Wait…Blue Light Filters Don’t Help?

Tell me if this sounds familiar.

You’ve read the advice about getting better sleep and taken it to heart. You try and do what you can to get yourself to bed at a decent time and get enough sleep.

You don’t eat heavily or drink alcohol close to bedtime. You do your best not to consume a lot of caffeine past late afternoon. You don’t exercise right before bed.

You turned on the blue light filter on your phone so when you check your emails or social media right before bed, the glow won’t trick your brain into staying awake.

(Screeching record sound)

Wait…what? Those blue light filters don’t work?? But the experts said…

Brigham Young University recently published a small study, and what they found was that it actually may not have much, or any, difference at all.

The study participants were 167 emerging adults – you may know them as “college students” – with iPhones. The split was 71% female to 29% male. They broke this sample into three groups:

• Used their iPhone in the hour before going to bed with Night Shift (iPhone’s blue light filter) turned on
• Used their iPhone in the hour before going to bed without Night Shift on
• Didn’t use their phone in the hour before bed

You can read the full release for all the details, but what they found was that there wasn’t any statistical difference between the Night Shift on vs. off participants.

What they did find was that of those who got about 7 (6.8 to be exact) hours of sleep or more, the individuals who didn’t use their iPhone during the hour before bed got better quality sleep. Better sleep was defined as follows:

• Sleep latency – how long it takes to fall asleep once in bed with lights out
• Sleep duration – the length of time asleep
• Sleep efficiency – the percentage of time asleep vs total time in bed
• Wake after sleep onset – waking after…you know…falling asleep

So, the takeaway seems to be that you don’t need to have the jarring moment every night when your phone turns that eerie yellow-orange color at 11:00 pm anymore.

But if you’re really serious about getting better sleep, you won’t see the color change anyway, because you won’t be staring at your phone right before bed.

Maybe what’s keeping us from falling asleep easily is that we keep stimulating our brains with whatever we’re doing on our screens until late at night (guilty).

I think we all kind of knew that in our hearts, didn’t we?