Healthy light indoors = 1,000 lux

Healthy light indoors = 1,000 lux

14 Jun 2021

Lux? That probably doesn't mean anything to you. Lux is the quantity of light. In this blog, Maarten Voorhuis from Sparckel (based in hub Mu) explains it to you exactly.

Do you know that feeling when you leave your house in the morning and step into a sunny day? Your eyes squint for a moment and pretty soon it feels like normal. You go from darkness to light. And that's a big transition, because a sunny day easily contains 50,000 lux. Your eyes have to get used to this, because inside your house there is often 1,000 times less light. In other words, huge differences.

And do you know the feeling of a very cloudy day outside? Drizzling light, instinctively somewhat dark, but at the same time that light also has an effect of 'waking up' your body. Then there is about 1,000 lux outside! And that is the minimum requirement of our biological clock. 

But - unfortunately - we spend most of our day indoors. And in the office, the light standard is 500 lux. We actually get half of that (250 lux) on our eyes. A little calculation shows that we actually need four times more light than we are getting now. If we draw a comparison with the home, the situation becomes even more minimal. At home, we want atmospheric light that is gentle on our eyes, which means that on average we get 10 times less light on our eyes. With all the consequences that entails. A light deficiency does something to your biological clock, including a poorer night's sleep and an effect on your mood. If you experience this in the long term, it can lead to depression, burn-outs and other mental states.

Not good. We need to get at least 1,000 lux on our eyes during the day and our personal mission is to make that happen for everyone. We need to fool our eyes into thinking we're outside - that's great for our health!

If you want to know exactly how this works for you, we have to measure it. You know the pedometer on your phone, you have the same idea for light. A lux meter that measures how much light you are getting during the day, so you can consciously make sure that your daily dose of daylight is enough!

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