New studies are coming out every day on the effects of blue light on the human mind, and the results, in general, suggest it might be having negative effects on some. How badly, and how many are affected are up for debate. It’s an extremely complicated thing to study given how difficult blue light is to avoid. Worse, almost everything emitting blue light is exciting anyway: is using your phone before bed keeping you up because it’s emitting stark white-blue light when your brain is expecting orange, or is it keeping you up because you just saw the funniest post you’ve seen all week while you’re already laying in bed with the lights off? Is the late-night video game sesh a problem because of the screen, or because you just fought and killed an awesome giant bug as a team with your online friends? Is all this news about blue light being pitched to people who want to have their phone and their reasonable bedtime too, hoping they can scroll right until they fall asleep? Tough to tell, especially in today’s scientific journal environment, where all of the challenging seems to happen after the study is published.
As a result, the solutions to the perceived problem of “blue light” are also very scattered. While some devices do “ bedtime mode”, what that actually means can vary wildly; where one study suggests it is the phone’s fault, not the light, the solution is to get you off the phone faster and get you out of your scrolling loop. Bedtime mode on an Android device may mean the screen goes black and white to encourage you to set down your device and go to bed, since not having the pretty colors on Instagram or Twitter makes it a little more boring and a little easier to set down. Other studies suggest yellow and red light are less disturbing of sleep, and so a ‘sunset mode’ can put an orange hue across the screen, with the goal of easing the effects of blue light on your melatonin production. Outside of the device itself are things like blue light glasses and sunset lamps, which aim to cancel out all the blue light you might encounter. Do any of these help? While the studies on the light are everywhere, studies on solutions are tougher to find, so… anecdotally, maybe, but statistically, that’s not a known thing.
More fine-tuned apps gradually shift your device’s screen from white, to yellow, to red, mimicking an actual sunset as the day goes on. To do so, many have to ask you for permission to “jailbreak” your device (which means going beyond an app’s permissions and actually touching the device’s equivalent of Sys32) which can be scary for people who cannot read the code themselves. Instead, just going with the built-in settings is a fine option – even middling options of Android devices comes with these milder features.
Ultimately, if you’re finding it difficult to sleep, actions to get off of your electronic devices sooner are probably going to help no matter what – the light itself can delay sleep, but by how much is up for debate. On thing for sure is that your phone is beaming entertainment to you no matter where you are, and it can be tempting to stay up to enjoy it. If you enjoy it slightly less, whether by a reminder you’ve been scrolling for an hour or because the colors or comics are harder to read, it’ll be easier to set down and go to bed.
