We all know modern gadgets can keep you awake at night, but they can also be used for the exact opposite reason
If you’ve ever found yourself engrossed in a good book at 2am on a work night, then you’ll know how reading can keep you awake instead of helping you nod off. But these days, thanks to e-readers, even the most dull or badly written of prose can prevent you from getting a good night’s sleep.
The problem, as you likely already know, is blue light. As numerous studies and researchers have shown, the short wavelength light that is emitted by our smartphones, televisions, e-readers and so on tells our brains that it’s not time to sleep. The ‘circadian rhythms’ that determine our internal clocks are messed with, and the production of the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin are suppressed. The result is plenty of tossing and turning, and not a lot of good-quality shut-eye.
That’s why experts recommend limiting exposure to blue light at least 90 minutes before you intend to sleep. Putting away your phone and laptop and not watching TV would help, of course, but it’s not that simple, unfortunately. There’s also evidence that room light from ceiling fixtures and lamps produce enough blue light to keep you awake too, especially as we move away from incandescent bulbs towards LED lighting (goo.gl/fBXtG).
Bearing this in mind, completely eliminating blue light an hour and a half before you sleep is going to be difficult without sitting or lying in a completely darkened room. That’s not necessarily a bad idea, but if you’d rather spend the last few hours of each day doing something else, then there are other solutions, many of them technological. Yes, plenty of technology might keep you awake at night, but as we’ll see, there are also a fair few ways it can help you instead.
Blue Light Filtering Software
If you’re not prepared to give up your gadgets, then you can do your eyes and your body clock a favour by installing a blue light filtering app on your smartphone or tablet. There are plenty available from all the major app stores, but one of the best is F.lux. Available for iOS (jailbroken), Android, Linux, Mac OS X and Windows, it changes the colour balance of your device’s screen, reducing the amount of blue light that is emitted, thereby helping you to sleep.
But it doesn’t stop there. Although you can toggle the filter on and off, you can also adjust the strength of the filtering effect and, best of all, F.lux can be set to automatically adjust the colour balance according to the time of day and whatever time you tell it you wake up normally. There are even options to allow for weekend lie-ins, extended daytime hours and extra sleep for teenagers.
Other apps and programs worth checking out include Blue Light Filter For Eye Care, Redshift, Twilight and Screen Filter.
You might also find that your device already has a blue light filter built in. Apple, Google and Amazon have all recently added this functionality, for example, as have some monitor manufacturers.
Blue Light Filtering Hardware
Using software to limit exposure to blue light is all well and good, but what about for devices that don’t run apps? How do you protect yourself from the light emitted by your e-reader, TV or ‘feature’ phone.
The answer is with a special screen protector. These are available from numerous companies, including Ocushield and OptiGuard, among many others, and they can be placed over a wide range of devices.
The big question, though, is whether they actually work. This is open to debate, because many such products appear to be completely transparent and don’t affect the colour of the screen they’re placed on. If they’re blocking blue light, then it figures that the colours you’d see through them would be altered.
Indeed, there are also screen protectors that give screens a yellow tint, like those at www.sleepzzz.ca/screen-filter and www.lowbluelights.com. In fact, the latter is fairly unequivocal in its feelings towards more transparent filters:
“We’ve tested most of our competitors’ so called blue-blocking filters, many that use PET films such as the SleepShield, and have found that these filters block only a minute amount of blue light – certainly not enough to prevent melatonin suppression. Many companies are falsely advertising that their products do not change the screen appearance and yet are supposedly blocking blue light. We guarantee that if blue light is visible, then it’s certainly not being blocked. Beware. You can’t block blue light and see it too.”
Whatever the case, putting plastic filters on your screens isn’t ideal, because not only do you need to get one for every screen you use, you also need be able to get them made in the right sizes. Apple devices are well supported, but other products aren’t always as well catered for. Some companies even offer custom sizes, but it’s still extra hassle.
