Best Light Therapy Glasses and Wearables for Sleep

Here’s a quick summary of the leading light therapy glasses and wearables you can buy in 2023 right now.

The best light therapy wearables and glasses in 2023

Ayo Lite

EMF-free, instant-on version of Ayo glasses

AyoLite Wearable Quick Specs

• Website: – https:goayo.com
• Light source/colour: – Blue-turquoise (peak ~470 nm)
• Session duration: – 20 mins
• Typical battery life:  8 sessions between charges
• Weight: 31 grams
• Bluetooth: Yes
• Wireless charging: No
• App features: None
• Price: $199 with 60-day 100% refund policy. Exclusive 10% discount ➡️ Use coupon SG10
• Read Ayo Reviews on Amazon

Released in December 2020, AyoLite is, as you’ve probably already guessed, a redesigned, stripped version of the award-winning Ayo wearable. AyoLite retains pretty much an identical form factor as its more expensive cousin, the main cosmetic difference being a slightly lighter shade of blue in the folding arms.

Probe a little deeper and you’ll see the left arm also incorporates a double-pronged charging socket to be used with the included proprietary charging cable.  But apart from that, AyoLite retains the same high build-quality, materials and LED light sources of the full version, only $100 cheaper.

So what’s missing from this version? Well, AyoLite was introduced in response to customer demand for a non-connected version of AYO, so AyoLite is very much designed to work with as little fuss as possible.

There’s no app to connect with your phone (although intriguingly the makers say it will be supported by a new app version soon), which means you lose the ability to set custom programs for Sleep, Energy, Travel, you also lose the ability to change the brightness setting, and most obviously, AyoLite doesn’t include the same hard shell case which doubles as a wireless charging dock.

>> Check out our in-depth Ayo Review here

Instead AyoLite’s design ethos is much more similar to Pocket Sky in that there are no buttons, no options to fiddle with, all you do is open the arms, and the device switches on automatically and then switches off again after 20 minutes.

AyoLite holds up to 8 sessions on a single charge, meaning you’ll only have to charge once a week, assuming daily usage. For travel and storage you get a simple, protective travel case, which means AyoLite needs to be charged with the supplied cable.

All in all, AyoLite keeps the award-winning design of its predecessor, and strips back the smart functionality into a device you can just pick up and start using immediately

Take 10% off AyoLite NowUSE COUPON 'SG10')

Retimer

Science-based green light wearable

Re-Timer 2 Quick Specs

• Website: – https://www.re-timer.com/
• Light source/colour: – Green-blue light (peak 500 nm)
• Session duration: – 45-60 mins
• Brightness/luminosity: Low = 315 lux, High = 506 Lux
• Weight: 75 grams
• Typical battery life:  8 days
• Wireless Charging: No
• Bluetooth: No
• App features: None (jetlag/shift-work calculators available on website)
• Price: $189 with 60-day money back guarantee
• Read Re-Timer Amazon Reviews 

Next, in the spirit of Monty Python ….. something completely different. Winning the award by a long stretch for the most wacky styling, Re-Timer is a light therapy wearable that eschews snazzy looks in favour of scientific rigour, led by Dr Helen Wright, and Professor Leon Lack, world-renowned sleep researchers who have been studying and treating sleep problems for over 4 decades.

The academics had been working on a prototype light therapy device since 2000. 10 years later they formed the company Re-Time Pty Ltd, to bring a commercial product to market. With a team of 7 engineers, 4 design iterations and nearly 2000 hours of CAD design alone, they released the original Re-Timer in 2013. Now in its second generation,  Re-Timer 2’s unique design features are the result of extensive R&D which has subsequently been backed up by an impressive list of peer-reviewed studies and clinical trials which the company lists on its website.

It’s not only the ‘alien scuba-mask’ looks that make this wearable a little different to its peers. For a start, Re-Timer uses greenish-blue light, at a peak wavelength of 500nm, instead of the more commonly used 468-470 nm. In an FAQ page on their website, the company states that Re-Timer chose to ‘go green’ because “this balances the safety concerns of blue light with the efficacy of the shorter blue and green wavelengths. We have completed extensive product testing on both optical safety and efficacy.”

Also, Re-Timer shines the light from the bottom of the eye because in tests, the inventors found it avoided blockage by the eyelashes and allows normal activities to be carried out more easily when you’re using the device.

Re-Timer 2 has two brightness settings, high (506 lux) and low (315 lux) according to the user’s specific and time. For example, if you suffer from a mid-afternoon slump, and want to overcome sleepiness and get an energy boost, you can wear the glasses at low brightness for 15 minutes to get the intended benefit.

