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Joanna Cooper, M.D., a neurologist and sleep medicine specialist with the Sutter East Bay Medical Foundation, says bright screens stimulate the part of our brain designed to keep us awake. Looking at a brightly-lit screen prior to sleep can make for a restless night.

Device screens produce blue light, Dr. Cooper says, which is the part of the light spectrum most active in our sleep cycle. Stimulation of this part of the brain suppresses production of melatonin, making it difficult for many people to “turn off” their brains and fall asleep.

“The light from our screens can delay our transition to sleep, even if we are engaged in some soothing activity online,” Dr. Cooper says. “But it’s more likely that our evening texting, television shows or video games are stimulating in themselves, keeping the brain busy and wound up, and even causing adrenaline rushes instead of calm.”

See Full Reference to sleep problems stemming from electronic devices that emit blue light. Numerous studies have established a link between using devices with screens before bed and increases in sleep latency, or the amount of time it takes someone to fall asleep. Additionally, children who use these devices at night often do not receive enough high-quality sleep and are more likely to feel tired the next day.

See Full Reference. Unlike blue light, red, yellow, and orange light have little to no effect on your circadian rhythm. Dim light with one of these colors is considered optimal for nighttime reading. Portable e-readers like the Kindle and Nook emit blue light, but not to the same extent as other electronic devices. If you prefer to use an e-reader such as a Kindle or Nook, dim the display as much as possible.

Establish a Relaxing Bedtime Routine: A regular bedtime that ensures an adequate amount of rest is essential for healthy sleep. The hour before bed should consist of relaxing activities that don’t involve devices with screens.

See Full Reference reduce blue light emissions and decrease the display’s brightness setting. You should manually dim the display if your device does not automatically adjust the brightness in nighttime mode.

Mariana Figueiro led a team of scientists who found that exposure to the light from self-luminous displays, such as Apple iPads, could be "linked to increased risk for sleep disorders because these devices emit optical radiation at short wavelengths, close to the peak sensitivity of melatonin suppression".

He said the issue at stake was an important one, namely the potential adverse effects of light and use of computer and television screens on sleep, the body"s circadian system and brain alertness.

In a world increasingly dependent on technology, bright screens are more commonly part of our everyday life. These screens range broadly in size and purpose: televisions, computers, tablets, smartphones, e-books, and even wearable tech.

The Source of Light:Artificial light can come from light bulbs and many other sources, including the screens of televisions, computers, tablets, smartphones, e-books, and even wearable tech. Each of these can generate different amounts of light that can impact our sleep.

The Amount of Light:Each source of light generates its own light intensity. For comparison, full sunlight at midday may be 100,000 lux, whereas commercially available light boxes that are used to treat seasonal affective disorder often generate about 10,000 lux, and the screen of your smartphone may create hundreds of lux of light intensity, depending on the settings you use. (A unit of lux describes how much light falls on a certain area; whereas a unit of lumens tells you the total amount of light emitted by the light source). Using lux helps us understand how nearby screens may have more impact on us than the same screen from across a room. Even smaller amounts of light, such as from a smart phone that is held 12 inches from our face before going to sleep, may have a negative impact on our sleep.

The Color of Light​​​​: Much is made of the fact that blue light is responsible for shifting circadian rhythms, while red, yellow, and orange light waves do not have this effect. Full-spectrum light, what you might consider as “white light” or “natural light,” contains the blue wavelengths as well. Digital screen filters, blue light blocking glasses, and prescription glasses with FL-41 tint are sold to block this blue light wavelength to minimize disruption to our circadian rhythms.

You can’t help it. Screen time has become a part of not only your daily life, and your children’s lives as well. Yet you may have also heard about potential harm from the resulting blue light and how it can cause eye strain and affect your sleep. With so much of our lives now dictated by screens, what was evolutionarily an adaptive response to light has become something to worry about.

How does screen time fit in with all of this? By using blue light-enriched screens in the evening hours, “there is a big potential for [the sleep phase] to be delayed by this artificial light exposure,” says psychologist Christina Schmidt of the University of Liège in Belgium. For example, a 2014 study byHarvard researchers comparing people who read from paper books and from screensfound that screen users secreted less melatonin and had a delayed circadian rhythm of more than an hour.There’s also some amazingresearch in blind people that found they can still detect light even if they can’t see it, and that their brains respond to blue light.

It might be possible to adjust how much blue light your device emits or put a physical screen filter over the device to reduce the amount of blue light. Many people are also switching to “night mode” in which screens show less white spaces and show more dark colors.

While more research is needed to determine whether blue light is harmful to kids and young adults in the long term, the research shows that it’s counterproductive to getting to bed on time and can delay the circadian rhythm. So, if you are one of those people who needs at least a full eight hours, then it’s in your best interest to limit blue light exposure in the evening. It might be time to invest in blue blockers for the whole family, or you can go the old-fashioned route and turn off your screens well before you hit the hay.

Several studies have found that pre-sleep exposure to blue light, which is produced by laptop and smartphone screens, can make people less sleepy and affect the quality of their rest. One of the supposed mechanisms for this is that the blue light makes bodily systems block the hormone melatonin that usually makes you feel drowsy.

The study also suggests that blue light’s effect on sleep may be driven by other eye cells in addition to ipRGCs, she says. Blume adds that had they kept the screens turned on for a longer time or closer to bedtime, it may have taken longer for the participants to fall asleep.

He and his team plan to discover targets for treatments that will counter circadian rhythm disruption, which can result, for example, from artificial light exposure.

"We are continuously exposed to artificial light, whether from screen time, spending the day indoors or staying awake late at night," says Salk Professor Satchin Panda, senior author of the study. "This lifestyle causes disruptions to our circadian rhythms and has deleterious consequences on health."