A solution that eliminates this problem is blue-light-filtering spectacles. Opticians now offer this as an option on their lenses, but you don’t need to visit a specialist to take advantage of this idea. There are plenty of non-prescription filtering glasses available online. Some of them are marketed specifically as blue-light-filtering glasses, but many of them are just yellow- or orange-tinted sunglasses. So as well as being able to get to sleep more easily, you’ll also get to look like a rock star.
Special Bulbs
As with the other hardware we’ve covered, there are companies that specialise in low-blue-light bulbs and lamps, LowBlueLights.com being one of them, as well as special bulbs from firms like General Electric (goo.gl/lqJjca).
For bedside lamps, you could just use ordinary cheap orange light bulbs, because you only tend to use these when you want to sleep anyway, but this is still a limited solution, because the only way to get a different form of light is to change the bulb.
Thankfully, there are more elegant solutions available, but they’re naturally pricier. For example, you can get the Drift Light (drift-light.com) for around £20. This LED bulb can be used like any other light bulb, but if you flick the light switch twice in succession, it will change to a mode that mimics a sunset, slowly dimming over a period of 37 minutes. It also has a nightlight mode.
The Drift Light isn’t a hugely original idea, though, having been used in other products, such as the Lumie Bodyclock range of alarm clocks. These clocks are geared more towards waking you up slowly rather than helping you sleep, but they do have a sunset function too. Starting from around £60, though, they’re considerably more expensive than the Drift Light.
You could also consider one of the many smart bulbs that are now available. These tend to be expensive, but unlike the Drift Light, bulbs like the Philips Hue series (www2.meethue.com) can be controlled using mobile apps, and they offer a far more versatile solution. They’re not necessarily designed specifically with sleeping in mind, but their smart features make that possible. Plus you get to impress your mates by switching the lights off from a different room.
Relaxation Apps
Even if you’ve completely eliminated all blue light from your bedtime routine, you might still find it hard to get to sleep. Sleeping pills are an effective but drastic option, and cups of camomile tea are more likely to see you getting up to empty your bladder, rather than helping you doze off.
This is where relaxation apps come in. Most of them simply offer looped audio of sounds that many people would find soothing: bubbling brooks, small birds tweeting (as opposed to giant seagulls squawking), gentle waves and so on. Some also feature calming music to help carry you off to your slumber. There are loads of these to choose from, with names like Sleepy Sounds, Nature Sounds Relax and Sleep, Relax Melodies, and Sleepmaker Rain. Most of them are free, though, so you can just try out as many as you can to find one that suits you. A more expensive option is Sleep Genius (sleepgenius.com). Although it’s free for Android (including Samsung’s Gear wearables), the iOS version costs £3.99, and both are linked closely with the firm’s hardware sets. These come with an iPod Shuffle and either a speaker or a set of SleepPhones (earphones built into a headband).
Another approach that might appeal to insomniacs is to use a deep breathing app. Whether it’s Breathe2Relax (iOS and Android) or something like Long Deep Breathing (iOS), these will walk you through breathing exercises that could help you relax and, of course, sleep. It’s questionable whether such apps offer anything that you couldn’t get from a book or website, but if they work for you, then they’re undoubtedly worthwhile.
Sleep Tracking
Rather than helping you get to doze off, sleep tracking apps and hardware monitor your sleep cycle, watching you to see when you’re sleeping soundly and when you’re restless. The apps tend to your phone’s accelerometer to track movement, but you can also find the same technology in smart watches and fitness trackers, along with other technologies that make them more accurate, such as sensors for heartbeat, light level, sound and body temperature.
The data you get from these could be used to come up with a more effective bedtime routine, but that’s not the only use for it. Many sleep trackers can also be set to wake you up only when you’re in the lightest phase of sleep, which is meant to leave you feeling more energised.
Just being able to how much sleep you’re getting is useful, but the limitations of movement-based sleep tracking are obvious. Just because you’re still, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re comfortable or breathing well. That’s worth bearing in mind if you use smartphone apps to track your sleep. That’s not to say they can’t be helpful, but you’re always going to be better off using a hardware solution like the Beddit Sleep Tracker (www.beddit.com) or a smartwatch.