Re-Timer is definitely the most quirky looking out of all the bunch, but it’s also, along with Luminette, a wearable that’s recommended by sleep physicians and boasts hard, scientific evidence to prove its efficacy.

Order Re-Timer 2 Now

Luminette 3

The orignal light box alternative

Drive – light therapy for your car

Light therapy for your morning commute

Ok, so this isn’t exactly a wearable, but you could say it’s a wearable for your car. … Drive, a brand new product for 2021 from Lucimed, the makers of Luminette is the only light therapy device that you can use while driving your car.

Drive clips to your sun-visor and is held by both a magnetic clip and an elastic securing strap. If doesn’t interfere with your driving thanks to light being placed above your eyeline making Drive safer to use than a regular light therapy wearable which may obscure your view of the road.

As with Luminette, Drive features 3 intensity levels, a USB charging port so you can permanently install the device in your car, and a rotation hinge to you can easily modify the light intensity for optimal visual comfort. Simple one click operation gives you a 20 minute session with a single button press.

Drive is perfect for those who have to get up early to drive to work when it’s dark or the sun hasn’t risen fully. Or when you’ve had to get up too early and it’s a cloudy and gloomy day. With Drive you can effortlessly and safely get your light therapy in your car, on your morning commute, or in the afternoon to give you an extra energy boost.

Drive retails for $149 and ships worldwide.

What is light therapy?

First some basic definitions. Light therapy, sometimes called phototherapy, or bright light therapy, is the use of light to treat a very broad range of health and medical conditions. Of these, light therapy is considered a ‘gold standard’ treatment for seasonal affective disorder, (SAD) aka the ‘winter blues’ and is also used to treat a range of other mood disorders.

In this article however we’ll be focussing on new and exciting applications for bright light therapy –  ie  sleep and circadian rhythm problems, which include insomnia, morning sleepiness, shift-work, jetlag, delayed sleep phase syndrome and more.

Light boxes vs wearables and glasses

Clinical bright light therapy for SAD has been around since the 1980s. But the standard treatment method – using a special type of lamp called a light box hasn’t been updated in all this time.

A light box is essentially a bright white light source, usually outputting at least 10,000 units of lux at a specified distance. A typical protocol is to sit in front of the light box as soon as you wake up, for around 30 minutes.

Whilst there are indeed measurable benefits to traditional light box treatment, the drawbacks are pretty obvious. For one, you have to sit still, at the time when most of us are rushing around, trying to get ready for work or a busy day ahead. Secondly, because you have sit at a distance, the light source is by nature, very bright and intrusive.

Light therapy glasses and wearables by contrast are small and portable. So you can still get your light boost in the morning, but instead of being anchored to your chair, you can get dressed, brush your teeth, have breakfast, work out, or even have an early morning conference call.

And because these wearables are worn close to the eye, the brightness of the light source can be relatively dim (in comparison to a standard light box), which means they’re more discreet, won’t blind anyone when you’re having a conversation, but you’ll still the benefits of sitting in front of a large, very bright light box.

Humans and the sun – an ancient relationship

I pretty much flunked biology in school, but I vaguely remember being taught about how plants synthesise sunlight into energy. It’s kind of taken for granted that all life on earth has an immutable bond with the 4.6 billion year old ball of plasma we call the sun.

So it’s odd, that we’re not taught at a young age about the critical human relationship between sunlight, metabolism, energy and overall cellular health.

Granted, much of this knowledge has been unearthed in relatively recent scientific discoveries, but in the 21st century we seem to have largely ignored the vital role that sunlight plays across the spectrum of human well-being.

We don’t have the scope to dive into all the aspects of what’s been called the ‘new science of sunlight‘  so for the purposes of this article, we’re going let’s zoom in on just one aspect,  sunlight’s impact on our body clock, which of course has huge implications for how we sleep.

Whilst we’re on the subject, check out our Sleep Junkies podcast episode with science author Linda Geddes

We are clocks

Circadian rhythms (sometimes called the ‘body clock’) are our internal timekeepers – responsible for regulating not only sleep and wake, but countless other physiological processes including digestion, cellular repair, immune function.

As well as having a ‘master clock’ located in the brain (a tiny clump of neurons called the supra-chiasmatic nucleus or SCN)  the human body is made up of  trillions of biological clocks, located in almost every cell in the body. And what’s becoming ever more apparent to doctors and scientists is that proper timing and synchronization of these clocks is critical to our health.

