We’ve seen studies saying that scrolling through your social media feed on your smartphone before going to bed contributes to bad sleeping habits. And so we’ve seen things like Dark Mode for phones and apps and the Night Shift from Apple that adjusts the screen colors to warmer hues. This way, the phone’s blue light will supposedly not disrupt your sleep cycle and your melatonin secretion. But a new study is now saying that this night shift feature doesn’t really affect or improve your sleep.
A new study from Brigham Young University (BYU) published in Sleep Health is actually challenging this “theory” that things like Night Shift affects our sleeping habits. They partnered with researchers from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center to conduct a study on the sleep outcomes of various individuals that participated. They were divided into 3 groups: those that had the Night Shift turned on, those that didn’t, and those that didn’t use a smartphone before bed.
According to BYU psychology professor Chad Jensen, there were “no differences across the three groups”. So the basic conclusion of this study is that there’s really no effect on your sleep quality whether you use Night Shift or any other equivalent of it as compared to those that didn’t use it or those who didn’t use their phones at all. Results are saying that blue light is not the only cause for difficulty falling asleep.
As for this BYU study, they included 167 participants from the age of 18-24 and who said they used cell phones daily (as do probably most of us). They had to spend 8 hours in bed and wore an accelerometer to record their sleep activity. Those who had to use their smartphones also had an app to monitor their phone use. Things measured for the study include total sleep duration, sleep quality, wake after sleep onset, and time it took to fall asleep.
It’s interesting to see how the results of this study will affect our understanding of how blue light affects or now doesn’t affect our sleeping habits if we use our phone while in bed. Of course the most ideal situation would be not to use any device while trying to fall asleep but the reality is that a lot of people are still doing that.
