Why You Might Want to Try Green Light Therapy for Migraine

Are you looking for a nonmedicinal approach to easing your migraine attacks? There are plenty of natural remedies out there, and one of the newest might be worth a go: green light therapy, a noninvasive therapy that has shown promise for helping those with migraine as well as other conditions, including fibromyalgia, anxiety, and neuropathy.

How did they study this? Well, picture rats in green contact lenses.

In a 2017 study published in the journal PAIN, rats fitted with green contact lenses experienced long-lasting effects on their antinociception (the ability to block pain) when exposed to room LED (light-emitting diodes) light and a thermal pain stimulus. This antinociceptive effect lasted for 4 days following the exposure, and showed no side effects or impairment to motor function. Rats wearing opaque contact lenses were unable to exhibit this antinociception.

The study suggested that “green LED therapy may represent a novel, nonpharmacological approach for managing pain.” The results of numerous other studies back up its benefits, and due to its promise in chronic pain management more research is underway.

What Is Green Light Therapy?

Essentially, green light therapy consists of spending consistent daily time in a specific wavelength of light known as narrow-band green light, with no other light sources to interfere. It can be relatively inexpensive, conducted in the comfort of your own home, and no adverse side effects have been reported.

If you’re up for a nonpharmacological approach to incorporate into your migraine care plan, it’s a harmless, relatively inexpensive tool to add to the box. But what if light is a migraine trigger for you?

Light Sensitivity and Migraine

First, let’s take a look at light sensitivity. You might know from experience how painful light can be for someone with migraine and that it can both trigger migraines and exacerbate an attack. In fact, photophobia, or light sensitivity, affects from 85 to 90 percent of people during a migraine attack. Prior to recent years, this facet of the disease hadn’t been studied a great deal; however, it is currently being looked at with increasing attention.

Dr. Deborah I. Friedman, MD, MPH, a headache medicine specialist and neuro-ophthalmologist in Dallas, shares what happens in the eye when photophobia symptoms occur: “The most recently discovered type of retinal ganglion cells [neurons that send information from the eye to the brain] are called the photosensitive (or intrinsic) ganglion cells,” which “help regulate our day-night rhythm cycle” — something that even blind individuals have.

“The photosensitive retinal ganglion cells are also responsible for the marked sensitivity to light that people with migraine experience,” she says.

Interestingly, sensitivity to light and headache exacerbation is unique to those with migraine: People who don’t experience migraine aren’t affected by light in the same way as people with migraine.

Color Matters When It Comes to Migraine

So, if light can actually trigger or make a migraine attack worse, why would we be suggesting light therapy? It turns out that light color is the key. Dr. Friedman points to a 2016 study led by Dr. Rodrigo Noseda, PhD, assistant professor of anesthesia at Beth Israel Deaconess (part of Harvard Medical School), in which exposure to white, blue, amber, red, and green lights was studied during a migraine attack.

“Dr. Noseda found that green light was the only color that did not make the pain worse; in fact, it decreased the pain intensity by 20 percent,” says Dr. Friedman. “It was also less likely than other colors to worsen the throbbing or spread of pain.” Additionally, “many individuals with migraine also have photophobia in between attacks, or bright light can trigger an attack. Green light may help with these symptoms and provide migraine relief, says Dr. Friedman.

Taking a Cue From Nature

The calming benefits of the color green have been utilized for centuries in practices like shinrin-yoku, a Japanese term that translates to “forest bathing,” or soaking up the forest atmosphere. No bathtub is required; it just means to immerse yourself in nature, which can reduce anxiety and have many other therapeutic effects.

Using green light can mimic these effects. “Many point to bathing in nature, and that green light has healing powers,” says Kathleen Digre, MD, chief of the division of headache and neuro-ophthalmology at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

So if you’re stuck in the city and can’t get out in nature, a green light might just be the next best thing.

How Does Green Light Therapy Work for Migraine Relief?

Now we know that green light can be beneficial for people with migraine, but how does it actually work? That’s not a simple answer, even for Mohab Ibraham, PhD, MD, lead author of the contact-lens-wearing rats study.

“The mechanism of how or why it works is not clearly defined yet; however, there are some clues and hypotheses to direct us and so far, current research suggests a combination of mechanisms,” says Dr. Ibraham, professor of anesthesiology at the University of Arizona College of Medicine, and director of the department’s chronic pain management clinic.

During his research at the University of Arizona lab, he and his colleagues found that green light ramps up production of endorphins, the body’s naturally occurring painkillers. More recently, they’ve observed that green light both decreases inflammation and increases an anti-inflammatory response at the same time.

“This is a brand new medicine and a lot of work needs to be done to better understand it,” says Dr. Ibraham. However, he says the research points to these two components: pain and inflammation reduction.

