No, Night Mode Won’t Help
As it starts to get dark, you may notice that your phone screen turns more orange to help you get ready for bed. According to the theory, our bodies only expect to see blue light during the day, so blocking blue light at night should help us relax and feel more tired when it’s time to go to bed.
It is true that using your phone while you sleep is likely to interfere with your sleep, but can color change really reverse this effect? Unlikely, according to new research that confirms what experts have been saying for years.
What have we learned recently
In a new study, college students were assigned one of three conditions: put their iPhone away one hour before bed, use an iPhone with Night Shift enabled, or use an iPhone without Night Shift. There were no differences in sleep quality as measured by the activity tracker between the three groups.
“Taken together, our study results, in combination with previous literature, do not support blue light filters (such as night shift) as interventions to improve sleep, whether measured by characteristics (such as sleep duration, sleep onset latency, sleep onset melatonin or minutes). spent in a dream with a quick eye movement, ”the investigators write.
College students are notoriously sleep deprived, so researchers wondered if the participants were so tired that they had no problem falling asleep no matter what they did with their phones. When they looked at people who slept more than average, that is, those who were less likely to get enough sleep, they found a difference in sleep quality between people who used their phones before bed and those who did not sleep. But then again, using Night Shift didn’t seem to matter.
What we already knew
Night Shift (and its Android and desktop equivalents) is based on scientific evidence that made sense but was not rigorously tested in the real world when it was introduced. Here is a Lifehacker article from 2016 , for example, when these modes were just starting to catch on, where we noted that while science has supported the idea that blue light can interfere with sleep, we don’t know if coloring your display orange will actually fix it. problem.
Today, blue light has gotten an even worse reputation, but the science that supports it has yet to find it. Optometrists and ophthalmologists continue to try to tell us that blue light from screens does not have serious adverse health effects, and they do not recommend night mode as a panacea for smartphones that interfere with our sleep.
In short, go ahead and use Night Mode to chill out in the evening, the American Academy of Ophthalmology says , but you should still put your phone away an hour or two before bed so it doesn’t interfere with your sleep.