The watchmaker

So how on earth does sunlight play a role in helping to synchronise our internal clocks?

One analogy I like, is that of an antique watch-maker. Everyday, he checks the church clock in the town square, and then, to ensure all of his timepieces are correct when customers enter the shop, he has to manually wind each minute hand. If he doesn’t do this regularly, some of his timepieces will slowly drift out of sync with the local ‘reference’ time.

Similarly, human body clocks need some assistance to stay aligned with the 24-hour day/night solar cycle. The average human circadian rhythm runs slightly longer than 24 hours so without some kind of external synchronisation cue, our internal clocks may start to become disorganised, and experience circadian disruption, which can have wide-ranging health consequences, including of course our sleep/wake rhythms.

Fortunately however, nature has provided an exquisitely simple, but at the same time, incredibly complex way to wind our metaphorical minute-hands every day…. the falling and the rising of the sun.

How sunlight wakes us up

Throughout the day, our body temperature, hormone levels are constantly rising and falling, signalling to us the optimal times to eat, digest, be active, and to rest. But the most significant of these changes happen during the transitions between wakefulness and sleep (and vice versa).

As we open our eyes in the morning, light (optimally, sunlight) starts a chain reaction of biochemical processes. When light hits our retina, it passes through a set of specialised light receptors. These receptors send a signal via the optic nerve to the SCN, which instructs the pineal gland to stop producing melatonin, the sleep-promoting ‘darkness hormone‘ which is manufactured throughout the night.

At the same time, production of cortisol, a stimulating, alerting hormone, starts to rise, reaching a peak at around 9am in the morning. Cortisol, is often associated with being our main ‘stress hormone’, but it also plays a vital role in sleep/wake regulation.

How modern life messes with your circadian rhythms

Up until the industrial age, this 4 billion-year old sunrise alarm setup worked flawlessly, because for 99% of human history, we’ve lived in partnership with nature, waking and resting in synchrony with the dawn and the sunset.

But starting with the industrial revolution, and then the invention of the Edison lightbulb, humans, for the first time, were able to free set their own wake/sleep/work schedules.

Houses and workplaces could be lit up at will. No longer was night-time synonymous with down-time. Work, social activities could continue long after the sun had set.

Undoubtably the modern era allowed huge leaps forward in human progress, but inevitably there were some downsides too – one of them being the disruption to our sleep schedules.

For example, nowadays we take the 9-5 regime for granted. But the truth is, a huge proportion of the population is waking (and going to bed) at sub-optimal times – when it’s still dark outside instance.

Couple this with catch up sleep at the weekend, and you end up with social jetlag – a permanent state of circadian disruption whereby our biological clocks, instead of being anchored to the sun, are constantly flipping back and forth according to the ‘social clocks’ of work, family and societal schedules.

Of course, nobody wants to go back to a pre-industrial age, but the problem remains – modern life is messing with our clocks, and subsequnetly our general well-being. So how we combat some of the negative consequences of fitting the square peg of our circadian rhythms into the round hole of societal commitments?

You guessed it…. this is where light therapy can help.

How light therapy can improve your sleep

Even if your sleep patterns happen to align perfectly with the solar clock, it’s true that most of us, especially outside of summer months spend most of our time indoors, often in dimly lit offices and living rooms.

Humans however, are evolutionarily hardwired to respond to sunlight, which can be of magnitudes 100x or even 1000x brighter than indoors light.

Light therapy is a useful intervention in these cases because it targets and attempts to reset the biologic clock in our brain – just like the watchmaker winding the minute-hand every morning. A pair of light therapy glasses can provide a reliable, accurate dose of safe, bright light that approximates what you would experience being outside on a sunny day.

Hence, with a short dose of light therapy in the morning, you can help to realign your body clock, and shift the phase of your sleep-wake cycle, giving your more energy during the daylight hours, and more likelihood to feel sleepy at a bedtime that’s  appropriate for you.

Sleep/circadian problems you can treat with light therapy

Light therapy’s impact on the body clock lends itself to a range of conditions broadly concerned with circadian health. Here’s a quick rundown:

Insomnia

Difficulty falling asleep at night can occur for numerous reasons. If you’ve been diagnosed with chronic insomnia you should seek  qualified medical advice and appropriate treatment like CBTi.  However, if you’re struggling with sleep because your body clock is out of sync with your natural bedtime, or if you’re an owl, forced to get up at lark schedules, light therapy can help to realign your circadian rhythms so that you’ll feel naturally sleepier at night.

