Blue Light is not only harmful to our eyes but also disturbs the circadian rhythms — This has been the popular belief for as long as I can remember.
In fact, people didn’t consider blue light coming from screens as a problem until tech companies rolled out Blue Light filters — A feature in phones and laptops that shifts the colors in your display to the warmer end of the spectrum. The idea was to help us sleep better, or so we thought.
New research from The University of Manchester suggests that the Night mode or blue light filters in electronics worsens the sleep cycle, rather than helping it.
According to the researchers, changing the screen color, in fact, confuses the body and “send us mixed messages.” They say brightness levels are more important when it comes to sleep cycles. However, when blue light and yellow light are dim, “blue is more relaxing than yellow.”
The study was conducted on mice where the researchers used specially designed lighting that allowed them to adjust color without changing brightness.
The team concluded that blue colors produced weaker harmful effects to the mouse body than “equally bright yellow colors… We think there is a good reason to believe it’s also true in humans,” says Dr. Tim Brown.
Contrary to Dr. Brown’s claim, we believe that such studies should be treated with skepticism. This is because the effects on screen light also depend upon the sleep cycle of a particular person.
However, if there is one thing to take away from this is that netizens should turn off their screens before going to bed rather than focusing more on changing the color of the screen.
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