotolia / leszekglasner
Compared with regular white light, people are able to recover from a stressful experience three times quicker when sitting under blue light.
Regular stresses such as that caused by arguing with a friend or having a close deadline at work could be best tackled with blue light.
In the small study, 12 people were first stressed and then performed a relaxation session under either blue or white light.
The study's authors explain their conclusions:
"...blue lighting accelerates the relaxation process after stress in comparison with conventional white lighting.This is not the first time studies have found that coloured lighting can influence people's emotions.
The relaxation time decreased by approximately three-fold (1.1 vs. 3.5 minutes).
We also observed a convergence time (3.5-5 minutes) after which the advantage of blue lighting disappeared.
The study's authors explain:
"A study about the influence of color of walls in learning environments proved that pale colors caused more relaxation than vivid colors, and that heart rate decreased with short-wavelength colors (e.g., violet, blue and green) in comparison with longer-wavelength (e.g., yellow and red).The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE (Minguillon et al., 2017).
In addition, a few authors have successfully treated people with behavior disorders by influencing their emotional states (e.g., causing mental calm) by color lighting.
For instance, pink light was successfully utilized to reduce aggressiveness of delinquents in prison.
Furthermore, another color-lighting-based method with blue light have been used for disruptive behavior disorders..."
However, after reading the paper, the actual experiment used blue light (LED emitting 471 nm wavelength, at high power) versus a mixture of red, green and blue (all LED, with respective wavelengths of 616 nm, 550 nm and 471 nm, and differing luminance) which together look like white (or so they say). If I was doing it, I would rather use real white light than fake one.