Difficulty waking up

Waking up, especially when it’s still dark outside, can be difficult to cope with if you’re not a natural early riser. A dose of light therapy shortly after you wake up acts like an alerting signal to the circadian system, lessening grogginess and lethargy, and giving you a natural energy boost in the morning. Repeated use can also help to realign your body clock to a more suitable hour for waking up. See Also: The best sunrise alarm clocks and wakeup lights in 2023

Jetlag

Travelling across timezones causes your sleep/wake schedules to be completely out of whack with your body clock. Whether it’s for work, or even a leisure break, you want to feel energised and at your best when you reach your destination. A carefully planned light therapy program can minimize the negative effects of jetlag by gradually shifting your circadian rhythms to match the local time at your final travel destination.

Shiftwork

Shift workers, and especially nightshift workers, face enormous challenges in adapting their body clock to fit work schedules that often change, rotate and turn day into night. Research has shown that bright light therapy, and other interventions such as melatonin supplementation can be an effective strategy to help night shift workers to adapt to their schedules.

Energy boost
If you work in a dimly lit environment, or you’re generally tired during the day, light therapy glasses are an ideal, safe way to give you a direct energy boost when having an afternoon slump because they simulate the natural invigorating effects of being in bright sunlight. Light therapy is an excellent alternative to OD’ing on coffee, Red Bulls, and even naps (although we’re great nap evangelists here!)

Cautions, risks and side effects

The risk profile associated with light therapy, whilst not zero is pretty low. There are no long-term reported side effects, and any adverse conditions that arise soon dissipate if treatment is stopped.

Because light therapy wearables are so new, most of what we know about side effects comes from reports of people using light boxes. In these cases a small number of users have reported headaches, eyestrain, irritability and other mild mood problems.

For certain individuals, it’s advisable not to use light therapy at all, because of possible complications from existing health problems. So, if you fall into one of the following categories, you should probably stay clear of using light therapy and take advice from your doctor.

Don’t use light therapy if:

• you have a skin condition which makes you sensitive to light, such as some forms of lupus
• you’re taking medications that magnify the harmful effects of sunlight
• you have an eye condition and you’re eyes are vulnerable to light damage
• you suffer from bipolar disorder
• you suffer from frequent headaches
• you are under 12 years old ( our eyes are still developing up until this point)

When should I wear light therapy glasses?

Guidelines vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, because each wearable has slightly different optical properties. But as a very general rule, if you want to optimize your sleep by using light therapy, the idea is to wear your glasses first thing in the morning -usually for around 20-30 minutes – to simulate the rising sun.

But lots of people use light therapy for its energy properties, in which case you might want to use your device in the morning coffee break, midday, or after-lunch time to counteract the post-prandial circadian slump.

Can I use a light therapy wearable if I wear glasses?

Short answer, yes. In fact, there are even a couple of devices (Sula Health, and the still in development Lumox glasses) that you can equip with prescription lenses so you don’t even have to carry your normal specs with you.

Isn’t blue light harmful for me?

Short answer again… no.

Longer answer.. there’s been a lot of media coverage in recent years about the harmful effects of blue-enriched light from phones, tablets and laptops.  And indeed, if you’re using technology before bedtime, this will act as a ‘brake’ on your natural secretion of melatonin, preventing you from feeling sleepy, when you really should be nodding off.

But this is only a problem at night. In the morning and daytime, blue light as part of the natural spectrum of colours in sunlight is crucial for proper circadian health and indeed light therapy wearables are designed to mimic the properties of the sun in this way. Just don’t wear them at night!

What’s the difference between white light, blue light and green light?

The field of light therapy wearables is very new, so it’s interesting to see how different manufacturers have taken different approaches to designing what they consider to be an optimal light source. For instance, Luminette uses white light, but enriched with blue wavelengths that peaking at around 468nm. Propeaq by contrast, uses a pure 468 nm monochromatic blue light source. Retimer and Pegasi light therapy wearables have chosen LED light sources that are closer to green spectrum light that blue.

Right now there’s no scientific consensus on which type of light source is best for optimising sleep; blue light, green light, or full spectrum white light. Anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that all of the various options (blue, white, green) have some efficacious effect, but until widespread clinical trials are carried out comparing all of these difference, then we won’t have a definitive answer for a long time.

So the best you can do is to read all of the scientific literature that the various wearables companies have published and make the best informed decision you can.

