Study: Night mode may be even worse for your sleep

There's a belief that late at night, filtering blue light from your computer or smartphone screen may help you to sleep better. Blue light is believed to interfere with your sleep cycle, so a lot of device and software makers have come up with a simple blue light filter. Unfortunately, research from the University of Manchester suggests night modes may not be beneficial at all. As always, more research will be needed as this study was based on mice, which may not be a good analogue for human vision.

Using a mouse model, the researchers discovered evidence that yellow wavelengths of light may have an even more substantial disruptive effect on sleep patterns than blue light. This doesn’t have anything to do with melanopsin, though. Your eye has groups of light-sensitive cells called retinal cones that are responsible for color vision. The researchers speculate that the brain associates yellow-shifted colors with daytime, whereas blue colors are closer to twilight. That effect may outweigh any benefit from lowering the amount of melanopsin activated via blue light, based on observing the test animals.

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