When it gets dark, you may notice your phone’s screen turn more orange to prepare you for sleep. Our body expects to see only blue light during the day, according to the theory. So if we block out blue light at night, we should relax and feel more tired when it’s time for bed.
It’s true that using your phone before bed is likely to interfere with your sleep, but can a change in color really reverse that effect? Not likely after new research that confirms what experts have been saying for years.
What we recently learned
In the new study, college students were assigned one of three conditions: inserting their iPhone in the hour before bed, using their iPhone with the night shift turned on, or using their iPhone without the night shift. There were no differences between the three groups in terms of sleep quality as measured by an activity tracker.
“Taken together, our study results in combination with the previous literature do not support blue light filters (such as night shift) as interventions to improve sleep, regardless of whether they are based on sleep characteristics (e.g. duration of sleep, latency of the onset of sleep, onset of melatonin or minutes) are measured while sleeping with quick eye movements, ”write the investigators.
College students are notoriously sleepless, however, and researchers wondered if the participants were perhaps so tired they could easily fall asleep no matter what they did on their cell phones. When they looked at the people who had more than the average amount of sleep – in other words, those who were less likely to be deprived of sleep – they found a difference in sleep quality between people who used their phones before Bedtime, and those who didn’t, but once again using Night Shift didn’t seem to make a difference.
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What we already knew
Night Shift (and its androids and computers equivalents) is based on science that made sense but wasn’t rigorously tested when it was first introduced in the real world. Here’s a Lifehacker piece from 2016For example, when these modes were just beginning to take hold and we found that while science backed the idea that blue light could interfere with sleep, we didn’t know if the orange hue of your display would actually fix the problem.
Today blue light has an even worse reputation, but the science that supports it hasn’t really emerged. Opticians and ophthalmologists keep trying to tell us The blue light from screens doesn’t have any serious health effects and they don’t recommend night mode as a panacea for smartphones that interfere with our sleep.
In short, use the night mode to relax in the evening American Academy of Ophthalmology saysHowever, you should still put your phone away for an hour or two before bed so it doesn’t interfere with your sleep.