Let’s talk about lux…

In talk of light therapy, you’ll regularly hear ‘10,000 lux’ being stated as a benchmark measurement of how bright you light source should be. But what does 10,000 lux actually mean?

Without getting into the weeds too much, lux can be considered a unit of light measurement where ‘area’ is also taken into account. Technically speaking, one “lux” is one lumen per square meter, one lumen being the light intensity of a single candle.

So, as a completely ludicrous, not to mention health and safety-contravening concept, if you can imagine sitting one metre away from 10,000 lit candles, then you would be experiencing 10,000 lux.

As we discussed earlier, lux levels throughout the day can vary wildly, depending on our environment. Typical office lighting is anywhere from 300-500 lux, but being outdoors, depending on cloud cover or blazing sunshine, you may experience anything from 10,000 – 100, 000 lux.

But here’s where things get complicated. Bear with me on this…..

Traditionally, anyone involved in taking optical measurements, has worked with a model called photopic vision, which tries to approximate what the human eye/brain perceives in terms of colour and brightness.  It is based on three types of cones which generally appear blue, green and red, respectively to the human eye.

But measurements such as lux,  are all based on the theoretical response of the standard human eye and brain, relying on elements of psychology as much as they do physiology and physics – because each individual is different, and light/colour perception differs across age ranges, genders, and even cultures.

However, in 2007, a landmark scientific paper was published, challenging the assumption that rods and cones were responsible for mediating all “visual” responses to light.

In short, the paper described the workings of a separate visual system in the eye, consisting of a network of photosensitive ‘ganglion cells’ (or intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells – iPRG) whose key function was not vision per se, but to interpret light as a signalling cue for the circadian system.

Ganglion cells express a photopigment called melanopsin and this mechanism for entraining the body clock (environmental light > iPRG > melanopsin > brain > I feel sleepy/awake) works even in individuals who are functionally blind.

If you’re still with me, you may be asking, how on earth is this relevant to light therapy wearables? Well, when I quizzed Lucas Wen, CEO of Lumos Health about the lux stats for his new upcoming wearable, he gave me this response:

“this is a complex field as lux is a function integrated with respect to the human photopic curve, which may not be most accurate response curve that is exhibited by ganglion cells for circadian rhythm. In the following study, measuring light in the melanopsin age, authorities in the field propose a new lux measurement standard, with a response curve fitted to that of the melanopsin cells, to better capture the effect of wavelength on neurobiological and circadian rhythm effect. Our co-founder, Dr. Jamie Zeitzer, also recommends using this new lux to characterize effect.”

In short, old ways of measuring lux do not take into account that the response curve of light as a pathway for circadian entrainment (ie shifting out sleep/wake timing an energy boost, mitigating jet-lag), is totally different to the response curve of our ‘visual’ system. Ganglion cells/ melanopsin is most sensitive to short-wavelength (∼480 nm) blue light, whilst the peak of the photopic curve/visual system is around 555 nm,

Disregarding all the physics/biology, the takeaways are simple. If you’re using light therapy to optimize your circadian function/mood/energy, then ‘lux’ on its own, becomes somewhat of a heuristic if you don’t also take into account the specific wavelengths of the light source.

As a good example, Propeaq glasses emit only blue light, so their overall lux output is only around 30-40 lux, but it can achieve a comparable melanopsin response as white light which has ~10x the lux value.

All of this is very new stuff, and in truth, the technical standards, the research, the clinical trials are nowhere near validating the scientific theory yet. But, to use an analogy,  with a car – you don’t measure it’s speed just by the horsepower. And it’s the same with light therapy wearables. Absolute lux values are only part of the story – there’s a lot more under the bonnet to consider…!

Our guide to the best light therapy wearables in 2023

So now we know all about the principles of what light therapy can do, but let’s get down to the nitty grity – what are some of the best wearables and glasses on the market right now?

The good news is that this is a really dynamic, innovative space and there aren’t really any bad products in this sector (….yet). But what we do have are 6 wearables that all do things a little differently, in terms of design, form and function.

Some place more emphasis on aesthetics, with others eschew good looks and focus more on health and wellness. Some light therapy wearables are designed with travel and portability in mind,  others are more suited to use at home.

Other considerations include; whether you want a device that has integrated app functionality, or if you prefer standalone products; snazzy looks; battery life; wireless charging and whether scientific validation is a deciding factor in your purchase.

All that said, here’s a comprehensive look at our top picks in 2023 for the best light therapy glasses and wearables you can buy right now.