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Cellphones Technology

Night Mode Could Actually Be Worse For Your Sleep Pattern, Study Finds (cnet.com) 41

Posted by BeauHD from the contary-to-popular-belief dept.
According to a new study published in Current Biology, the "night mode" on your phone could actually be worse for your sleep pattern. Scientists say the blue light, which is significantly reduced when night mode is enabled, could be telling our brain that it's night time because it resembles the colors of twilight. From the report: According to the study, brightness levels are more important than color when it comes to stimulating the body clock. However, when the light is equally dim, blue is more relaxing than yellow. This makes basic sense: daylight is yellow, twilight is blue, and sunrise and sunset are pretty reliable ways to tell your body clock what time it is. Of course, at this point, we only know it works on mice -- and mice don't have phones. "We think there is good reason to believe it's also true in humans," says Dr Brown, lead author of the study.

There is perhaps a more obvious truth to be drawn -- if your phone is telling you to switch to night mode, it is time to put down your phone. It is not the color of the screen that is keeping you awake; it is all the stuff your phone offers as an alternative to sleep at 2am. There is only one real night-mode switch: the off button.
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Night Mode Could Actually Be Worse For Your Sleep Pattern, Study Finds More

Night Mode Could Actually Be Worse For Your Sleep Pattern, Study Finds

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  • Daylight is white, not yellow. It's the reason a sheet of paper looks white when you hold up in the sunlight. Just ask Neil deGrasse Tyson.

    • Re:Actually... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @06:21PM (#59530236)

      Daylight is white, not yellow.

      The sun looks yellow for the same reason the sky is blue: Rayleigh scattering [wikipedia.org].

      The shorter wavelength (blue) light scatters, leaving the longer wavelengths to go straight through the atmosphere.

      If you hold a paper in daylight it looks white because you are getting yellowish light from the sun and blueish light from the sky.

      But if you use a long tube to illuminate the paper with only direct sunlight, it will look yellow.

      • Re:Actually... (Score:4, Informative)

        by ChrisMaple ( 607946 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @07:31PM (#59530484)
        Within rather large limits, white paper looks white if it's illuminated with the same type of light that your general environment has. In a white room illuminated with 2000 K light, white paper looks white. In a white room illuminated with 6500 K light, white paper looks white. Your eyes and brain adapt.
      • You're contradicting yourself. If you use a long tube to illuminate the paper with only direct sunlight, then the scattered light can't escape the tube and hits the paper, too.
      • UV is even worse. In a free field with blue skies, blocking only direct sunlight actually leaves about 70% of UV-light, hence sitting in the shade of a vertical wall at the summer beach not to far away from mid day without uv protection is about factor 3 (half the sky visible, no direct sunlight = 0.5x0.7). White people should probably not do that longer than a handful of minutes, not hours. With a darker complexion, you can linger longer. Sitting under an umbrella is likely closer to factor 2 (blocking jus

    • It's the reason a sheet of paper looks white when you hold up in the sunlight.

      Nope.
      Not at all.
      Absolutely wrong.

      That's not how eyes work.

      Cones in your eyes (like most other sensors in your body) don't work on an absolute scale (they're not directly telling your brain's visual cortex"there are exactly N billion photons of wavelength ${RED} that arrived here"), instead signals are compared.
      (With the eyes, this happens on the top layers of the retina, with most other sensors it happens in the spine) and what your brain process is the difference.
      (There's a reason why "convolutional neural

  • According "one" study, nothing has ever been learned.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by b3e3 ( 6069888 )
      At least they emphasized in mice for this article. Now we get to watch all the other news outlets drop that part.

  • There should be a way to put night mode away during daytime, then automatically switch at night....

  • Only light source (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    That only makes a difference if it's your only light source

    But yes. Before sleeping we should do things that are less stimulating. But then there's fucking which can put you to sleep after, so there's that to consider.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      Before sleeping we should do things that are less stimulating.

      Review last week's staff meeting minutes.

    • Before sleeping we should do things that are less stimulating

      writing OPENGL backed drivers is perfect for this! You certainly wont be up all night thinking about it!

  • Our grant money is almost gone so we needed to come up with something new to study.