Dr. Ibraham acknowledges that “it’s important to point out that these studies were done on animals and sometimes the mechanisms are different between humans and rodents.” However, he says, what we do know is that it “seems like more than one mechanism is acting in harmony to have synergistic effects.”

Dr. Digre points to another 2021 clinical trial that Dr. Ibraham was also part of, in which 29 patients with episodic or chronic migraine were recruited and exposed to green light for a 10-week period. Researchers found that green light resulted in fewer migraines — both episodic and chronic. Specifically, exposure to green LED light resulted in a significant decrease in headache days: from about 8 to 3 headache days for those with episodic migraine, and from about 22 to 10 days for those with chronic migraine.

This is good news for pain reduction, easing migraine symptoms, and lessening headache frequency — and with no side effects or adverse events.

Green Light Exposure and Your Brain

Now, if you’re envisioning yourself relaxing with your eyes closed under green light, erase that image: You need to keep your eyes open in order to get the benefits of the therapy, which all stem from the intake of a narrow band of green light through your retinas and how your brain processes it.

Dr. Friedman cites research by Dr. Rami Burstein, PhD, professor of anesthesia and neuroscience at Harvard Medical School, and vice chair of neuroscience at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical School, who has studied green light extensively and has developed a product of his own: “Dr.  Burstein and researchers in his laboratory at Harvard discovered that the nerve fibers from the photosensitive retinal ganglion cells project to part of the brain called the thalamus,” she says. “The thalamus is a large area in the brain which controls a lot of different functions, including receiving and processing information about pain in the body. So, that particular part of the thalamus is where light meets pain.”

Interestingly, she says, this part of the brain is also where CGRP (calcitonin gene-related peptide) — which our newer migraine therapies target — is found.

So, green light for migraine is targeting the same region of your brain in a nonpharmacological way to reduce migraine attacks.

Green Light Therapy ‘Dosage’

Dr. Ibraham underscores that first and foremost, it’s crucial to receive a medical diagnosis of migraine prior to self-treating. Once you have that, he says when it comes to using pure green light therapeutically, he likes “to talk about light as a medication because it makes parameters easier to discuss.”

He says to think of green light as a medication like ibuprofen, for example. Like any drug, if you don’t take enough, it won’t be very helpful; if you take too much there could be side effects.

So how does that apply to administering green light? “In terms of dosing, think of the intensity of the light: If the light is too dim, you may not get an effect; if it’s too bright or too intense then we can almost guarantee you’ll get the opposite of what you’re expecting,” says Dr. Ibraham. “The intensity of light for phototherapy is what I equate to a dosage of medication.”

So for green light therapy to be effective enough to reduce headache pain and migraine frequency, the “dosage” involves both the right light color and the right intensity, or brightness.

“Anywhere from 515 to 535 nanometer spectrum [wavelength of the light color] is where we get the best effects for green light,” says Dr. Ibraham, with other colors coming in at different numbers on the spectrum.

For light intensity, one unit of measurement is lux, which describes how much light falls on a certain area. For optimal green light therapy, Dr. Ibraham says anywhere from 4 to 100 lux is the sweet spot or optimum intensity. For comparison, light on an Arizona day would be about 500 to 750 lux. “So, relatively speaking, it’s low intensity,” says Dr. Ibraham.

Consistency Is Key for Effective Migraine Pain Reduction

Daily exposure and consistency are key to green light exposure potentially helping to reduce head pain and other migraine symptoms. According to Dr. Ibraham, for people who had daily green light exposure,“it took on average about 3 weeks to see any benefit, and then benefits were cumulative, meaning week four was better than week three; week five was better than week four, and so on.”

In the 2021 study mentioned earlier, the 29 migraine patients were instructed to use the green LED light strips in a dark room for a minimum of 1 hour a day, with the option to increase the exposure time to 2 hours a day for 10 weeks.”

When and How to Incorporate Green Light Into Your Day

When you use green light, you must be in a dark room and unexposed to any other light source. For this reason, some suggest that nighttime is the easiest time to incorporate the daily therapy, but time of day is not essential, as long as the room is dark.

And again, your eyes must remain open during therapy. “Everything happens in the visual system through the retina, not through skin exposure,” Dr. Ibraham emphasizes. Using his earlier ibuprofen analogy, it makes sense then that closing your eyes during treatment would be akin to tossing the medication over your shoulder instead of into your mouth.

Because the green light must be your only light source to reap the benefits, make sure you’re not taking in light from any screens like your phone, computer, or television. You can carry on with other activities while your visual system is bathing in the calming light though: read a book, journal, tidy up a space, do a yoga practice, etc. With consistent exposure, you’re allowing green light to work with the powers of your own body to diminish pain sensitivity over time.

Is Green Light Considered an Acute Migraine Treatment?

