The Psychology of Color: How RGB Lighting Affects Focus and Skill

Strategically incorporating LED lights into your desk setup is a necessity to ensure a clean, sleek look. But a lot of people seem to think that glowing desk accessories are just an expensive gimmick strictly for looks, and many people believe that they cause eye strain and harm when around them for too long. 

What if I were to tell you that RGB LEDs around your desk environment and on your light-up mouse pad can actually have significant advantages to your focus and productivity? The psychology of colors is a very well-studied sector in science, and understanding how these different colors can trigger biological shifts in your brain is important for enhancing your experience while at your setup. Whether you need to increase your accuracy and focus or simply need to stay awake to complete a project the lighting does truly matter.

 Why Your RGB Is Actually Good for You

Throughout the rest of this blog, I will break down the science behind RGB lighting and its advantages to people who use it correctly to enhance performance and productivity. 

Before we get into specific colors, we need to understand how light actually affects your vision. When staring at a normal monitor in a dark room, you are guaranteed to get eye fatigue. If you try to turn on your main room light, it will wash out your screen and kill your vibe. The key is to create a well-lit environment. This can be you running lights behind your desk and monitor, or pairing it with an RGB desk mat right at your fingertips. By doing this, you create a balanced environment that lowers the contrast and saves your eyes to last longer at your setup for gaming or those late-night work sessions, all while making your setup look pure.

Blue Light: Faster Reactions and Laser Focus

You might always hear that blue light from our screens is harmful and will keep us awake at night, and make sleep troublesome. But what if you actually want to be awake and focused when it's hard to stay up? The study published by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine shows that exposure to blue light directly increases activity in the prefrontal cortex of the brain. This resulted in measurably faster reaction and response times during cognitive-loaded tasks. The increase in focus was also shown to last up to 40 minutes after the lights were turned off.

Depending on your mood and goals, you can always change your setup light to blue to increase your focus and keep you awake, whether that be for long gaming sessions or a late night of work, keeping you productive and wide awake.

Surrounded by Red: Detailed and Focused Dominance

Red may seem like a darker and almost evil color to some, which is okay. There is actually a reason that emergency vehicles and cars have red lights on them. Red lights are actually proven to command our attention faster than any other color. According to research from the National Center for Biotechnology Information, the color red significantly improves our performance and focus on detail-oriented tasks.

To experience this cognitive presence, we aren't just talking about one red light but creating an actual red environment around your desk just like all the other colors. Being able to change the colors of your environment easily will greatly increase your productivity and your ability to focus at different times of the day on different tasks like gaming or work. If you really need to lock into a project like proofreading or tedious Excel document reads, the color is for you. Like, if you're hopping into a competitive video game, the red will keep you dialed in the whole time.

Warm Lights: Creativity and Flexibility

Now we get to the fun colors that create fun ideas. Does your job or task require you to think outside the box and create extravagant ideas? Or do you just sit down and game to feel relaxed and laid-back? This is where warmer wavelengths of light, like the pinks and purples, can enhance your work and experience.

According to a synopsis by PacLights based on a University of British Columbia study:

People working under warm-colored lighting generated significantly more creative solutions and showed an increased openness to novel ideas. This is because warm colors like those pinks and purples that I talked about above actively lower cortisol levels as well as boost creative problem-solving by 23%.

For the Creative and Care-Free Bunch

If you are a gamer who's casually building a massive world in Minecraft or playing fun casual games, these are the colors that you need to turn on to maximize your gaming experience. On the other side of the spectrum, if you are a graphic designer or are in a creative-related industry, you too should look to incorporate these colors within your setup to really increase your creativity and avoid that blank page anxiety by creating this calculated low-stress environment.

How to Make These Environments Come to Life

So, how do you actually build this color-changing environment without worrying about spending a fortune on a sweet-looking room and desk setup? It’s way easier than you think. You don't need to cover your walls in expensive lights; you just need to intentionally place these lights. 

Start by grabbing a basic LED strip and running it along the back of your monitor or desk to bounce light off the wall. This creates that ambient background glow to save your eyes and make the light look natural in your setup.  You then need to bring that light right to your table. By laying down a high-quality RGB gaming mouse pad like the ones at PureGlide Gaming, you set up your personalized zone and bring the whole desk and setup together.

With just these simple upgrades, you completely control your vibe. With a quick click, you can shift from a red environment to stay dialed in during a competitive game straight to a blue environment to lock into your work and then to those warm tones to feel relaxed and laid back because we all know we deserve some of that time. Stop settling for a boring and bland desk; grab some strip lights, a light-up mouse pad, and start using color to your true advantage!

Thanks for reading! Follow us on our socials to see what's up next and look at our products to improve your desk!