Turn On Blue Light Filter For Better Sleep

How your phone could be keeping you up at night. What's going on.

I'm rich Demiro, this is Rich on Tech.

So I've been hearing for a while how the blue light from both our computer screens and also our phone.

Screens are keeping us up at night.

But I didn't really put much thought into it until I was at a bunch of different parties and a lot of separate people started telling me that they're concerned about this, and they've gotten glasses to help them, They've adjusted their settings on their phones. So I figured I want to do a little bit more research, talk to an expert and see what is going on with this blue light and figure out what we can do to help us sleep better. And I consulted a's sleep expert.

This blue light will hit a receptor called melanopsin, and melanopsin actually will go on to suppress the release of melatonin. And as you may know, melatonin is a very very important hormone we talk about getting good sleep. It's released by the pinal gland in our brain. So you can imagine that in most individuals we like to wake up during the morning and go to bed at night. And how do we actually get this circadian rhythm what we call in trained in our twenty four to seven society,

So because our phones emit all this blue light, the more we look at them, the more it kind of confuses our brain, especially if we're looking at this blue light late at night, and a lot of us do that. We look at our phone right before we go to sleep, and that could be keeping us up at night.

At night when a lot of us are going to be on these devices, you can imagine lots of blue light. It prevents the release of what melatonin, and it's just another thing contributing to maybe not getting to sleep we want. Because in society, what is the big topic. It's insomnia and it's sleep deprivation. So if it's something that could help us out a little bit, this is why blue light is such a big topic.

So there are several ways we can limit our exposure to blue light. So first off, you can wear special glasses. There's a company named Felix Gray. They make glasses that are designed to reduce eye stress by filtering out blue light, and these glasses cost about one hundred dollars. I tested a pair called Nash they were ninety five dollars, and the company also recently introduced sunglasses that perform a similar function.

So it's not only that you'd actually wear these blue light shades and all of a sudden, the next night you got great sleep. It doesn't work like that. The foundation of good sleep is what we call cognitive behavioral therapy. It's your actions, it's your behaviors. So you always have to add on to that.

And here's the funny thing about all this.

Back in the day, when I was at c NEET, there was a company called Gunner Optics that were marketing these glasses that were for like gamers who looked at screens for a long time. And I always sort of discounted them, thinking, come on, do we really need special glasses for looking at screens? And it's kind of funny how everything has come full circle and now this is

So normally your phone screen has kind of this.

Blue bright white look to it, but when your phone is on a blue light filter setting, Apple calls it night shift for them, it will actually look a little bit warmer, so it almost looks like it has a red tint. So if you're on the iPhone, you can go into settings, then display Brightness and look for night shift. This will make your display a pure warmer and less blue and you can have it turn on during schedule times or you can have it follow sunrise and sunset.

So you probably want to.

Have it due schedule times if you have a bedtime that you try to keep, so Let's say you go to bed at eight o'clock every night, you can have night shift come on at six pm every night, So if you're looking at your phone before you go.

To bed, it's going to have that blue light filtered out. Android devices also do this.

If you're on a Samsung device, you can go into settings and then under display look.

For blue light filter.

If you have another brand of Android, just go into your settings and search for blue light, or search for blue or search for filter, or just search for display and look through all the settings in there, and I'm sure you'll find something that has to do with blue light.

Even on Windows ten.

If you have a desktop computer or laptop with Windows ten and the appropriate latest software.

You can schedule night light.

So all you have to do is go Start and then Settings and then System and then Display and then night light and you'll see the settings for that and that will do the same thing. It will change your screen to have a less blue que And if you're on a Mac computer you can do the same. You go to the Apple Menu System Preferences and then click displays and look for the night shift tab and again all of these system in the settings lets you turn this on. Automatically, which is probably the best, and a

Now here's the bad news.

Doctor Raj recommends no phone or screens two hours before bedtime, which I know that's not always easy. And what's not clear to me is that if you're looking at your screen with the night shift on before bed, is that still counted towards those two hours or is it just a little bit better because you don't have all that blue light? But the reality is I think anything will

We all have this Pablovian reflex to be an arms distance of our cell phone. Who's snapchatting me and who's instagramming me? So I think that if you are going to look at your phone, there is no downside in using a blue light shad. It's kind of like called a low lying fruit, you know what I mean. Especially now there's more data about is there healthcare in the eye involved here.

And here's the flip side of all this.

If blue light is bad, it sounds like red light might actually be better. So that's why these screens turn to that warmer red color. But if you have some of those smart color changing light bulbs in your house, maybe set those to a warm red light before bedtime and this could help signal to your body that it's time to sleep.

Personally, I do this.

I've got those color changing lights in my bedroom and I've always used like sort of a pink or a red at night, just because the first time I looked inside the lifix app, it said relax and it was sort of a pink shade. And now I've just kind of stuck with that. And now that I've heard that red is better, that's what I have at night.

All wavelengths of light could actually suppress melotonin, but red light may do with the least and some data may say it actually increases the production of melatonin.

So there you have it, adjusting those settings on your phone to help you get some better sleep. And again this is just one part of healthy sleep. Look, if you're chugging a red bull right before bed and you've got your blue light filter on, doesn't necessarily mean you're gonna fall asleep instantly. So this is all part of a healthy lifestyle and one other thing I learned doing research for this story.

It's not cut and dry.

Yes, it seems like a lot of experts agree that this blue light is a problem, But just how much of a problem and to what extent it affects our sleep, We're not one hundred percent sure, but the reality is clearly these settings are built into the phones. The major manufacturers have caught on to this, so I think there's something here there.

You have it.

If you want to see those instructions one more time, you can go to my website it's rich on tech dot tv, or you can check the show notes to see how to turn on the night shift or the blue light filter settings on your particular device.

Thanks so much for listening.

If you love this podcast, please tell a friend I'm Rich jamiro I'll talk to you real soon.