Another study shows that the Night Shift feature is not as effective as Apple advertises

With Night Shift turned on, your phone screen will go back to a heavy yellowing state to eliminate all of the ‘blue’ blue light – the factor that is thought to make you lose sleep.

Night Shift feature on iPhone (Image: The Verge) In the description, Apple says that the Night Shift feature on its mobile devices “can help users sleep better”. The reason given by the company is that when the user turns on this feature, the light from the screen will turn into “blue light” thereby helping the user to easily fall asleep. But in a recent study shows the exact opposite, not only does it not make the user sleep easily, this mode also makes the quality of the user’s sleep worse. The study, published in the journal Sleep Health, tracked the sleep of 167 people for a week. These people are divided into three groups: one that uses a phone with Night Shift on for an hour before bed, one group does the same but does not have Night Shift on, and a group does not use a phone at all. before sleep. “There is no difference between the three groups,” said Chad Jensen, “there are even people for whom having Night Shift turned on isn’t as good as using a phone without having that feature activated.” This result is in line with early skepticism that the Night Shift feature isn’t really helping to improve the quality of a user’s sleep, especially since Apple doesn’t announce which wavelengths of light will be blocked when the user turns it on. this feature. While blue light and using your phone before bed can reduce the quality of your sleep, there are still many other variables that need to be considered. The researchers are also quite surprised when the group of people who do not use their phones before bed is not sure to have a perfect sleep. Before the experiment, Jesen and colleagues determined that they had to see the best sleep on the off-phone group, then the group that turned on Night Shift and finally the group turned it off. “But we were a bit surprised that the results were not what we expected.” This was especially true of university student participants who had a pre-existing sleep deprivation. “When people are already very sleepy, whether or not they use their phone before bed is not so important anymore. Since your needs are so high at that stage, you will fall asleep quite easily. whether you turn Night Shift on or off or even use the phone “. Jasen shares. The small differences related to cell phone usage observed by the research team were related to the amount of sleep the participants had. Among students who slept more than 7 hours, those who did not use their phones slept better and woke less in the middle of the night than those who used the phone before bed. But for those who slept less than 7 hours, there was no difference in sleep quality, regardless of whether they used the phone before bed or not. To explain this bizarre phenomenon, Jensen lists a myriad of factors that can affect your sleep apart from using your phone, such as caffeine use, exercise, temperature, and amount of light. , noise, bedtime … Results show that it is not only blue light that causes difficulty sleeping. Your psychological, emotional, and well-being will also affect the quality of your sleep. Raj Dasgupta, a sleep medicine specialist at the University of Southern California, said: “Sleep is such a personalized element that there won’t be one feature that will suit everyone. are more sensitive to light and may find blue light filtering helpful, but that won’t be the only solution to better sleep for others. ” For phones, there’s more to consider than blue light exposure, according to Jensen. “All other non-light stimuli can affect the quality of your sleep. If you’re reading a boring article or watching a funny video on TikTok before bed, That level of alertness and interaction will probably interfere with your ability to fall asleep. Blue light filtering now won’t compensate for that effect. “