We’ve all been members of the much known “Team Insomnia”, some of us frequent members than others. But is Team Insomnia really suffering from insomnia or are we just giving an excuse and blaming it on a condition that we have little or no knowledge at all?
Well, here’s the answer, your smartphone is the reason you stay up late. That’s obvious you might say, but no, it doesn’t keep you awake till those ungodly hours because you’re going through your Twitter timeline or you’re busy double tapping and stalking your crush on Instagram but it keeps you awake because your screen is emitting too much ‘blue light’ which causes inability to sleep and makes you in some way, “hyperactive”.
Studies have shown that people who uses their smartphones a couple of hours before they sleep, their sleep is delayed by about one hour. Now imagine how many hours we delay our sleep for in one week and what this can do to our sleep cycle. The cause of this is the photoreceptor in your eyes, called Melanopsin, which is sensitive to a narrow band of blue light, an increase in this band of blue light may suppress Melatonin production – a hormone responsible for your healthy sleep-wake cycles, causing you to stay up longer than you should.
The solution is to lower the amount of this blue light, and it is as simple as downloading an app on your smartphone, one of my personal best apps for this is known as ‘Twilight’ which is available on both Android and iOS, if you find this app a bit too large, there are much simpler ones such as ‘Blue Light Filter’ and for those who stay up using their PCs or MACs, try ‘f.lux’. Try any of these apps and see yourself slowly break out off “Team Insomnia”.