You might also like to consider a special bed base like BeautyRest’s SmartMotion bases (www.beautyrest.com/Smartmotion), which work with the company’s SleepTracker app to monitor your sleep and ensure you get a good night’s rest. At least that’s the theory. Does it work? Maybe, but you’ll have to pay at least US$1,199 to find out.
Bedphones And Sleep Pillows
Whether you’re using a sleep sounds app or listening to Wham’s greatest hits to get the sandman to work his magic, if you share the bed with another person, they either need to share your love of ‘Club Tropicana’ or you need to wear headphones.
If you sleep on your side, an ordinary pair of over-ear headphones are out of the question. And even if you don’t, if you fall asleep with them on, they’re likely to be restricting when you inevitably move around throughout the night.
In-ear headphones might be a bit more comfortable, but they’re still not ideal. Also, if you’re anything like us, then you’ll be enormously paranoid about the possibility of being strangled to death by the cord (something that has probably never happened in the entire history of earhones).
Although they’re wired and therefore don’t address our death-byheadphones fear, Bedphones (www.bedphones.com) promise to be so comfortable that they won’t disturb you when you go to bed. It’s certainly an intriguing idea, but they appear to be little more than fairly standard clip-on headphones, although they’re much slimmer than normal. The few user and press reviews we could find were mixed, but more of a problem is actually finding a retailer that’s still selling Bedphones. Both Amazon and Tesco, for example, did have them in stock once, but they don’t sell them anymore, and Google Shopping returns no results either.
Searching for ‘bedphones’ in Amazon does, however, come back with various other sleep headphones, but ones built into headbands. These are all from different companies, but they’re all cheap, and they all have mixed reviews. For around £12, though, they’re probably worth a punt if you have trouble getting to sleep. Most of them have wires, but if you’re prepared to pay a bit more, then you’ll also find there are Bluetooth models available as well (this one, for example: goo.gl/VwJ99G).
If you just don’t want to wear anything on your head, though, none of these will be helpful. In that case, you might be more interested in a speaker pillow. As you can guess from the name, this is just a pillow with a speaker inside it. The idea is that the person who has their ear on the pillow, in close proximity to the speaker, can hear their music or whatever, while others in the room won’t hear anything. Brands include Sound Pillow (www.soundpillow.com) and Sound Asleep (www.soundasleeppillow.co.uk), but there are plenty more manufacturers, and prices start from as little as £7.
Of course, you might be perfectly happy with your current pillow, but that doesn’t mean you get left out. You can also buy speakers designed to be placed under your pillow (or even inside it, if you don’t mind doing a bit of sewing). For example, you can get a simple pillow speaker from Amazon for just £1.62 (goo.gl/z8EdVi), at time of writing, and even though that’s unusually cheap, most other pillow speakers don’t come in at more than £10. That’s not surprising, considering they’re simple mono units, probably costing pennies to make.
Will Any Of These Actually Work?
As we’ve already seen, there is some science behind many of these products and apps, but whether they actually help you is always going to be largely a personal thing. If you’re being kept awake by stress, then all the orange lamps and blue-light filtering in the world isn’t going to provide any relief, but apps and hardware that help you relax might actually do the trick.
It’s also worth considering that the things you do to help you sleep might actually be having the opposite effect. We already know that reading an e-book can be counter productive if your e-reader emits light, but that’s not the only thing that could be less than helpful. You might think that listening to music relaxes you, but like an addictive novel, it also has the potential to invigorate you. Any kind of mental stimulation can do that, so even if this (or, indeed, something else) is part of your nighttime router, don’t be afraid to change things to find what’s actually right for you.
Hopefully, with the right mixture of reduced screen time and relaxation, you can stop yourself from suffering sleepless nights. And, as we’ve shown, technology really can be part of the solution, rather than just being the problem. Sweet dreams.