Why Sleep and Phones aren’t Friends

We don’t get 8 hours of sleep anymore, we get it. The question is why. Most people say it’s because of how hectic the world is, with so many hours of consecutive work and a clearly too busy schedule. Yet most of us really aren’t that busy where 7-8 hours of sleep can’t slide in the agenda. The reality may be that people are somehow struggling to sleep more, and whether it’s bad habits with eating, more time indoors with less exercise, or a form of jet lag, there is a clear killer: Phones.

Phones have a capacity to give its consumers any form of communication, games, news, social media, shopping, or simply surfing the web. This digital giant is capable of anything. So much so, that teens love it enough to spend 7 hours a day on it without a flinch. The hidden assassin is the light this phone emits. Approximately at 500 nm, it has the perception of daytime, all the time.

Hey, seeing your crush’s picture in HD at night isn’t so bad, but it may be detrimental to your internal body clock. The circadian rhythm or your body clock, establishes your sleeping time, eating time, and even levels of focus. This clock is why we wake up around the time of sunrise, and fall asleep 2-3 hours after the sun sets, giving the human body a rhythm in order to sleep effectively and be alert during the day.

When incorporating LED light directly into your eye tissue during the late hours of the night, the brain will feel tricked into believing that the sun may not have set yet, or even worse, it’s just confused. Like taking a nice caffeinated coffee late into the night, you may still feel awake well into the night, but not the good type of awake either, more like a type of tired that can’t even function too well after so many hours with your eyes open. This is because the hormone balance of melatonin (your sleep hormone) is thrown way off, suppressing 55-65% of it, creating a spiraling vicious cycle, leaving you into a state of lower energy throughout the day, and unnaturally awake at night. The LED light is putting you in a state of artificial jet lag, where the screen light makes you think you’re in the middle of the Atlantic, when really, you’re in London.

There is a solution, of course.

Logically, the sensitivity to light in our rhythms can’t force a whole city to shut its lights off after sunset. That would just be counterproductive. Thankfully, the human eye can tolerate certain spectrums of visible light at night, without throwing you completely off. Blue light, what is absorbed when looking at that suave iPhone X, will be pretty harmful. But, as can be logically hypothesized considering all the centuries prior to electricity, fire, or better said, red light, is least harmful to our sleeping patterns. Shifting to red light at night will ease you into a smooth state of relaxation capable of putting you into deep sleep within 2-3 hours of the sun setting. That’s pretty nice. Especially when you want to be productive the next day.

A phone is a key tool in this century, especially as we become more dependent on it, taking into account its negative effects at night will open your mind and close your eyes.