If you have trouble sleeping, laptop or tablet use at bedtime might be to blame, new research suggests. Mariana Figueiro of the Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and her team showed that two hours of iPad use at maximum brightness was enough to suppress people"s normal nighttime release of melatonin, a key hormone in the body"s clock, or circadian system. Melatonin tells your body that it is night, helping to make you sleepy. If you delay that signal, Figueiro says, you could delay sleep. Other research indicates that “if you do that chronically, for many years, it can lead to disruption of the circadian system,” sometimes with serious health consequences, she explains.

The dose of light is important, Figueiro says; the brightness and exposure time, as well as the wavelength, determine whether it affects melatonin. Light in the blue-and-white range emitted by today"s tablets can do the trick—as can laptops and desktop computers, which emit even more of the disrupting light but are usually positioned farther from the eyes, which ameliorates the light"s effects. The team designed light-detector goggles and had subjects wear them during late-evening tablet use. The light dose measurements from the goggles correlated with hampered melatonin production.

On the bright side, a morning shot of screen time could be used as light therapy for seasonal affective disorder and other light-based problems. Figueiro hopes manufacturers will “get creative” with tomorrow"s tablets, making them more “circadian friendly,” perhaps even switching to white text on a black screen at night to minimize the light dose. Until then, do your sleep schedule a favor and turn down the brightness of your glowing screens before bed—or switch back to good old-fashioned books.

night. Electronic devices stimulate brain activity, they say, disrupting your ability to drift off to sleep. But according to the National Sleep Foundation, more than 90 percent of Americans regularly use a computer

Several studies have found that pre-sleep exposure to blue light, which is produced by laptop and smartphone screens, can make people less sleepy and affect the quality of their rest. One of the supposed mechanisms for this is that the blue light makes bodily systems block the hormone melatonin that usually makes you feel drowsy.

The study also suggests that blue light’s effect on sleep may be driven by other eye cells in addition to ipRGCs, she says. Blume adds that had they kept the screens turned on for a longer time or closer to bedtime, it may have taken longer for the participants to fall asleep.

"We are continuously exposed to artificial light, whether from screen time, spending the day indoors or staying awake late at night," says Salk Professor Satchin Panda, senior author of the study. "This lifestyle causes disruptions to our circadian rhythms and has deleterious consequences on health."

Previous studies have already shown that watching screens before going to sleep damages our sleep. It has also been found that exposure to blue light with wave lengths of 450-500 nanometers suppresses the production of melatonin, a hormone secreted at night that is connected with normal body cycles and sleep. The new study, published in the journal Chronobiology International, was undertaken by researchers Prof. Abraham Haim, head of the Israeli center for interdisciplinary research in chronobiology at the University of Haifa; doctorate student Amit Shai Green of the Center for Interdisciplinary Chronobiological Research at the University of Haifa and the Sleep and Fatigue Center at Assuta Medical Center; Dr. Merav Cohen-Zion of the School of Behavioral Sciences at the Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yafo; and Prof. Yaron Dagan of the Research Institute for Applied Chronobiology at Tel Hai Academic College. The researchers sought to examine whether there is any difference in sleep patterns following exposure to blue screen light as compared to red light prior to sleep, and furthermore, to find which is more disruptive: wavelength or intensity?

The study participants were 19 healthy subjects aged 20-29 who were not aware of the purpose of the study. In the first part of the trial, the participants wore an actigraph for one week (an actigraph is a device that provides an objective measurement of the time when an individual falls asleep and wakes up). They also completed a sleep diary and a questionnaire about their sleeping habits and quality of sleep. In the second part of the trial, which took place at Assuta"s Sleep Laboratory, the participants were exposed to computer screens from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. -- the hours when the pineal gland begins to produce and excrete melatonin. The participants were exposed to four types of light: high-intensity blue light, low-intensity blue light, high-intensity red light, and low-intensity red light. Following exposure to light, they were connected to instruments that measure brain waves and can determine the stages of sleep a person undergoes during the course of the night, including awakenings not noticed by the participants themselves. In the morning, the participants completed various questionnaires relating to their feelings.

On average, exposure to blue light reduced the duration of sleep by approximately 16 minutes. In addition, exposure to blue light significantly reduced the production of melatonin, whereas exposure to red light showed a very similar level of melatonin production to the normal situation. The researchers explain that the impaired production of melatonin reflects substantial disruption of the natural mechanisms and the body"s biological clock. Thus, for example, it was found that exposure to blue light prevents the body from activating the natural mechanism that reduces body temperature. "Naturally, when the body moves into sleep it begins to reduce its temperature, reaching the lowest point at around 4:00 a.m. When the body returns to its normal temperature, we wake up," Prof. Haim explains. "After exposure to red light, the body continued to behave naturally, but exposure to blue light led the body to maintain its normal temperature throughout the night -- further evidence of damage to our natural biological clock."

The most significant finding in terms of the disruption of sleep was that exposure to blue light drastically disrupts the continuity of sleep. Whereas after exposure to red light (at both intensities) people woke up an average of 4.5 times (unnoticed awakenings), following exposure to weak blue light 6.7 awakenings were recorded, rising to as many as 7.6 awakenings following exposure to strong blue light. Accordingly, it is hardly surprising that the participants reported in the questionnaires that the felt more tired and in a worse mood after exposure to blue light.

"Exposure to screens during the day in general, and at night in particular, is an integral part of our technologically advanced world and will only become more intense in the future. However, our study shows that it is not the screens themselves that damage our biological clock, and therefore our sleep, but the short-wave blue light that they emit. Fortunately various applications are available that filter the problematic blue light on the spectrum and replace it with weak red light, thereby reducing the damage to the suppression of melatonin," concludes Prof. Haim.