  • Credibility (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Science: blue light is bad for sleep
    Also Science: blue light is good for sleep

    Yeah, ok.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Xenx ( 2211586 )
      Technically they're not saying it's good for sleep. They're saying it's not as bad for sleep.

  • At work I am using blue blockers and dark mode on any program that does dark mode correctly. I don't know about sleep, but my eyes seem much less fatigued compared to not using blue blockers and dark mode. When I swap to a program that doesn't do dark mode correctly, without blue blockers, it just burns into your brain. It is fairly tolerable with blue blockers on.

  • Placebo Effect (Score:5, Interesting)

    by williamyf ( 227051 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @06:27PM (#59530256)

    Try your phone with and without nightmode, and see which one helps you sleep better and stick with it.

    Whether it truly works, or is just placebo effect is irrelevant for you, the only relevant thing for for you is if it helps you sleep better and fall asleep faster. Let the boffins argue the science...

    • I want to post something snarky about how difficult of a thing this is to do but I just can't pull it together. Do what works for you. Don't do what doesn't work for you.

      Want to know what works for me? It doesn't matter.

  • I don't use night mode because it helps me sleep, I use night mode because it's not as bright, more comfortable to look at, and saves battery life on OLED displays.

    • I don't use night mode because it helps me sleep, I use night mode because it's not as bright, more comfortable to look at, and saves battery life on OLED displays.

      Yep. Me too. Though I could imagine having a display that doesn't hurt the eyes, might prompt you to use your phone more in bed, and thus keep you up longer. Still I prefer it to having my eyes burned by bright blue light.

  • Hard to take sleep researchers seriously when they keep coming to opposing conclusions. Fairly recently I watched a vid from Dr. Rebecca Robbins, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Population Health at NYU Langone Health about sleep myths and they specifically called out this "common belief" as a reason why you should watch tv at night. ~1:20 here https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] She seems smart and is likely surrounded by smart people but the folks who did this study are probably smart too. But i

  • ... shit in my 74 years and some of it was blue and some of it was yellow and some was all colours, as in white and none as in black.

    Maybe that explains why I'm bald headed?

  • When the battery runs out, but the clock radio wakes you up for Monday morning...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by quenda ( 644621 )

      When the battery runs out, but the clock radio wakes you up for Monday morning...

      The old Nokia phones would still wake long enough up to sound an alarm, even if they had shut down the night before due to low battery.
      (because you have gone a whole week without recharging)

      I miss 'em sometimes.

  • i get a few texts and calls a day then i put my phone down, maybe 20 to 30 minutes a day, i bet people that dont spend all day drooling on their phones wont be effected by this,

  • I use night mode because the bright light bothers my eyes. I read ebooks on my phone and have no problem ignoring the notifications and other crap, but I guess that's just me. I never understood these people who can't put down their phones or just ignore the notifications.

  • In nocturnal rodents. Meanwhile, humans have been regularly using fire for 125,000 years. The hotter fires are still cooler than the sun's surface and therefore redder. And when would be the likeliest time to be staring at a fire? In the evening, long after the last blue light of day is gone.

  • I use nightmode because it is less painful to the eyes when ambient light is weaker. I can't see blue light as more relaxing to anyone, because IT IS MORE PAINFUL.

  • Don't look at my phone when sleeping, so no problem !

  • I had massive problems staying in rhythm with naturay day and night cycles for most of my life. It ruined everything.

    And it only got better when I had no PC for several months and only used my phone. For which I had both dark mode and a more yellow color temperature enabled at all times.
    Plus I also turned off the lights in my room early, and in the summer, didn't turn in the lights at all. But now I do, and it still works.

    My problems are solved. Yet I still use my phone in bed with "night mode" enabled.
    I ju

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by tflf ( 4410717 )

      Glad to read you found relief with those changes. I, following the same course, did not. The caveat: "your results may vary" applies.

  • It's supposed to stop your retinas from getting slapped everytime you take a look at a BRIGHT WHITE SCREEN when everything else is dark.
  • Could these guys please align their bullshit before publishing it? All the planet is aware that Blue is bad at night. So please get your shit together and then say what's what.

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