This is How Smartphones Destroy Our Sleep!

Caution: it is so harmful to surf on your smartphone for a few minutes before falling asleep! Here’s how to protect yourself.

No falling asleep after logging in

That’s probably what we all do: Before falling asleep, just pull out your smartphone and check on Facebook to see what happened. And while we’re at it, we can also skim the headlines of our favorite websites while we’re at it, and we can’t afford to miss this photo gallery now. So a few minutes can quickly turn into an hour or more, no matter how hard we try to make sure it never happens again.

So it’s no wonder if we sleep badly? Yes, but the reason is not that we stay up late because we read so much – the glowing display of our smartphone is more dangerous for our night’s sleep. It glares in our face all the time while we are reading and signals to our body that it doesn’t have to sleep for a long time yet. For our organism, the blue light that we hold directly in front of our eyes is practical like a small sun that shifts our inner clock further and further back. When we finally switch off the phone, sleep is out of the question, because the body is still wide awake. According to a recent study, the smartphone in bed is even a stronger wake-up aid than a double espresso.

Is “Night Mode” the solution?

All of this has been proven by studies – and is now to motivate manufacturers to act. Sleep researcher Professor Paul Gringas told the BBC that it’s hard to forbid people to use their beautiful consumer electronics devices in bed, after all it’s fun. But it would be easy for the manufacturers of smartphones to filter out the striking shades of blue (which adjust our internal clock) in the evening and night hours. For airplanes, the phones have an “Airplane Mode” that cuts off the strong radio signals – so why not add a “Night Mode” that lets users sleep better?

Sleepless through Smartphone – what you can do about it

It is questionable whether this offer will actually be made by the manufacturers. Until then, self-discipline is the main thing that helps all sleepless smartphone users: Half an hour before going to bed, it is best not to concentrate on the illuminated displays of tablets and phones. In fact, the best thing is to go to bed with a book (or an e-book, if the e-reader has no backlight) and read until your eyes get heavy all by themselves.

And if you can’t do without the smartphone at all, you should set the brightness of the device as low as possible in the settings. You’ll see: In a dark bedroom, you can still read everything clearly and easily – and still fall asleep gently and relaxed.