While it seems like this technology is at the cutting edge of something, there’s more work to be done to shed light on this type of treatment before it can be ruled as a standard acute treatment for migraine attacks.

“I think we need more research on wavelengths of light on migraine,” says Dr. Digre. “That’s important for both our future treatments and understanding light sensitivity."

But that doesn’t mean it can’t be used in conjunction with other therapies, or as a tool to relieve other pain or some of the other bothersome symptoms of migraine.

“It’s not really an acute ‘therapy’ because it doesn’t relieve a migraine, but most people with migraine find it more comfortable to use even when they are not experiencing a migraine episode,” says Dr. Friedman. “People should expect that everything will have a greenish cast, and colors won’t be perceived accurately using green light, but it’s worth a try.”

Currently, no side effects have been reported, which makes it a safe, and inexpensive (depending on the option you choose) therapy to try for tension relief and possibly fewer headache days.

Find Your Light

If the science behind a narrow band of green light has fascinated you, you’re probably wondering how you can get your hands on this type of therapy to give it a try. Although there’s a sea of green light products available, don’t be so quick to buy just any old green light bulbs off Amazon. “There’s a lot of noise in the background with copycat products, which dilutes the effects and contributes to more skepticism when they don’t work,” says Dr. Ibraham.

Whoever you choose to buy from, Dr. Ibraham underscores the importance of researching any claims the product makes. He suggests looking for the scientist behind the product and what studies they were involved in to support their claims. Be sure the light source you choose is flicker-free (as this reduces irritation), and that it’s a narrow band of pure green light.

If you’d like to try the same products that were used in the study of 29 patients and where they were purchased, you can find those details here.

Vetted options for the best green light for migraines range in price from low to high based on level of convenience:

• The Allay Lamp: Developed by Dr. Burstein (a principal investigator on a number of Harvard studies on green light), this lamp is said to be soothing and calming to even the most light-sensitive individuals. Although pricier at $199, the lamp comes with its share of conveniences, including the ability to easily move it to wherever you want, an adjustable shade to direct the light, one-touch controls for power and brightness, and a 32-hour battery life that charges with a micro-USB so you never have to worry about replacing a bulb. Another cool feature: If you turn the device upside down, the green light becomes a regular white light. Allay also makes a desk lamp with similar features.
• NorbRELIEF light bulbs: A more cost-effective option at $19.95 for a single bulb, or $69.95 for a four-pack, these bulbs can be installed in a lamp you already have. These are not the same as other green bulbs you might find at Walmart or on Amazon. With a specialized flicker-free, narrow-band light, this green light bulb provides a brain- and eye-soothing effect similar to the Allay lamp.
• Luxxon Therapeutics: Currently in prelaunch, Dr. Ibraham’s start-up company will eventually offer other science-backed green light products for consumers.

Do Green Light Glasses Have the Same Effect as Green Light Therapy?

Green light glasses are also available and can be worn throughout the day, or to ease an attack. The results of a study Dr. Digre was part of led to the creation of the Avulux lens, a special lens that filters out amber, red, and blue light while letting soothing green light in. These glasses run at about $329 and up.

In a follow-up study in 2020, patients reported that if the Avulux glasses were used within the first hour of an attack, they had statistically better results at reducing the impact of the attack than with the sham lenses.

Dr. Burstein’s company is also working on affordable glasses and bulbs.

To learn more about other migraine glasses made to block the harshest forms of light while letting green light in, check out our review of the best migraine glasses.

Real-World Reviews From Those Who’ve Seen the (Green) Light

A few people in the Migraine Again community shared how they’ve incorporated green light into their migraine tool kits and how it’s working for them:

The green glasses help to soothe my migraine pain and nausea. —Jacqueline O.

I use my green lamp DAILY. —Kelley B.

I tried the green Norb lightbulb but didn't have great results with it. Now I have Avulux glasses, which are made to let in green light specifically, and they've had a very calming, pain-relieving effect! —Elena M.

It’s Not Easy Being Green

As always, along with new technology comes a lot of excitement and a side of skepticism. “This is technically a brand-new branch of medicine,” says Dr. Ibraham. “It’s very promising, it’s very exciting, and there’s a lot of skepticism in the science community because it’s a relatively simple and inexpensive approach with results,” he says. Dr. Ibraham says he is excited about a number of independent groups worldwide who are currently studying phototherapy and green light therapy and confirming their findings.

We might just be on the cusp of a new frontier when it comes to treating migraine — and other diseases — with light therapy. Research is ongoing and in the coming years, more scientists will no doubt be creating even more safe, reliable products. There are already some promising ones out there, so remember to stay tuned. There might just be yet another light at the end of the tunnel for people with migraine.

Meanwhile, happy "forest bathing!"